Search for "Offers 1 800-299-7264 Cheap American Airlines"

The Same Toxic Christian Right Theology Supports Both the Online Bullying I Experienced and the Cruel Anti-Trans Policy in TX — And it’s Not Remotely Fringe

By Chrissy Stroop

…the extent to which an authoritarian ethos characterizes the mainstream of American evangelicalism, and the human cost will be high if we can’t find a way to stop the Christian Right from destroying what’s left of American democracy. ### *For what it’s worth, my #EmptyThePews hashtag campaign from 2017 is not, and has never been, anything so organized that anyone could be said to be “running” it. Also, I have never said that “spreading the gospel…

Turn on the News: Some Abortion Opponents May Opt For a New Vaccine, But Behind Their Skepticism it’s Often a Different Story — of Disinformation, Conspiratorial Thinking, and White Nationalism

By Daniel Schultz

…or a disruption of a natural order given by God or gods. Appeals to Native American spirituality and “nature” were raised (even though actual Native American communities had one of the highest vaccination acceptance rates in the country). There were many conspiracy theories with this fantastic quality, some of which came close to medieval blood libels: that unborn babies had been aborted for use in the vaccine, or that contamination of one’s blood…

Of Zionism and Anti-Zionism: The Ultra Orthodox and the Settler Movement in Israel

By Shaul Magid

…titute a crucial support group. Second, the Russian immigration in the late 1980s brought a large group of secular Jews (and non-Jews) who, being the victims of anti-Semitism, have little or no sympathy for the Arabs; whether citizens of Arab countries, Israeli citizens, or inhabitants of the West Bank. Finally, and most interestingly, the Haredim, or Ultra Orthodox. This group, mostly descended from Eastern European Jews, were traditionally (and…

An Open Letter to Black Clergy on the Disdain for Protest

By Rev. Osagyefo Sekou

…y or by a wannabe Martin Luther King. While the President sermonized about cheap grace, a daughter of the church climbed a flagpole and took down the American swastika. Like Mary and Elizabeth, Bree Newsome proclaimed that our salvation—wrapped in swaddling clothes—is here in our hands. As an ordained clergyperson nurtured in the bosom of the black church, I am all too familiar with the way in which we tend to spiritualize the material suffering o…

Why the ‘Confession & Redemption’ Path is Unlikely to Help Falwell Recover from Sex Scandal

By Chrissy Stroop

…aders caught up in sex scandals, and most commentators predicted this same cheap grace for Falwell when he was recently forced to take an indefinite leave of absence from Liberty after posting a picture of himself with his pants unzipped, his arm around the waist of a similarly (un)dressed woman who was not his wife, and a glass of something that looked suspiciously like alcohol in his hand. According to two experts on evangelicals and gender, how…

‘We’re all in this together’: The Perils of Kumbaya Rhetoric

By Peter Laarman

…of the state’s population, 70% of the dead in Louisiana have been African American; in Michigan the numbers are 14% and 40% respectively, etc). The crisis has already condemned low-income families to a shocking level of food insecurity, with one-fifth of American kids now at risk of going to bed hungry each night. Many of those forced to work—especially women of color—will sicken and die in a too-rapid “reopening” aimed at saving businesses. The…

Why Conservatives Really Oppose Federal Aid for the ‘Undeserving’

By Daniel Schultz

…those big city folks too, you know. As deep as the scar of racism runs in American society, though, there’s something even deeper at work here. Stoehr is right to point out the economic hierarchicalism that pervades this attitude. Somewhere along the way, Republicans went from Reagan’s belief that maybe the government should step off the necks of the wealthy a little, to Trump’s brag that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with i…

Is the Satanic Temple Just an Elaborate Prank? 10 Questions for the Author of ‘Speak of the Devil’

By Joseph Laycock

…ligion itself. I see TST as testing America on the values we profess. Most Americans claim to value tolerance and religious freedom. But talk is cheap, especially if you have never seriously thought about what these commitments might actually mean in a pluralistic society. I was disturbed to read some of TST’s Christian opponents openly renouncing religious freedom if it meant respecting the freedoms of Satanists. I also think TST is forcing the p…

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

By Peter Laarman

…on to a gay-positive position. Rejecting reason and common sense, only the American Baptists* and the United Methodists still take the view that committed gay relationships are unacceptable. It is surely no coincidence that both of these bodies have a straight white man problem: too much power in the hands of straight men who aren’t especially interested in the rule of reason and whose reading of Scripture is cramped, at best. Seen in this context…

In a Time of Irrational Fear and New Media: The Deadly ‘Dance Plague’ at 500

By Ed Simon

…e of nationalism was emerging in individual states, the media explosion of cheap print caused a type of epistemic collapse where truth itself was uncertain. With such uncertainty, Europeans experienced the simultaneous birth and death pangs of two different eras, where medical historian John Waller claims that this dance phenomenon was a “hysterical reaction … one that could only have occurred in a culture steeped in a particular kind of supernatu…