Search for "cheap airline tickets to santa barbara phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Gay Men Detained and Killed in Chechnya, and More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…he said. “Nature is very clear. There are men and there are women.” As for Santa Muerte, Romero considers it a heretical cult. … Despite the church’s condemnation, many Santa Muerte devotees describe themselves as Catholic. Austria: Some activists prefer modern civil partnerships to marriage Gay Star News reports that members of the Homosexual Initiative Vienna (HOSI) said that same-sex couples are better off remaining in civil partnerships under…

I Always Knew Santa Was Make-Believe: A Retired Pastor on Losing Her Faith

By Anne Grant

…to all who believe in him. They never lied to me about anything, including Santa Claus. A few years ago, I watched a little boy after a funeral. He seemed oblivious to the conversation occurring over his head until one grownup exclaimed: “I still believed in Santa Claus then!” Beneath them, the child’s eyes and mouth popped open. Laughter riffled the air. He searched upward for his parents. But they were laughing and never met his startled gaze. I…

Festivus, Atheist Santa, and the Invention of Blasphemy

By Anita Little

…has extended to other images that don’t even have Christian origins? (i.e. Santa Claus, Christmas trees or even the reindeer on Starbucks cups) Santa comes from a Christian tradition; he comes from an actual saint. But then he becomes increasingly secularized, and he now doesn’t really have a connection with the church. But through time, he becomes kind of sanctified, and becomes an integral part of the modern American Christian tradition. And the…

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

By Eboo Patel

…, not the fourth century … You’re not free to practice your religion in my airline seat.’ ‘This is male entitlement .. the height of male arrogance.’ One comment referred to this as a ‘back of the bus’ issue; as in, women being asked to move in such circumstances was tantamount to assigning them a lesser status as citizens and lower dignity as human beings. Other readers proposed that airlines set aside special seating for men requiring such accom…

The Key to Understanding the Federalist Society Isn’t Originalism — It’s This 800-Year Old Tradition

By Peter Schwartz

…notions of “human dignity” and “human flourishing,” Catholic natural law—an 800-year-old tradition dating back to Thomas Aquinas—is a lens that offers utter clarity to conservative Catholic jurists, activists, policymakers, and scholars as they observe, describe, and engage the world. The power and sharpness of this lens allow them to confidently snap every human movement—every human desire and motive and act—into its divinely appointed and proper…

Barbara Ehrenreich’s ‘Wild God’ is Not Here to Help

By Angela Bonavoglia

The most harrowing chapter of Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Living with a Wild God, isn’t the one that describes her mystical experience. It’s the final chapter, “The Nature of the Other,” where she finally draws her stark conclusions. Ehrenreich, a self-declared atheist, doesn’t believe in “God” as in the one true God of the Abrahamic religions, and in fact skewers belief, declaring it to be “intellectual surrender” and faith “a state of willed…

High Schooler says Barbara Ehrenreich’s Book Violates his Civil Rights

By Sarah Posner

…New Hampshire couple, Aimee and Dennis Taylor, object to the assignment of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book about the horrific conditions endured by working Americans who labor full-time for poverty wages, Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America. In one section of the book, Ehrenreich describes her attendance at a revival at which she contends the preacher distorted the teachings of Jesus. Ehrenreich, the Taylors complain, “refers to Jesus Chr…

Hail Santa! War-on-Christmas Outrage Over Satanic Tree Reveals the Self-Serving Ambiguity of ‘Religion’

By Joseph Laycock

…ed with red Christmas lights, upside-down crosses, and messages like “Hail Santa.” Bishop David L. Ricken of the Diocese of Green Bay released a statement claiming that the “traditional understanding of Christmas” was being “usurped and desecrated by an organization/cult.” Bill Donahue of The Catholic League called Museum CEO Jacqueline Frank a “disingenuous person” involved in an “anti-Christmas scam,” while the Religious Freedom Institute (RFI)…

Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

By Susannah Heschel

Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…

It’s the Year of the Protester: Would Santa Occupy? How About Mother Teresa?

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…t please many of Occupy’s major constituencies. I do hope his doppelganger Santa Claus visits some Occupy encampments, though. _____________________ Circumcellions My favorite weirdo religious sect. But first, the backstory: In the fourth century, after the intermittent regional persecutions of Christians had died down and Christianity had become a legal religion, a big argument ensued. Put simply, the argument was over how bravely you ought to ha…