Search for "cheap airline tickets to myrtle beach south carolina phone number 1-800-299-7264"

With Methodist LGBTQ Vote and GOP Support for Trump, White Protestantism Has Hit Bottom

By Peter Laarman

…or liberals within the UMC to blame churches and delegates from the Global South for the vote to retain (and even heighten) the denomination’s ban on all things queer. Yes, the UMC does have a much heavier Global South representation in its governance than any of the other “sisters”; fully 41% of the delegates in St. Louis represented churches outside of the United States. But recall that the votes against the One Church Plan and for the Tradition…

North America Has a Hindu Nationalist Problem, and Scholars are On the Frontlines of These Right-Wing Attacks

By Manan Ahmed, Rohit Chopra, and Audrey Truschke

…know little about its anti-intellectual instigators. We, as members of the South Asia Scholar Activist Collective, seek to change that by publishing a timeline that tracks the harassment of South Asian academics in North America as part of a larger project we call the Hindutva Harassment Field Manual. The assaults on academic freedom that we document are orchestrated by far right groups and individuals who promote the political ideology of Hindutv…

RDBook: Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa

By Luke Ssemakula

…d Peru in Latin America; Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa in Africa; and, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines in Asia. Each study in the project addresses the extent to which evangelicalism, a religious movement based on biblical orthodoxy, has helped or hindered the inauguration and consolidation of the democratic movement in the global South. This newest volume, on Africa, is edited by Oxford e…

Joe Miller’s Anti-Gay, Anti-Islam Advisor

By Sarah Posner

…he American Family Association’s legal eagles sued the University of North Carolina over its inclusion of Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, on a summer reading list for incoming freshmen. Carl Ernst, professor of Islamic Studies at UNC, in explaining why he advised selection of the book, said, “This book presents the Koran the way it is studied by beginners who approach it.” Of the inclusion of the book as summer readin…

For International Human Rights Day, a Snapshot of LGBT Rights from the Vatican to Cape Town

By Peter Montgomery

…gay rights camp last Saturday held demonstrations in Northern, Central and Southern Taiwan to protest the same-sex marriage bills, arguing that the draft amendments to the Civil Code were contrary to traditional family values. Egypt: HRC reports on persecution and harassment Human Rights Campaign released a report “highlighting the persecution and harassment of LGBTQ people in Egypt by both the state and society.” From a blog post on the report: T…

Too Hot for Shul: Rabbis Seek Healthy Israel Dialogue After Gaza

By Sarah Posner

…ger chilling effect in the American Jewish world, yes; I’ve gotten so many phone calls and voicemails [from people] who have had something happen to them—this summer I do believe it has gone off the rails.” Yet, Kleinbaum said, “I do think my job is to create a Jewish space in which this discussion can take place without saying this person is not a good Jew and another is a good Jew. That, I think, is a reachable goal for my community.” Many rabbi…

Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

By Nick Street

…tal volunteers—who would come in to teach job skills and do Bible study—outnumbered Catholic volunteers by about 15 to 1. Also in the city I was in the vast majority of inmates were from the poorer parts, where there are more Pentecostals. But the main reason for the dominance of Pentecostalism was because they believe in the potential for God to radically change a person’s life. The once-I-was-lost-but-now-I’m-found narrative in Pentecostalism re…

Why Crux‘s Knights of Columbus “Partnership” is Problematic

By Kaya Oakes

…mpaigns in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington. In 2005, they printed 800,000 postcards in Canada “in a campaign that [argued] that the redefinition of marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would promote pedophilia, pornography and unsafe sex.” As Marianne Duddy-Burke of the LGBTQ Catholic organization Dignity USA commented in a press release, “The Knights are deeply invested in advancing a particular brand of Catholicism, and I am con…

Why I Wrote the Freedom Seder And Why It’s Still Necessary 50 Years After Dr. King’s Assassination

By Arthur Waskow

…tian radical A. J. Muste calling Moses the organizer of “Brickmakers Union Number 1” and a pacifist Russian rabbi named Tamaret—wove them all into a new Telling of the tale of freedom. In that Telling, the then ongoing, even now unfinished, struggle of Black America for freedom was interwoven with the ancient story of the Israelites’ struggle to end their slavery under Pharaoh. Where the old Haggadah had what seemed to me a silly argument about ho…

LDS Church Responds to South Park Mormon Musical

By Joanna Brooks

…monism this year will be The Book of Mormon, a Broadway musical written by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone with help from Avenue Q’s Robert Lopez, telling the tale of two naive but well-meaning LDS missionaries to Uganda who, faced with the realities of mass human suffering, collide with the limits of their insular Book-of-Mormon-Belt worldview. Reviewers are reporting that despite the shock value of the show’s obscenity-laden music…