Search for "Spirit Air 1 800-299-7264 Customer Service Phone Number"

Pentagon Report Rejects Religious Right Arguments On DADT

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…study notes that there was stronger resistance to racial integration in the 1940s and 1950s than to the open service of gay and lesbian troops. Surveys of troops back then revealed many of the same objections as today. Harvard professor and author Peter Gomes, in an op-ed in the New York Times in 1993, after DADT first passed, noted a few of them: In 1942, the General Board of the Navy was asked by Admiral Knox to consider “enlistment of men of co…

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

By Diane Winston

…s of church: a community of friendly, generous, caring men and women. Some customers, comparing the store to their congregation, even found the latter wanting. Wal-Mart epitomized Christian service and, thanks to its homely displays and low prices, did not hallow the kind of conspicuous consumption common to many malls, gallerias, and shopping districts across the country. If anything, Wal-Mart sanctified a sort of stylized frugality, bringing the…

They’re Not Coming Back: The Religiously Unaffiliated and the Post-Religious Era

By Kaya Oakes

…iously unaffiliated Americans, but shows an even sharper increase in their numbers. According to PRRI, in 1990 the religiously unaffiliated made up only 6 percent of adults. From 1998 to 2004, that percentage held steady at around 14 percent, but today, 25 percent of Americans “claim no formal religious identity.” This percentage continues to primarily consist of adults under the age of 50. The survey also makes it clear that this decline began am…

Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” Depicts Death Struggle Between Hope and Despair

By Peter Laarman

…or hope. The pastor counsels Michael that it is our human duty to hold despair and hope together and not let either eclipse the other. Yet he himself cannot fend off despair and desperation after Michael kills himself, despite the pastoral counsel. He must also face the abomination of witnessing the founder/CEO of a leading corporate polluter (think Charles Koch) speak at the anniversary celebration and re-consecration of the 250-year-old Dutch Re…

Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” Depicts Death Struggle Between Hope and Despair

By Peter Laarman

…or hope. The pastor counsels Michael that it is our human duty to hold despair and hope together and not let either eclipse the other. Yet he himself cannot fend off despair and desperation after Michael kills himself, despite the pastoral counsel. He must also face the abomination of witnessing the founder/CEO of a leading corporate polluter (think Charles Koch) speak at the anniversary celebration and re-consecration of the 250-year-old Dutch Re…

When Religion Kills: The Narco-Traffickers of the Borderlands

By Luis Leon

…w others get close to God.” Credo sixteen extols the virtue of patriotism. Number nineteen advises humility and nobility, while twenty-two announces that no woman should fear a Knight, but, rather, should feel protected by him. Twenty-nine reiterates that every Knight should be “firmly and truthfully in the just cause of God.” Numbers thirty-four through thirty-eight prohibit drugs, kidnapping, and mandate drug testing. Forty-three requires member…

Blankets, Booties, and Jesus: Spiritual War on the Uterus in Rick Perry’s Texas

By Sarah Posner

…uttmacher Institute. Thirty-five percent of Texas women between the ages of 15 and 44 are uninsured, 13% higher than the national rate. Texas also has a higher rate of teen pregnancy than the national average, 88 pregnancies per 1,000 teen women, compared with 70 per 1,000 nationally. Yet in the face of this, the Texas legislature slashed family planning funding by two-thirds in 2011. The Republican-led legislature allocated another $8.4 million o…

Are Muslims Nuts?

By Haroon Moghul

…e mistake tensions for incompatibilities or inherent opposition. I know a fair number of African Americans, Hispanics, and Muslims who once voted Republican. They no longer do—not because they disagree with the Republican Party, but because they feel it has no room for them. It seems opposed to their presence in America. A good number in the Muslim-majority world feel the same way about the place of Islam in the world: there is no room for it. It…

Conversion Story #643 (not a real number)

By Amina Wadud

…s hooked. I count my dates of entry from these two points: Thanksgiving day 1972 when I said shahadah, and March 1973, when I was began reading the Qur’an. For some time after that, all I read was Qur’an. Still today if things get freaky I return to just reading the Qur’an. Knowing it was originally in Arabic, I began studying Arabic through the local mosques until I could register for a course at my undergraduate University of Pennsylvania. In fa…

Republican Scandals Drag Secretive ‘Family’ Into the Big Time

By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston

…Camelot was a “layover on the way to Vietnam.” Maybe so, maybe not. On June 10, 1963, President Kennedy delivered the commencement speech at American University. In the middle of the Cold War, he laid out his vision for a world at peace and how we might get there: “Some say it is useless to speak of peace or world disarmament, and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I bel…