Search for "cheap airline tickets from tampa to st. louis phone number 1-800-299-7264"

“The Gift of Gay”: Father Matthew Kelty, Confessor to Thomas Merton, Dies at 96

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…diences with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and visited the monumental Buddhist statues on Sri Lanka—they were to be the inspiration for what was to be his final artistic and mystic vision. Then, almost as mysteriously as that Buddha’s smile, Merton was gone. Clearly exhausted, he gave a rather poor performance in Bangkok and then, before retiring to his room for a nap, he uttered what were to be his final public words: “Now I will disappear.” He re…

Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

By Susannah Heschel

…,” a hatred of Jews that they call racial and blame on anti-Christian atheists. Historians have made it clear that the distinction is not legitimate, and logic compels recognition that from a Jewish perspective it doesn’t matter if the SS officer who killed my grandmother attended Catholic mass the next Sunday or mocked Jesus as a wimpy, pathetic Jew. What does matter is that the Church (Protestant as well as Catholic) never excommunicated that SS…

Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

By Andrew Aghapour

…federal, state, and local governments through most of the 20th century. In St. Louis, for example, government policies included the segregated zoning of residential and commercial real estate, tax favoritism for private institutions that practiced segregation, urban renewal plans designed to shift black populations away from central cities, and the federal subsidization of suburban developments on the condition that they exclude African Americans….

Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace

By Karyn Carlo

…ews of Jesus Christ. Perhaps it is time to put down the chalk, stop drawing pyrotechnical conspiracy theories that play into our worst fears and listen, instead, for the difficult, yet enduring, hope of the Gospel….

Louis CK Asks on SNL: “How Could We Not Have a [Divine] Mother?”

By Holly Welker

…. Some Mormons think we aren’t even supposed to talk about her, but her existence in Mormon theology is at least acknowledged in the recent essay about whether we’ll get to have our own planets in the next life. One source Mormons rely on to establish God the Mother’s doctrinal relevance is a hymn by Eliza R. Snow (who married to both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young) currently entitled “O My Father.” Snow’s logic is similar to CK’s: if we have a fa…

Rolling the Stone Away: LGBTQI Elders Meet the Next Generation of Christian Activists at a Watershed Conference

By Mary E. Hunt

…nerations of Love and Justice” conference, October 30-November 2, 2017, in St. Louis gathered 250 people who reviewed the struggles to make Christian churches inclusive of persons, genders and sexual orientations. Key to the discussion was what the next generation of folks plan to do to continue the work on their terms in these complicated times. Longtime Methodist activist Mark Bowman combined his visionary leadership with wise funders’ generous…

A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…oke to our consumerism. Oddly, I came to find the clearest answer to my quest to understand our current culture of shopping in the fourth century. Augustine of Hippo, in his poetically written spiritual autobiography, The Confessions, struggles with misguided desire in his long and arduous path to Christianity. As I searched for a theological category to come to terms with our context, the word concupiscence leapt out at me. A theme that emerges i…

Are Evangelical Films Destined to Leave Secular Audiences Behind?

By Daniel Silliman

…ts, faith films haven’t all been complete commercial misses either. The first installment of The Chronicles of Narnia brought a big profit for Walt Disney and Walden Media—around $750 million globally. After a few films, the franchise stalled, though. Rising production costs, declining ticket sales and increasingly mixed reviews led to conflict between the various production companies. There’s currently a legal moratorium preventing a fourth insta…

Finding Nonreligious Happiness at the RNC

By Peter Montgomery

…re ill; Keep your body clean; Preserve your teeth; Eat properly; and Get Rest. Other rules caution against harmful drugs, excessive drinking, and sexual promiscuity. Two chapters are devoted to the Golden Rule, stated both positively and negatively (“Try not to do to things to others that you would not like them to do to you”). Some chapters are straightforward: Do Not Murder. Others get a bit more complicated. Chapter 9, “Don’t Do Anything Illega…

Newt Gingrich Visits the “Holy Ghost Bartender”

By Sarah Posner

…, calling their views heretical and unbiblical. Critics range from the Christian Research Institute, which aims to “provide Christians worldwide with carefully researched information and well-reasoned answers that encourage them in their faith and equip them to intelligently represent it to people influenced by ideas and teachings that assault or undermine orthodox, biblical Christianity” to televangelist watchdog Ole Anthony of the Trinity Founda…