Search for "cheap airline tickets from new york ny to grand rapids mi phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Rejecting Blood Sacrifice Theology, Again

By Peter Laarman

…ully admonished by respected elders of the very liberal church I served in New York that it was confusing and potentially hurtful to our visitors to include old gospel hymns expressing washed-in-the-blood theology during regular worship services (as I was wont to do). If hymns like that were going to show up in our services, there needed to be a clear explanation that no one there still actually clung to such barbarously bad theology. In view of t…

Amway, Religious Right Pyramid Scheme, Returns to the Motherland

By Bill Berkowitz

…: A report about a libel suit by one John F. Singer, a 49-year-old Queens, New York, man who claims that Centropa (the Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation, an oral history project based in Vienna and Budapest that focuses on Jewish life and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries), published false information stating he was uncircumcised; A lengthy follow-up comment from a fellow suggesting that Bartholomew may himself be a witch b…

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…e romance with Eastern spirituality,” Michelle Goldberg wrote last year on newyorker.com. “For well over a century,” she continued, “business-minded Americans have been transforming Hindu and Buddhist contemplative practices into an unlikely prosperity gospel.” Prosperity gospels and contemporary mindfulness practice share a profound belief in the power of the mind. Redirect your faith, prosperity gospel preachers claim, and you will be rewarded w…

The Forgotten Struggle Over Gender and Bigotry in Christianity

By Stephen J. Patterson

…y, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 147–48. 5. Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Introduction (New York: Crossroad, 1983). 6. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)….

A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…e end of each month. This was not small town America in the ’50s, this was Miami in the ’80s. Today I shop at drugstore.com. I shop anonymously. We, Consumers We should never forget that to consume is to devour. Whether it is the excess of our ritualized Thanksgiving meals or the “click, click, click” of the computer mouse in response to “free shipping!” “40 % off!” or “Buy one get one free!” in the United States, we are gluttonous consumers of ma…

‘Enchanted New York’ Offers a Journey Through the City’s Magical History — With Some Mystifying Oversights

By Gordon Haber

…center driven by real estate, banking, and the stock market. Yes of course New York is the American center of theater, fine art and publishing; but even with these folks the talk is of money, financing, advances, sales figures. The pandemic will change a lot of things about New York City, but not its obsession with money. Of course, I can think of a few complicating factors. The outgoing president is the Emperor of BS, and he is, or was, a New Yor…

Are Evangelical Films Destined to Leave Secular Audiences Behind?

By Daniel Silliman

…ider audience, selling millions of copies and reaching the top slot of the New York Times bestseller list. The films should be able to appeal to anyone who liked a good thriller, which would require higher production values, actors known more for their acting than their religious commitments, and a real understanding of the business of movies. The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court. Paul Lalonde got the rights to make the movie again and…

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

…we’ve had real problems with narrow-mindedness, institutional immaturity, misogyny, and religious illiteracy—these persist in places, but I think not like they did before. And that’s because American Muslims were able to separate Islam from its practitioners, giving a new generation—or at least enough of us—a sense of ownership deep enough to support an agenda of reform and renewal. My own struggles with my faith and community weren’t very diffe…

Corporations Have Consciences and Contraceptives Are Cheap: Hobby Lobby at the Supreme Court

By Sarah Posner

…ccinations or blood transfusions — the question of the impact on employees might have been treated differently. That was evident, too, in Scalia’s flip dismissal of the costs of the contraceptive methods that Hobby Lobby objects to. Unlike Catholic plaintiffs, Hobby Lobby seeks an exemption from covering ella, Plan B, and IUDs, claiming that they may cause an abortion. Scalia declared these methods “not terribly expensive.” But Verilla pointed ou…

Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

By Rachel Wagner

…iritually enriching? Is there a sense of religious community on a cellular phone? Tony Dokoupil of Newsweek asks: “[S]hould Jesus and Madonna (the singing one) go on the same iPod?” Later, he wryly observes that “downloading the Word through the same fiber-optic cables as the latest Korn album sounds like a bad idea, given that Roman Catholics dispose of holy water through special pipes to keep it from touching sewage.” The implicit question here…