Search for "cheap airline tickets to sacramento ca phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Dragged Through the Mud: This Little Church-Backed Support Group for LGBTQ Teens Suffered Bomb Threats, Smears and the Cancellation of its Drag Show

By Chrissy Stroop

…events. The performances raise money to send local queer kids to a summer camp—Camp Fruit Loop—where they can simply be themselves and be supported. Each past show easily sold out, which prompted the group to look at larger venues. This year, they rented the 500-seat auditorium at Roseville High School for a March 31 performance. Everything was going fine until right-wing activists decided to manufacture outrage, insinuating that this was a schoo…

How Much Did Jesus Care About Sex?

By Peter Laarman

…istian and Lutheran but at the cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap…We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale; we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition…Was there ever a more terrible and disastrous instance of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme that Rod Dreher can toss into his deba…

Beyond Alarmism and Denial in the Dominionism Debate

By Anthea Butler

…als in order to get the blessings. I know that will seem distasteful and a caricature to some, but these events are well-attended, and at a hundred bucks a person, revenues from book and DVD sales. Conferences and meetings like Lou Engles’ The Call are not just prayer meetings, they are Christian marketplaces, with all sorts of spiritual wares being sold. As to the political interaction, all of these groups know they don’t have the numbers alone t…

Episcopal Church Assault Data Reveals the Dark Side of Inclusive Christianity

By Charlotte Dalwood

…ense as a way of distinguishing The Episcopal Church on the religious landscape from the evangelical Right and its culture wars against gay marriage and transgender rights, among other conservative bugaboos. Disaffected with the latter? The Episcopal Church welcomes you. Here’s the problem. This brand image is at odds with the fact that LGBTQ+ Episcopalians experience sexual victimization in Episcopal spaces at consistently higher rates than their…

Power Up: Turn Off the Cell Phone

By Daniel Schultz

…plugged-in lifestyle doesn’t really get at the heart of the issue. I think the Amish, of all people, have it right. It’s not so much about what you as an individual are doing or not doing, as the effect technology has on the community: Why not make life easier and just put [a phone] in the house? “What would that lead to?” another Amish man asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a tel…

Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

By Rachel Wagner

…ntenders for New Testament inclusion—the Gospel of Peter, for example—they can scan through the Early Christian Writings online database. The sticky problem for Christians, as with Muslims, is authority. With individual access to a host of early Christian texts, and inspired by Brown to question the New Testament’s authority, what should people believe? Today’s Christians must decide for themselves which texts “should” have been included in the Ne…

“Saints Are Only Human”: Leaving the Church, But Heeding this Pope’s Lessons

By Elizabeth Colmant Estes

…giveness for the living people who suffer harm. So in the afterglow or aftermath of Francis’ historic visit, the most important take-away may be the old sinner in the white cap who captured so many eyes and hearts here in the US—who reminded us that like him, the church itself is only human….

We Went Through Amoris Laetitia Section by Section So You Wouldn’t Have To

By Anthony Adams

…lp young people to accept their own bodies and to avoid the pretension “to cancel out sexual difference because one no longer knows how to deal with it”. In Section 293, the pope reports that his bishops discussed their treatment of folks who are in civil—not sacramental—marriages or simply co-habitating. The bishops decided that it is preferable to try to make nice-nice with those couples only because they might eventually be enticed to convert t…

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…vailable to commodification.” The melding of Eastern spirituality and American capitalism isn’t new. As the popularity of yoga demonstrates, adapted ritual practices can sell. (Much the same could be said, too, about many martial arts). Spiritual practices can also be harnessed for corporate ends. “American capitalism has had a long and durable romance with Eastern spirituality,” Michelle Goldberg wrote last year on newyorker.com. “For well over a…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…sider careers in science (the number is decreasing annually). I bet we’d have more productive conversation among students and leaders of science and religion around the many profound issues in our nation that engage both: abortion, medical care, stem cells, homosexuality, and genomic research. The battle rhetoric would fade and, more than likely, movies like Expelled wouldn’t be made in the first place. We’d be less about selling books and tickets…