Search for "how do i get cheap airline tickets phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Why It’s Heresy to Read the Bible Literally: An Interview with John Shelby Spong

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…despite his best-selling controversial books and popular speeches, his position on Jesus and the Christian church will never be the majority opinion, because he believes Jesus is not the Savior of the world and that the Bible cannot be read literally. That hunger for security is being sated by everyone from mega-church pastors offering assurances that Jesus will save the faithful, to the current crop of presidential candidates hawking their abili…

United Methodists Elect 1st Gay Bishop; Canadian Anglicans OK Same-Sex Marriage

By Peter Montgomery

…igious leader issues fatwa against violence toward gender nonconformists Shiite religious leader Muqtada Sadr issues what OutRight International calls a “groundbreaking religious decree” prohibiting the use of violence against gender non-conforming individuals. The June 29 ruling came in response to a question about men who “look like women” and engage in “suspicious same-sex [sexual] relations. The questioner added, “Such a dangerous trend, which…

Fear, Guns, and the (Unwinnable) War Against Death: A Letter to My Fellow Americans

By Beatrice Marovich

…spent a full hour, numb with terror, refreshing the news on my phone and waiting to be reassured that the violence had been contained. The (unarmed) door guards at the school’s drop-off line know my daughter’s tricks; how she likes to stall and take her sweet time. And I watch her dance away into the little building where she builds her dreams and plays with her friends every day. I can hold it together until I drive away, but then it bursts in my…

Accused of Anti-Semitism, Trump Aide Makes Ancestry Appeal

By Michael Schulson

Anti-Semitism lurks around the Trump campaign, and every week seems to bring a new not-necessarily-a-scandal-but-it-sure-sounds-fishy kind of incident. Among other things, the candidate has tweeted an anti-Semitic image, made a comment to Republican Jews about their penchant for business, repeatedly declined to disavow David Duke, and, most recently, hired a media executive whose website was recently described by a former employee as “a cesspool…

Book Bannings Are Bad Enough, But Where Those Involved Are Considered Demonic, the Stakes Could Get Much Higher

By Frederick Clarkson

Calls for, or at least predictions of, revolution or civil war have been common on the religious and political Right for decades. This has been particularly so among leaders of the Christian revivalist movement, the New Apostolic Reformation, in recent years. They appear to be openly preparing their people for the struggle to come by invoking biblical warriors such as Joshua, Gideon, David, Jehu, Esther, and Rahab as role models for transforming…

But ‘Natural’ is Better, No? ‘How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science’

By Andrew Aghapour

…illa extract and you’ll be faced with an ontological choice: natural or artificial? The real stuff—expensive “pure vanilla extract”—is made from the beans of a vanilla orchid that was painstakingly harvested, cured, a shipped across the globe. Artificial vanilla extract, on the other hand, uses synthesized vanillin derived from wood pulp or petroleum. Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science Al…

Culture Wars Masquerading as Social Science: New Survey Illustrates Evangelicals’ Election Year Anxieties

By Chrissy Stroop

The 2020 results of Ligonier Ministries’ and Lifeway Research’s State of Theology Survey, a project published every two years since 2014, are causing a minor moral panic in the evangelical information ecosystem, including flagship “respectable” evangelical periodical Christianity Today and “hip,” youth-oriented evangelical magazine Relevant. The latter’s headline, “Report: A Third of American Evangelicals Don’t Believe Jesus Was God” is more typi…

Thomas Jefferson’s Bible Rejected the Supernatural Jesus in Response to the ‘Stupidity’ of Those Who Deified Him

By Gordon Haber

…to four versions of the Gospels—Greek, Latin, French and English—neatly excising only the texts describing Jesus’s words and earthly deeds. Any mention of miracles, or anything in the least bit supernatural, was purposefully ignored. The Jefferson Bible: A Biography Peter Manseau Princeton U. Press September 29, 2020 Jefferson then pasted these texts into a blank book and titled it, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. His idea was to present…

For Clergy Who Ministered Through the AIDS Crisis Covid is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different

By Lynne Gerber

“This is not my first plague.” In 1982, Rev. Steve Pieters was the first minister diagnosed with AIDS in the Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC), a denomination that lost a third of its clergy to the disease. In 1985, he was the first openly gay man and person with AIDS interviewed by Tammy Faye Bakker on The PTL Club, a Christian TV show and cultural staple of the early Christian Right. Today he’s retired from ministry, locked down at home, an…

With Release of Pentagon Report, UFO Narrative Belief System is Suddenly Supported by Military Witness Testimonies

By Diana Pasulka

…f National Intelligence, released a report of UAP sightings by pilots and military personnel. The report, according to journalists like O’Brien and others, creates a safe space within which to discuss matters related to the sightings of UFOs and UAPs (they also informed the public that the term UFO should be replaced with UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomenon). Ironically, this report reversed the multi-year—and quite successful—campaign to debun…