Search Results for:

united airline cheap tickets to hawaii from chicago phone number 1-800-299-7264

70th National Prayer Breakfast Made ‘Cosmetic’ Changes, But Biden Delivered the Same Old Tone-Deaf ‘Unity’ Message

…hat most Americans would prefer to live in a friendlier, more humane, more united country; I certainly would. But there can be no cheap or easy unity in a country torn apart by an increasingly fascist Right. Troublingly, establishment Democrats like Biden seem unwilling to hear that comity with unreconstructed bigots will only legitimize and empower them in their authoritarian lust for power, causing severe harm to—to use a biblical turn of phrase…

Read More

Fear of a Catholic Ghetto

…te the backstory there. Haley’s use of the phrase “Catholic ghetto” is not cheap hyperbole, if you consider the history of Catholics in the United States. The US Catholic hospital system grew up in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; largely under the care of women’s religious orders, and largely to serve the poor. (Read about a few of the women who helped build Catholic health care.) The surrounding cultural landscape could be pr…

Read More

South Asian Religious Leaders Challenged to Take on Stigma and Discrimination: Global LGBT Recap

…oring well due to high spending on social programs and women’s rights. The United States falls into fourth place because, although its social spending is the highest in the region, murder rates, particularly femicide, remain high, as well. The report also points out that some of the region’s larger economic powers like Brazil and Mexico could greatly improve their scores by placing more emphasis on women’s rights, access to education and access to…

Read More

Hajj Journal: Door Number 89: The Door with No Name

…d inside the mosque one day, I came across Bab raqm tis’wa thamanin, “door number 89,” literally. The door with no name. Facing the mosque at door number one, bab maalik ’abd-al-’Aziz, this door is off to the left. Looking at the mosque floor plan, this is where the building structure of the mosque is deepest. This is “the women’s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door number one, the kings’ door, on my way out af…

Read More

What Can a Real Life Haunting Tell Us About American Religion? [Updated]

…ouse. She reported that, whenever she tried to speak to this friend on the phone in the house about the haunting, the phone connection would be interrupted. As a busy woman with two kids, Maria doesn’t always have a lot of time to devote to spirituality, but when she does, she often relies on intuition. In the case of the haunting, she reports that her intuition pointed her toward the conclusion that it’s the land on which the house was built that…

Read More

Religious Hostility to Gay Nigerians; The Pope’s Visit To Africa; Ireland’s Religious Schools Can’t Discriminate Against Gays; Orthodox Church in Georgia Leads Anti-Gay Forces; Global LGBT Recap

…ho have to deal with it on a regular basis,” she said. “I have already had phone calls from irate family members: ‘how could I perform the ceremony, didn’t I know this was wrong and not biblical’. I have, in my studies, a different interpretation of a lot of what people say the Bible says. “I believe in the whole Jesus concept. You love people and there is no judgment. They have their belief system and I have mine and I’m living true to mine.” Bru…

Read More

Yes, It Can Be Hard to Be an Atheist in America; Now We Have the Data

…particularly religious.” Gill, herself a transgender lesbian, noted in our phone conversation that the Secular Survey’s questions about identity concealment were indeed meant to get at “a coming out experience,” though the survey deliberately did not use that language in order to avoid possible confusion. Asked whether she thinks the phrase “coming out” belongs only to the LGBTQ community, Gill remarked, “I would vehemently disagree with that; I t…

Read More

The Lady Vanishes: Trump’s Communications Team Tries to Topple a Monument

…ght of”) to a drily historical material reading where there is no eternal, united, ideal of America, just differing opinions, shifting policies. Acosta’s question introduced American civil religion to the briefing, to which the Trump administration official shot it down as “ahistorical.” Another fail for the White House, even if Miller’s facts were right and even if Acosta’s accosting of him went beyond the standard protocol of a journalistic Q&A….

Read More

Are You There God? It’s Me, Donald: A President at Prayer

…amous Christian in the world.” He told me that last week in a great, great phone call. Oh, and Fred Douglass. I need to get his input, too. Just this morning I told them, the great African Americans who supported me completely, what an amazing job Fred is doing, being recognized more and more. They loved it. They love me. My speech was a the biggest success in the history of black people. The media lied about it, of course. They said I didn’t know…

Read More

Should NASA Have Given $1.1 Million to a Theology Institute?

…e walls tumbling down? When the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts your phone call on hold, you don’t hear muzak. Instead, the phone system plays a homegrown jingle featuring lines like “Everyone is tired of your piety / get off your knees and get to work” and “We’ve got to fight the battle of church and state / or the walls come tumbling down.” The receptionist told me that FFRF co-president Dan Barker, a former evangelical preacher and occasi…

Read More