Search for "Spirit Airlines 1 800-299-7264 My Reservations"

Joel Osteen and Annise Parker: Strange Stage-fellows

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…s not going to tell homosexuals they can’t come to our church. If the Holy Spirit convicts them, then they’ll change.” Not to read too much into Iloff’s statement, but what I hear is that Osteen took the opportunity mix politics, religion, and friendship evangelism all at once. He got to pray “in Jesus’ name” at a government event for an elected official who happens to be an open lesbian, who says she believes in God – but the Holy Spirit still ha…

Jesus, Carpet Bomb My Heart: An Undercover Muslim in Detroit

By Haroon Moghul

…from what they were told it is. All the passionate music, jubilation, and spiritual energy cannot hide the meanness of spirit that would perpetrate this kind of fraud. As much as TheCall prayed for “Jesus to cover Dearborn in light, and cast out the darkness,” Kamal Saleem was the one speaking in the dead of night. Engle should pay more attention to his own moralizing etiology of America’s crisis. Democracy, like a free-market economy, operates o…

And the Violent Bear It Away? Disciplined Nonviolence and the Coming Election Emergency

By Peter Laarman

…nshirts—the Sturmabteiling, or SA—facilitated his rise during the 1920s and 1930s. A badly polarized Weimar Republic found itself totally defenseless in the face of stormtrooper-incited chaos and crime. Of course our official founders—those rich white men in wigs—chose to euphemize and sanitize what they knew full well would ultimately threaten the stability of their perfect machine: the unspeakable violence they authorized within the system of ch…

A Response to the Newsweek flap: Passages vs. Principles

By James F. McGrath

…hat text. The reason for doing so, according to not only Galatians but Acts 15, was apparently experience. The early Christians had witnessed uncircumcised Gentile Christians manifesting the signs that God’s Spirit was at work in their lives, and believed that God’s “seal of approval” in the present trumped Scripture, at least in this instance. That being the case, perhaps it should not take more than an encounter with some gay and lesbian Christi…

‘When I Spoke in Tongues’ Points the Way Out of Fundamentalist Christianity

By Andreea Nica

…“The point was having this direct line to God, this evidence that the Holy Spirit had entered me and claimed me as his own. Now that same Spirit was reaching back out to God and appealing to him on my behalf.” It’s rare to come across individuals who can so precisely capture what it means to leave a unique and profound (religious) meaning system. Moreover, the ability to unravel the emotionally wrenching and often complex social psychological proc…

Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…Arch-bureaucrat Robert McNamara, who served as secretary of defense between 1961 and 1968, was perhaps more responsible than anyone for making “systems analysis” into the Pentagon credo. “Don’t give me your poetry,” he once retorted to a White House aide’s dour assessment of the war in Vietnam. “Give me something I can put in the computer.” But cybernetics didn’t do much good in a war where there was no clear line between enemy and friend. During…

A Nation of Believers and Nonbelievers—Second Thoughts on Obama’s Speech

By Ronald Aronson

…ll of separation” is actually breeched, we worry: can’t this undermine the spirit if not the letter of America’s secular Constitution? And why did Obama submit to an informal religious test during the campaign, being cross-examined by Warren about his personal religious beliefs? Warren asked: “What does it mean to you to trust in Christ? And what does that mean to you on a daily basis?” And Obama dutifully answered. To us this seemed to be a yield…

Our Last “Genius” Stephen Hawking is Gone… Cause for Worry Or Inspiration?

By Ed Simon

…of daemonic inspiration. As philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn wrote in his 1962 classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the “scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time… open up new territory… and test long-accepted belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things.” Even Newton, arguably the first universally celebrated scientific genius, for whom relics w…

Bad Religion Leaves Big Bruises: When Christians Threaten Health Care Reform

By Peter Laarman

…ember, particularly a poorer member, Christ is crucified yet again and the spirit of Christ is absent. Or as St. Paul put it in sternly rebuking a class-obsessed community in Corinth: The members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect… If one member suffers, all suffer together wi…

The Pope Is Not the Church

By Nathan Schneider

…ian fashion. “In all times the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit,” Cardinal John Newman said more than a century ago. If what we expect from the Church is what we expect from the aged and insulated man who happens to hold the office of Peter, there is little reason to expect much. In the New York Times, Paul Elie recently suggested that in imitation of the papal resignation Catholics might “give up your pew for Lent”—that is, take…