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

Is the Metaverse the Hero We Need to Rescue Us From Suffering and Enchant the World?

By Robert M. Geraci

…cination” where we can experience “bodiless exultation.” In Vinge’s “Other Plane” and Gibson’s far catchier “cyberspace,” virtual reality is geometric, much like the wireframe arcade games that offered a quasi-3D perspective in the early 80s. This Tron-like aesthetic relented before Stephenson’s vastly more human “Metaverse,” which was like the conventional world, only more so. Scholars have noted that these science-fiction dreams helped transitio…

Trump’s Lawsuit Amounts to ‘a Tweet With a Filing Fee,’ But That’s Not the Whole Strategy

By Andrew L. Seidel

…emptiness of his arguments have not impressed the courts. Trump’s closest spiritual advisor, Paula White, had a little bit better grasp of the math than his attorneys did. You can’t fight math, at least not with the law, so White decided to ask for some supernatural assistance. Amid the speaking in tongues, White claimed that “angels have been dispatched from Africa right now” and that “angelic reinforcement” was coming, not from the divine plane…

Netflix’s Iranian ‘Messiah’ Is a Gift to Trump and His Evangelical Base

By Tony Keddie

…wers to abandon their faith. But then the season ends with him surviving a plane crash and apparently raising other passengers from the dead. (Cue season 2 chatter.) If Golshiri does indeed have superpowers but is also deceptive, he fits the profile of the Antichrist who will come before the world ends, or “the deceiving messiah” known as Al-Masih ad-Dajjal in Islamic traditions. The show’s depiction of Golshiri as a Russian operative qua Antichri…

The Devil Stole Rod Parsley’s Money

By Sarah Posner

…od’s Profits: Parsley boasts that over the years he has had four different planes that have shuttled him more than a million miles around the world, allegedly to preach the gospel. The current plane is dubbed Shamgar VII, which Parsley translates as “God on the move.” (In the Bible, Shamgar was a judge who slaughtered six hundred invading Philistines with an ox goad.) In 2007, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and the Senate Finance Committee opened an…

Angry Voters, Right-Wing Populism, & Racial Violence: People of Faith Can Help Break the Linkages

By Chip Berlet

…h up with the Rev. David Ostendorf by cell phone while he is waiting for a plane at an East Coast airport. He is the executive director of the CNC where Ward works. Ostendorf, A United Church of Christ minister, once led PrairieFire Rural Action, a group that tried to save family farms during a major agricultural economic crisis in the 1980s. “Back then we helped build a popular economic political movement among family farmers across the country s…

“Paleo” is More Than a Fad Diet: Boyd Eaton’s Plan to Return to Eden

By Michael Schulson

…s impact on the environment, Eaton argues, it would also be better for the planet. This is Paleo eschatology, essentially—a vision of the world’s final destination, rendered in the language of an idyllic past. Eaton’s vision did not go over especially well with the other participants in the nutrition conference, most of whom were advocates of vegetarian diets, and most of whom seemed hesitant to suggest reducing the world population by a few billi…

The Leadership Crisis at the End of the Megachurch Era

By Benjamin Dueholm

…rity, these leadership roles can still be presented and accepted as public-spirited and idealistic. The guru facilitates “self-help,” the entrepreneur creates the “sharing economy,” the aspiring strongman wants to “make America great again,” all, we seem to imagine, without any stake in the matter, and all from no particular location in our society’s race, class, and gender hierarchies. And so “leadership” in our democratic capitalist language is,…

A New, Softer Prosperity Gospel Still Can’t Deliver On Its Promises of Health and Wealth

By Verdell A. Wright

…s Royces, “Money Cometh to You” conferences, or Creflo Dollar asking for a plane. Instead, prosperity preachers offer lifestyle management, paths to financial success, and encouragement to remain positive in spite of challenges. In 2013’s Blessed, Kate Bowler describes these gentler takes on prosperity theology as trending toward positive thinking and Christian self-help. She describes the soft prosperity gospel as “therapeutic and emotive, a way…

Franklin Graham Blames Democrats for Escalating Tensions with Russia

By Chrissy Stroop

…the United States in connection with the recent shooting down of a Syrian plane by U.S. forces. Graham noted correctly that the Syrian situation is a “powder keg,” and thus requires a careful foreign policy approach. However, he also took the opportunity not only to repeat the banal “Russia and America should fight ISIS together” talking point pushed by both the Kremlin and the Trump administration, but also to accuse Trump’s political opponents…

Does It Matter If Islam Is A Religion? An American Ahmadi Explains The Effects Of Religious Discrimination

By Daniel Schultz

…ll for either of them. Bhutto was executed in 1989, and Zia died in a 1988 plane crash rumored to have been an assassination. Yet the anti-Ahmadi laws remain, according to Khurram Ahmad, because “nobody wants to now tackle this beast.” Even to suggest reining in the law can be dangerous: two legislators were murdered for trying to put safeguards around the law. *** Ahmad is the unassuming leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Society in Oshkosh, Wisconsi…