Search for "cheap flights airline tickets deals phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Dilemmas of American Empire: Can Obama Pull Off a Game-Changer in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan?

By Gary Dorrien

…s are forming their own militias and creating new leaders adept at cutting deals and getting access to money that was supposed to pay for reconstruction. The predatory corruption of government officials and connected tribal leaders is pervasive, direct, and unrelenting, which helps to explain why $200 billion of reconstruction aid has produced almost no reconstruction. Iraq could explode again at any time, because Sunni leaders are demanding real…

Satanic Temple Protests Pseudoscientific Therapies for Satanic Abuse and Witchcraft

By Joseph Laycock

…e Satanic Temple is trying to draw attention to a serious issue. The ISSTD deals with highly controversial and discredited theories such as dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder), repressed memories, and hypnosis. These theories were key to a panic in the 1980s over “Satanic Ritual Abuse” in which numerous people underwent therapy and became convinced that they had suffered abuse at the hands of Satanic cu…

Still Captivated by Southern Gospel

By Douglas Harrison

…ensibility: Faith, Fallibility and Feeling in American Sacred Song, and it deals with all the data amassed by the survey that I couldn’t use in Then Sings My Soul—over 700 fans and professionals responded, generating more than 3,000 separate prose-based responses to various prompts. The Gospel Sensibility is grounded in listening to and analyzing the voices of Southern gospel music. In the process, the book aims to provide the first sustained crit…

Catholics Have Stopped Confessing

By Kate Childs Graham

…three cases involve sexual sins. Here are the cases that the penitentiary deals with: A man who directly participated in abortion (through, for instance, funding) and wants to enter priesthood A priest who has broken the seal of confession and revealed the sin and the sinner A priest who has offered absolution to their own sexual partner Someone was has desecrated the Eucharist Someone who has attempted to murder the pope. According to Cardinal J…

Dining with Dawkins in the Humanist Bosom

By Edward J. Larson

…ut how thrilled they were to hear him. Some said they came to conference—a number of them from quite far away—primarily because Dawkins was going to speak. It was something akin to the excitement that I once noted among participants at an evangelical conclave before a sermon by Billy Graham. An appearance by the Pope must arouse similar feelings among Catholics. Too bad secular humanists don’t do healings or alter calls because it was the type of…

What’s Wrong with Taming the Tongue? ‘Gossip’ and the Limits of Evangelical Abuse Prevention Efforts

By Chrissy Stroop

…e to Abuse,” Shellnutt’s article—which, incidentally, never defines gossip—deals primarily with the broad issue of abuse of power in the Christian workplace. It focuses mainly on the case study of Ramsey Solutions, a popular evangelical financial planning company that is largely indistinguishable from the “ministry” and person of its founder, Dave Ramsey, whose hardline approach to debt is appealing to many conservative evangelicals. Ramsey Soluti…

Vatican Equates Women’s Ordination with Priest Pedophilia?

By Mary E. Hunt

…n $1 billion in compensation to victims and for lawyers’ fees. The Vatican deals with a global church, so its legalese tends to be more generic and open to interpretation. It will be interesting to see just how these norms are spelled out but no one expects unambiguous prose and zero tolerance. So what about the ordination of women? How did that sneak in here? A Desperate Vatican? The 2001 norms focused on “most grave crimes” against the sacrament…

Global LGBT Recap: Nigeria Jails Gays, Russian Orthodox Spox Calls for Criminalization Referendum

By Peter Montgomery

…sion talking about the LGBT people being less than human. For example, the number two person in the state broadcasting company – actually now he’s the number one person – hosted a show devoted to the question of whether it was enough to protect our children to ban homosexual propaganda or whether more needed to be done. He argued that more needed to be done. He said and we need to outlaw blood and sperm donations by them. And if they die in car ac…

Hajj Journal: Door Number 89: The Door with No Name

By Amina Wadud

…d inside the mosque one day, I came across Bab raqm tis’wa thamanin, “door number 89,” literally. The door with no name. Facing the mosque at door number one, bab maalik ’abd-al-’Aziz, this door is off to the left. Looking at the mosque floor plan, this is where the building structure of the mosque is deepest. This is “the women’s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door number one, the kings’ door, on my way out af…

Build the Muslim Community Center at Ground Zero

By Donna Schaper

…hese are big words — hope, forgiveness and peace. They rarely have the megaphone that the party of “nope” enjoys. Nevertheless, they are words that religious people need to protect with all our hearts and souls. We too need a department of homeland security and its job is to protect our words. Let’s start with hope. When a tragedy happens, it often steals our hope. The 9-11 bombing is a terrible tragedy. It is a tragedy with causes in a larger hum…