Search for "Spirit Airlines 800-299-7264 Reservations Cheap Plane Tickets "

Milquetoast Liberal Religion Won’t Challenge Conservative Values: A History Lesson

By Sheila D. Collins

…arge part of the Great Plains, restored wildlife and built a system of over 800 state and county parks. They electrified an entire region of the country, bringing what had been America’s “Third World” up to 20th century standards. They created works of art, gave concerts, set up theaters throughout the country, ran nursery schools, served over 1.2 billion school lunches to needy children, gave immunizations, taught illiterate adults to read and wr…

Heterosexual Martyrs and Gay Saints: Did AIDS Coverage Clear the Way for LGBT Equality?

By Diane Winston

…ides casting AIDS as a pastoral challenge, reporters also depicted it as a spiritual trial, replete with heterosexual martyrs and gay saints. The former were typically women who, infected by tainted blood or bisexual male partners, went public—hoping to educate others. Saints were gay men whose personal suffering become public performances of love and religious affirmation. Sister Romana Marie Ryan was an early AIDS martyr. A “magically gifted” ki…

Colorado’s Personhood Initiative Fails—For Now

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

Colorado’s fetal personhood ballot initiative petition failed to get enough valid signatures, and so the measure will not appear on the ballot, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler announced this morning. According to the Denver Post, some of the signatures were deemed invalid, so the petition was found to have only 85,800 valid signatures—305 signatures short of the required 86,105. Jennifer Mason, speaking for Personhood Colorado, said tha…

Teaching Love: Soulforce Takes it to the Quad

By Nick Street

On a chilly but brilliantly sunlit Friday morning, about two dozen people have gathered along the sidewalk near the main entrance to Central Baptist College in Conway, Arkansas. The group includes a local lesbian couple who have been together for 35 years, a young African-American trans-man who came out of the closet a week before he graduated from another Southern Baptist college in Missouri, and a 22-year-old aspiring minister from Philadelphia…

US Archbishop and Vatican-Appointed “Overseer” Attends Annual Meeting of Women Religious

By Emily Baxter

…embly, the sisters officially called for gun control legislation and signed 800 postcards demanding Congress members to pass immigration reform. As LCWR past-president, Sr. Pat Farrell said to the Assembly, “Expressing what we really think and feel, with transparency and vulnerability, is for the brave of heart. It is, however, what we are being asked to do in our current conflict. All of a sudden the world is looking to us.” Like this story? You…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…s I watched talented African American actors hamming up “African-ness” for cheap laughs. It brought to mind the long, shameful history of Americans—black and white—performing blackness (often in blackface) on stage for white audiences. The Book of Mormon wants to have it both ways. It wants to make fun of The Lion King and its African stereotypes by substituting more authentic stereotypes. It wants to be transgressive and conventional, blasphemous…

Watching Preachers’ Daughters Right After the Boston Bombings While Teaching a Class on Augustine’s Confessions

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…taxonomies—good bodies and bad bodies, dirty acts and pure acts, flesh and spirit, those in authority and those under authority. I think that tendency has hurt people, and I think it’s implicated in rape culture. And that matters: this is not an interesting little theological problem for specialists to rub their chins over and try to work out in the abstract. But. You know what? I just can’t, right now, mock the parents on Preachers’ Daughters fo…

Pop-Eye: Meat The Wrestler

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…nt to get to some core non-physical identity, some materially transcendent spirit, some individuality that is more about the myth of modern individualism than about anything religious. Therein they miss the (religious) point. And this is where I will go on record to suggest that Darren Aronofsky is one of the greatest living religious filmmakers. I confess, I’ve been a fan since his first feature length film, π (alternatively titled: Pi: Faith in…

National Association of Evangelicals Supports Immigration Reform, But Elsewhere Discord Reigns

By Donna Schaper

…tepping up the pace of deportations of those same persons. Why? Because of cheap politics and the sneer. And also because people of faith have started fighting among themselves instead of working to resolve the problems. We should be in charge of helping politicians have the political cover they need to do the extravagantly right and realistic thing. Consensus is possible if people are willing to give and take; to be a little less convinced that t…

Recovering From Rejection: The Second Coming of Ted Haggard

By Wendy Norris

…is.” At New Life, which Jeff Sharlet described as “not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them,” worship services were extravagant multimedia, fog machine-choked productions, in which Haggard used his pulpit to wage spiritual war against satanic forces, including the demon of homosexuality. “It would be devastating for the children of our nation and for the future of Western civilization,” he told Christianity To…