Search Results for:

Southwest Airlines Customer Service 800-299-7264 Online Flight Reservations

As Long As There’s Fear, We Aren’t Ready for Atheism: A Conversation with Theologian and Ex-Priest Daniel Maguire

…in the morning and seeing the sun shine and the sky blue and the birds in flight and saying, ‘Thank you God,’ and you’re taking that away from me.” You write “theism promises simplicity and security and delivers neither,” but you do refer to a world that was “not yet ready for atheism.” Do you believe the world is now ready for atheism? As long as there is fear, it will never be fully ready. Fear makes you reach for a supernatural insurance polic…

Read More

Religious Resistance to Bolivian Gender Law; US Religious Right Celebrates Court OK For Romanian Marriage Initiative; Will LGBTs Be Banned from Indonesian TV?; Global LGBT Recap

…$119.1 billion annually. Hannah Harris Green reports on the ongoing legal flight of LGBT refugees, taking note of a recent decision by the U.S. Appeals Court for the Ninth Circuit that an immigration judge had erred in refusing to acknowledge an asylum seeker’s transgender identity. The article touches on those seeking asylum in Canada, Australia, and Europe. An excerpt: This decision means that transgender immigrants who fight their cases in the…

Read More

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Jihadis?

…ulture, that ignores slavery, Jim Crow, white supremacist movements, white flight, etc; or a monograph about anti-Semitism that ignores the Holocaust. This is Hirsi Ali’s M.O. We wouldn’t tolerate it from an affiliate of a prestigious university in nearly any other context. Forget bias, it’s blindness. The same percentage of Algerians died in that country’s war of independence against France as Germans did in World War II, except instead of findin…

Read More

RD10Q: What is Black Religion?

…powers that be. Finally, an Afro-Eccentric perspective provides a line of flight from the totalitarian blackness that often characterizes Afrocentric perspectives. Anything you had to leave out? A reader of the book in manuscript form suggested that I shorten the text by removing a substantial amount of material that dealt with scholarly/theoretical deviations from the Standard Narrative of Black Religion. I plan to publish that material separate…

Read More

Why Evolution Should Be Taught in Church

…ol, to be shut out in the dark, to drift, to face the abyss with no armor. Flight is an utterly human response to mystery. But sometimes the need for control, absolutes, and knowledge careens out of control. To wit: Those who desire to have creationism taught in our nation’s public schools. They know, because the Bible says so; and what’s more, they know so well that they’re going to take control of the educations not only of their own children, b…

Read More
Inspirational Quote

The Democrats’ Real Religion Problem, And All Of Ours

…district is significantly whiter than Georgia at large, or the role white flight played in building suburban Atlanta and its politics. Nor does he mention the interesting and probably more salient fact that wealthy, highly-educated suburban districts like this one or WI-05, which includes most of Waukesha County, form motivated, partisan counterweights to Democrats’ urban turf. (To be fair, that might be changing.) Williams doesn’t even manage to…

Read More

Larycia Hawkins’ Actual Violation of Wheaton’s Statement of Faith Hints at the School’s True Intentions

…s and cultures—it’s not easy, after all, to cultivate a reputation for top-flight scholarship while simultaneously signaling common cause with evolution-denying right-wing conservatism. Given the emptiness of Wheaton’s theological censure of Dr. Hawkins, it seems even more unlikely that Wheaton’s move to fire Dr. Hawkins is a principled defense of evangelical orthodoxy. In fact, it seems fair to presume that the optics of this situation are delibe…

Read More

From Organized Religion to Organizing Religion: Brian D. McLaren Wants Christians to Be Better

…a new love-centered Christian orientation (note the silhouette of birds in flight on the book jacket), McLaren also speaks of conversion, and I read the book more through the conversion lens (I’m not sure that the migration metaphor works as well as the author hoped it might). The tone throughout is warm and engaging, and the book is filled with telling anecdotes. But McLaren is never less than a master teacher with a solid lesson plan. He moves,…

Read More

Pope Francis Dismisses Condoms in AIDS Fight

…no such compassion for those living with HIV/AIDS when asked on his return flight from his African visit if the church should change its prohibition on condom use given the continued spread of the virus. Francis replied with an obtuse mixture of parable and exegesis that made it clear he saw little flexibility in the teaching: The question seems too small to me. It seems to me also like a partial question. The morality of the church is found on th…

Read More

Moral Mondays: The Battle For Justice Cannot Be Waged Only in the Courts

On a warm day in July 2013, I found myself on the wrong end of a canceled flight out of RDU Airport. I used the opportunity to travel into downtown Raleigh to observe one of the early Moral Monday rallies at the State Capitol. The gathering was ostensibly called to protest the legislature’s newly gerrymandered district map – among the most tortured in the nation. I expected to find a group of committed, passionate citizens (mostly people of color…

Read More