Search for "cheap airline tickets seattle to phoenix phone number 1-800-299-7264"

The Curious Case of Mormons and LGBT Rights

By Alan Michael Williams

…des in Salt Lake City, Boise, and other cities for the first time in large numbers, carrying banners that read “Mormons Building Bridges” (MBB). Donning Sunday attire and holding signs with messages of love, MBB forbade signs that criticized Church teachings—namely the notion that same-sex intimacy is a sin. Erika Munson, the founder of MBB, has assured me that the marches were a grassroots affair not in any way directed by Church leaders, but giv…

Are You Doing Your Part in the Baby War?

By Katherine Stewart

…n, over the long haul, move government policy in one direction. Founder of Seattle’s Mars Hill megachurch Mark Driscoll, whom Sandler wrote about in a previous book, said, “We are in a city with less children per capita than any city but San Francisco….and we consider it our personal mission to turn that around.” What that means for the women in his church, who are instructed to assume a “submissive” role within marriage, is predictable. “My life…

Creationism 3.0: Meet Intelligent Design’s Huckster

By Michael Schulson

…ctor of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, the Seattle think tank that powers so much of the anti-evolution movement today. The Discovery Institute claims to be a non-religious organization, particularly when it’s taken to court over repeated attempts to revise public school science curricula. In a fundraising document leaked to the press a few years ago, though, the Institute shows a keen awareness of their work’s reli…

Atheist Asked By Wolf Blitzer If She Thanked the Lord After OK Tornado Honored

By Becky Garrison

…g her a “Grace Under Pressure” award, as well as giving her son a toy microphone. In her talk and subsequent interview, she debunked Time columnist Joe Klein’s assertion that humanists did not contribute to the Oklahoma disaster relief efforts. However, she compared the lack of organized humanist organizations and secular groups like the Red Cross working on the ground to the clearly identified Christian groups who could be spotted sifting through…

Pope Francis vs. the Bishops: An “Overblown” Narrative?

By Patricia Miller

…he National Catholic Reporter, “since the 2011 USCCB elections, a stunning number of very talented people have left the USCCB” and many of their replacements have little experience with social justice policy but “a string of associations with different conservative outfits”: Now, not to put too fine a point on it, but one wonders if Pope Francis could be hired to work at the USCCB today. He has no background in religious liberty litigation. He did…

Fr. John Dear, Dismissed from Jesuits: “It Is So Strange to Be Hated by So Many Church Leaders”

By Megan Sweas

…n the United States. I recently was barred from speaking in Archdiocese of Seattle. This has gone back since I entered the Jesuits in 1982, but it has gotten really bad in the last ten years as the Catholic Church leaders in the United States became more and more involved in the Republican Party, supporting the war in Iraq. Very few Jesuits espouse nonviolence either. We run 28 universities, all of whom train young people to kill through ROTC. The…

An Evangelical Leader’s Lonely Fight to End an “Unholy Alliance” With the NRA

By Sarah Posner

…shortly after speaking in Isla Vista he learned of yesterday’s shooting at Seattle Pacific University, a small evangelical institution. “If you [evangelicals] think this was only happening in strange and alien places,” he said, “welcome to our own living room.” Schenck, a lifelong member of the NRA, admitted that his is a “minority opinion,” but the “unholy alliance” between his brethren and the gun rights behemoth is “a critical theological and m…

When Religion Becomes a Trap Rather Than a Safety Net

By Holly Welker

…ormon memoir, Ricks self-published Hippie Boy in 2011. Shortly thereafter, Seattle-area teacher Margie Bowker gave the book to her at-risk high school students. They had no problem relating to Ricks’s protagonist, a young girl trapped rather than supported by the safety net religion is supposed to supply, trying desperately to acquire some security despite parents who repeatedly put her in harm’s way. Ricks’s memoir inspired students to begin writ…

A Church Group, a Lawsuit, and a Culture of Abuse

By T.F. Charlton

…Mohler, president of the country’s largest Southern Baptist seminary, and Seattle’s “cussing pastor,” Mark Driscoll. Harris and Mahaney are also board members of influential, staunchly conservative organizations like The Gospel Coalition and the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Alongside these powerful partnerships has come strife. In its short history, SGM has been shaken by several high-profile departures and church splits. Co-founder…

Denying Darwin: Another Peculiar American Institution

By Lauri Lebo

…battles over religion and science. Fundamentalist Fervor According to Ron Numbers, in his book The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, the rise of Christian fundamentalism in America didn’t really start in earnest until the early 1900s. For the most part, Christians were not biblical literalists and accepted science—including the ideas that the earth was very old and that living creatures changed through time. A typic…