Search for "cheap plane tickets american airlines phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Art for Peace: An Interview with Artist Mary Button

By John Shorb

…elections. Button found inspiration and challenge when she stepped off the plane in Kenya, and she came back to create a series on her experience there. JS: How did your faith or the faith of other people play a role in this series? MB: During The Peace Summit, interfaith dialog was a real priority and so the youth participants were not only from a number of different countries—Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Kenya—…

Truth or Dare?

By Amina Wadud

…e technical stumbling block that keeps me from jumping headlong out of the plane of expectation and adventure. I haven’t felt this much impatience and uncertainty since the last few days before delivery of my children. I never wanted to know the sex beforehand, and for the most part managed to avoid ultrasounds even for medical reasons until the fifth child at the ripe old age of 37. Having miscarried a child just before that pregnancy and being t…

Is the Metaverse the Hero We Need to Rescue Us From Suffering and Enchant the World?

By Robert M. Geraci

…cination” where we can experience “bodiless exultation.” In Vinge’s “Other Plane” and Gibson’s far catchier “cyberspace,” virtual reality is geometric, much like the wireframe arcade games that offered a quasi-3D perspective in the early 80s. This Tron-like aesthetic relented before Stephenson’s vastly more human “Metaverse,” which was like the conventional world, only more so. Scholars have noted that these science-fiction dreams helped transitio…

Peru’s Civil Unions Bill Killed as Bishop Calls Sponsor ‘Faggot’; Germany Fines Men For Trying To Force Gay Muslim Teen Into Hetero Marriage; LGBT Global Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ion: “Father Rodríguez says the past few years have seen an upsurge in the number of baptisms into the Catholic Church in Spain of children who have been born to or adopted by same-sex couples, and that this has posed a new challenge for priests and parish leaders which often leaves them with questions and confusion.” The guide encourages respect, as well as pastoral sensitivity, for gay and lesbian couples who bring their children to be baptized….

Resurrecting Marley at 70: Rastafari History in 5 Songs

By Darren J. N. Middleton

…diately, a history connected with the slavery and Jim Crow politics of the American South, and those whose roots are deeply embedded in other African diasporas draw our attention to their heroes of anti-colonial resistance and racial justice. Bob Marley is one of the most misunderstood voices in this discussion. For many Americans the mention of Marley conjures the image of flashing dreadlocks, ganja smoke, and reggae’s hypnotic beat—all of which…

Santorum and Huckabee Question Authority

By Sarah Posner

…holic Church? In Santorum’s view, in interviews. And that interview on the plane failed to reflect a “core value of the faith and of the Catholic Church,” that people “should be fruitful and multiply.” (As Patti Miller points out here, what Francis said completely consistent with the encyclical Humanae Vitae promotion of “responsible parenthood,” while still deeming birth control “to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number…

Conservative Points in Pope’s Speech Include Liberal “Chasers”

By Patricia Miller

…c hierarchy spoke, are now talked about in coded language. For the average American, Catholic or not, listening to him speak at the White House on Wednesday morning, the take away would have been that the pope was very concerned about immigrants and the environment. While he did talk about the U.S. bishops’ pet issue of protecting “religious liberty,” for those not keyed into the ongoing culture war battles over access to contraception and discrim…

After Ferguson: America Must Abandon “Sick Christianity” at Ease With Violence

By Willie James Jennings

…om our seduction by guns to our formation as a people within gun cultures, Americans have made weapons part of our national confession, “….the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” We Christians have rarely resisted that seduction or that formation. In fact we helped create it on both the frontier and the plantation, and bound to this seduction and formation has been our blind commitment to abstract ideas of law and or…

Morality Police, Jihadists, Religious Competition, Grindr, & Americans Abroad: Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…Crimes reports that police in Beirut are using messaging apps on the cell phones of arrestees to try to entrap other gay men. In related news, the smartphone app Grindr, which allows gay men to find each other, announced it would permanently disable an option that allowed people to see their distance from other users. There have been reports that police in Egypt and Iran have used Grindr to hunt and arrest gay men. Jamaica: Activist Drops Challen…

Ugandan Anti-Gay Fallout: New Laws, New Violence, New Underground Railroad

By Peter Montgomery

…bserver reports that relations “soured” when “religious leaders questioned American’s support to pro-gay activists within Uganda.” The local organization says it is a victim of its anti-gay stance, which the donor finds unacceptable, although some sources claim IRCU failed to meet some of USAID’s rigorous accountability procedures. Suspension of funding was communicated to IRCU in a June 26 letter by USAID Country Director Lislie Reed. She told th…