Search for "US 1800-299-7264 South African Airways Reservations Phone Number"

What Can a Real Life Haunting Tell Us About American Religion? [Updated]

By Daniel Wise

…ouse. She reported that, whenever she tried to speak to this friend on the phone in the house about the haunting, the phone connection would be interrupted. As a busy woman with two kids, Maria doesn’t always have a lot of time to devote to spirituality, but when she does, she often relies on intuition. In the case of the haunting, she reports that her intuition pointed her toward the conclusion that it’s the land on which the house was built that…

Is There Hope for a Truly Progressive Evangelicalism? An Interview with Deborah Jian Lee

By Eric C. Miller

…he cancer that had crawled across his body, had lain in bed at home with a phone against his ear while my pastor, who had called him from the pulpit, pointed a cordless phone toward the congregation; we all wept and sang him love songs as he lay dying. These are uniquely evangelical experiences that shaped me, that will always be a part of me. I still long for this kind of community—the kind that journeys together through all the peaks and valleys…

The Lady Vanishes: Trump’s Communications Team Tries to Topple a Monument

By Spencer Dew

…sion with his own person image, as in the recently released transcripts of phone calls with Mexico and Australia, is all too apparent as a dominant and guiding focus) or a problem with those picked to actually “communicate” on behalf of the White House (from a Press Secretary who hid “among” bushes and banned cameras from press conferences to a Director of Communications who, in the early and yet also late days of his short-lived job accused one u…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…icult work. It’s even harder because The Public doesn’t like to answer its phones. Some people are more difficult to reach than others, such that these representative samples may not be so representative. Wuthnow points out that response rates for surveys have been declining steadily over the decades. Today, even a high-quality Pew study is unlikely to get even 25% of its randomly selected households to respond. Some recent Pew reports have reache…

Should NASA Have Given $1.1 Million to a Theology Institute?

By Michael Schulson

…e walls tumbling down? When the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts your phone call on hold, you don’t hear muzak. Instead, the phone system plays a homegrown jingle featuring lines like “Everyone is tired of your piety / get off your knees and get to work” and “We’ve got to fight the battle of church and state / or the walls come tumbling down.” The receptionist told me that FFRF co-president Dan Barker, a former evangelical preacher and occasi…

How To Talk To “Nones” and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…and the message, but actually hungry for both. When I spoke to Bell on the phone a couple weeks after the event in Durham, he told me, In some ways what I do is basic pastoring. It’s, you give people an idea, you let them respond to it, you give them another idea….it’s basic spiritual direction. Like the itinerant rabbi, the guru—not to say that I’m a guru—but there’s a long tradition [of that kind of work]. But so many people right now are rethin…

Are You There God? It’s Me, Donald: A President at Prayer

By Peter Laarman

…ss. I need to get his input, too. Just this morning I told them, the great African Americans who supported me completely, what an amazing job Fred is doing, being recognized more and more. They loved it. They love me. My speech was a the biggest success in the history of black people. The media lied about it, of course. They said I didn’t know Douglass. They just can’t stop lying. Oh, gotta go, that’s my man Douglass on the phone right now. #amen…

The “Southern Cage”: How the Myth of the Redemptive Depression Keeps Blacks at the Margins

By Eric C. Miller

…d reinforced Jim Crow. How are we to evaluate the virtues and vices of the Southern churches with regard to race? Southerners adored Roosevelt. He won 96 percent of the vote in Mississippi in 1932! And white Southerners didn’t just embrace the New Deal—they helped create it. Ira Katznelson calls this the New Deal’s “Southern cage”: Roosevelt relied on the support of powerful Southern congressmen who crafted economically progressive but racially re…

Brazilian Evangelicals Launch ‘Sin-Free’ (Read: Gay-Free) Version of Facebook

By Peter Montgomery

…ights advocate, on Sunday told the Washington Blade that Ruto has hosted a number of anti-LGBT American Evangelicals in the East African country. These include John Eastman of the National Organization for Marriage and Sharon Slater of Family Watch International. On Monday, anti-gay protestors at a march organized by the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya chanted that US President Barack Obama should not talk about gay rights when he visits. AFP’s Raph…

Why I Will Not See The Help: A Rant

By Rosetta E. Ross

…saying that “somebody had to do the work.” (The economic structure of the South depended on farming and 19th-century farming required vast human labor.) Nolan Harmon was a signatory of the infamous letter from eight Southern white clergy saying Birmingham demonstrations were “unwise and untimely,” which prompted Martin Luther King Jr. to write his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” The fact that clergy wrote the letter criticizing Birmingham protes…