Search for "cheap airline tickets to pittsburgh pa phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Israel’s Immigration Debate: “Where is the Jewish Spirit?”

By Mati Wagner

…e protagonists in an age-old Jewish dispute. Shas’s Yishai represented the particularistic, parochial protector of Jewish continuity from the ravages of assimilation and intermarriage. Wiesel et. al. took the side of the Jewish universalist, extrapolating lessons from the Jews’ long history of painful deportations to learn empathy for all humanity. On August 1, the cabinet struck a compromise. A Jewish state must address both sets of concerns. It…

Why Taxing the Rich is the Godly Thing

By Peter Laarman

…while refusing to hire new workers or even restore laid-off workers to company payrolls. Back when we had a bit more clarity and courage about these matters, progressives would have called this situation by its right name: a capital strike. Today, progressives have grown wary about using language like that—they think it’s too provocative and too Marxist-sounding—whereas conservative bloviators like Charles Krauthammer and Amity Schlaes openly cel…

A Truly Fearless Human Being: Rev. Howard Moody, 1921-2012

By Tom Davis

…aws. I think he reveled in the avant garde because he himself was actually part of it: completely breaking apart what it had meant to be a mainline congregation and creating something new and amazingly vibrant on Washington Square South. But what may ultimately be most endearing was his gift for exploding the cheap piety we’re still imprisoned by as we head toward the 2012 elections. Nowhere was this on display more prominently than in his distinc…

Prophets of the Environmental Apocalypse

By Peter Laarman

…berries economy, you have already lost. Try to show how the sustainability path is a joyful path, not a grim monastic path. It may be true, as many have said, that the next revolution—the green revolution—will be the first revolution in history that cannot promise material advancement in the same way that people have traditionally construed such advancement. But that does not mean we will be living immaterial lives, or that living much more modest…

Watching Preachers’ Daughters Right After the Boston Bombings While Teaching a Class on Augustine’s Confessions

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ich she and her older sister Audrey end up being part of. Tawni Koloff, as part of a slumber party with her sisters, gets a tattoo while their mother Victoria is out of town. Victoria is not a fan of tattoos; she sees them as being at odds with treating one’s body as a temple. So here’s the thing: I wish that Christian reflection on moral behavior did not have such a lazy habit of turning potentially important conversations into reductive taxonomi…

The Problem with Christian Gentlemen: A Short Goodbye to Ted Cruz, the “Mr. Pecksniff” of Presidential Politics

By Peter Laarman

…ecture, Pecksniff is adept at flimflamming prospective students (and their parents) into paying exorbitant fees to board at his house and learn at his feet. If one of the students should actually have a gift for drafting, Pecksniff passes the work off as his own. But his speech—oh, his sublime speech and gentle affect—is never less than sublimely Christ-like in the estimation of his many admirers. And this really is what gives the novel its satiri…

Is the Satanic Temple Just an Elaborate Prank? 10 Questions for the Author of ‘Speak of the Devil’

By Joseph Laycock

…fluence to have even written a book about Satanism. There are also more sympathetic people who still assume TST is an elaborate put-on. There is a degree of smugness that accompanies this view: People who assert it imply they have “figured out the joke” and everyone else is still catching up to them. It’s true that TST began with a series of prank-like political actions. But this view assumes there is nothing to TST beyond what the media reports….

With Methodist LGBTQ Vote and GOP Support for Trump, White Protestantism Has Hit Bottom

By Peter Laarman

…ter the tender age when he realized that his family was rich because crime pays). Here we see the white Protestant abandonment of the rule of law and the rule of reason in full hideous display. Which of course is different from saying that all white Protestants are a lost cause. But by now it is painfully clear that far too many are willing to throw both law and reason overboard for the sake of preserving (say it with me now) straight white male s…

In a Time of Irrational Fear and New Media: The Deadly ‘Dance Plague’ at 500

By Ed Simon

…s, some holding their severed heads. Again, before we blithely dismiss the past as prone to paranoia, we’d be wise to recall the conspiracy theories of our present day, or the irrational beliefs which proliferate on social media that were mentioned earlier. Christendom itself was on the verge of mutilation, as Martin Luther had initiated his Reformation only nine months earlier, the very world turned upside down. Society itself seemed to mimic the…

Must We Burn Something to Get Attention?: 50 Years After the Catonsville Nine

By Jason C. Bivins

…ans pay conscious, indeed religious tribute, to Caesar and Mars . . . And yet, and yet, the times are inexhaustibly good, solaced by the courage and hope of many.” Cynicism is understandable, and despair more so. But instead of siding with cheap, whitewashed nostalgia, let us note that certain moments in the past remind us of the future that may yet still be achieved….