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Flight Reservations 1800-299-7264 Tap Portugal Phone Number

The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Humans

…ill go to Mina, etc. There is still no address for the hotels, but a local phone number. There is also information about processing customs at Jeddah, meeting the tour guide, and information that says “the group” will proceed to Makkah—which means the first will have to wait for the last person, which is the beginning of feeling like you are a group. They even include suggestions to “get to know” your fellow travelers. I still had no idea what wer…

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Along Came a Spider: What the Pope Doesn’t See

…y, as many of the dioceses in the United States become uninsurable and the number of Catholic churches dwindles. As membership shrinks, the number of ordinations decreases, and the coffers dry up, perhaps the Vatican and its leadership will be forced to look at its decrepit, hierarchical structure, and fix it. I doubt it, however. Like the spider who crawled across Pope Benedict’s robes this weekend in Prague, everyone except the Pope can see the…

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Does Religion Still Matter?

…ort and through security, I was too tired for breakfast. I slept the whole flight from RDU to Charlotte, but once I’d landed in Charlotte, with only twenty minutes to transfer to my Milwaukee flight, I was starving. Famished. Broken. But the only breakfast option I trusted was Starbucks, and every single Starbucks had a line that resembled a breakdown of civilization at the baggage claim. So I did not do that.  I stopped at a newsstand slash conve…

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Mile-High Identity Politics: What We Can Learn From the Same-Sex Seating Controversy

…omen have long been marginalized by men. A man asking a woman to move on a flight may reasonably be interpreted as another chapter in a seemingly never-ending story. I am sympathetic to such a view. But haven’t Orthodox Jews experienced a long history of oppression? As far as who feels marginalized in the specific context of a typical commercial flight, consider that separation of sexes is far more common in traditional religious environments. Doe…

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Blame Series Bonus: Why We Want That Dish For Free, an Uncut Interview with Bertram Malle

…erson at the desk, who sat there, right when the doors were closed and the flight took off, just as you arrived. It doesn’t really matter who exactly provides some justice. The institution probably just prefers to funnel it through one channel, namely customer service, because then they can have stricter rules, what is given, how much is given, under what circumstances, and so on. There are larger social problems than missed flights, like racist p…

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Why Peter Beinart is Wrong on Democrats and Anti-Mormonism

…vered. And until we have proper data in hand to analyze why voters express reservations about Mormonism, it’s worth being a little more judicious at least in characterizing what counts as anti-Mormonism. The pejorative term “cult” is classic evangelical Christian anti-Mormonism that taps into a historic strand of anti-Mormon rhetoric rooted in the American South.  Exaggerating and sensationalizing the differences in Mormon theology or culture with…

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Free Will, Fate and FiveThirtyEight: The Theology of Election Polls

…er picture of our lives than even we know. And those select people who can tap that hidden reality have a special aura of power. AL: Yes! Although for some reason I have no problem with people who tap into the hidden reality of physics to make magical machines like the one I’m typing on. It’s as if there are certain kinds of knowledge that are ours to acquire, and other knowledge—as you said, the hidden reality of our lives, or, in the case of pro…

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An Open Letter to CEO Jeff Smisek On United Airlines’ Blasphemous Safety Video

…pense. In the video message that was played before my last United Airlines flight, you expressed your desire to greet each and every passenger; you invited us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. If I could greet you now, I would want to know: were you unaware of the monstrosity that was about to follow? There, rising above the hiss of the pressurized air, as the video monitors snapped to the image of an engorged sun bursting from behind the…

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In Repudiation of its Devastating Doctrine of Discovery, Vatican Masks the History and Responsibility of Catholic Church

…of the powers that oppressed the indigenous peoples.” In Francis’s view, a number of individual Christians succumbed to the ideologies or worldviews of the unnamed “powers” that oppressed Indigenous peoples. For Francis and others, settler colonialism is about political powers and individual Christians—not the Church as an institution. Like the apologies of Pope Francis, the joint statement on the Doctrine of Discovery obscures the inseparable the…

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Episcopal Church Assault Data Reveals the Dark Side of Inclusive Christianity

…a random sample size and therefore isn’t statistically representative. The number of individuals reporting victimization in Episcopal spaces is alarming nonetheless. However, I would argue the data is more likely to under- than to overestimate the scope of the abuse that occurs. To see why, the survey results must be interpreted in light of the Episcopal Church’s larger culture of inaction around sexual violence. See no evil, hear no evil… LGBTQ+…

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