Search for "airline tickets to st louis cheap phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Is the Satanic Temple Just an Elaborate Prank? 10 Questions for the Author of ‘Speak of the Devil’

By Joseph Laycock

…te that, “All progress depends on the unreasonable man.” As I continued to study TST, I realized this wasn’t just a daring rhetorical move but the birth of a new religious movement. What’s the most important take-home message for readers at this cultural moment? TST is changing the public conversation about religious freedom and religion itself. I see TST as testing America on the values we profess. Most Americans claim to value tolerance and reli…

Despising the Holidays: When Christians Led the ‘War on Christmas’

By Ed Simon

…ponse to an actual attempt at banning (or at least heavily regulating) Christmas festivities under Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan government in Britain, and concurrently in the charter-colonies of New England. The Puritans saw Christmas as tainted by “popery,” (after all, the word ends with “Mass,” which had also been abolished) and identified its extra-biblical elements as dangerously pagan. In England there was fierce resistance to this attempt to re…

Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

By Randall Balmer

…that even as Palin professes to fantasize about going “back to Wasilla and stop feeding the media beast,” she derives both fortune and fame from that “beast,” which includes the fawning downstream media. The appeal derives, in part at least, from her effectiveness at claiming the mantle of victimhood and assuring the adoring crowds that they, too, are victims. And the ultimate advantage of being a victim lies in the fact that, because of the outpo…

The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

By Frederick Clarkson

…has in the past, I’d go along with that. But they are political propagandists first and foremost. That they do it entertainingly just comes with the job, really. There’s nothing more ineffective than propagandists who bore people. Maybe that’s been the left’s problem. And being an entertainer has never been an excuse for indulging in hateful, dehumanizing rhetoric that reduces people to the status of disposable vermin fit only for elimination. Wh…

Churches Can No Longer Hide the Truth: Daniel Dennett on the New Transparency

By Andrew Aghapour

…ns that are clearly toxic. The recent Pew survey shows that Islam is the fastest growing religion, not because people are converting to Islam, but because they’re having more babies. The fertility rate is much higher than that of any other religious group. That means we’re going to have more and more children growing up with the default presumption that they’re Muslims. I think, however, that it’s not going to be as standard, obvious, or routine f…

Springtime for Ross Douthat?

By Daniel Schultz

…Cute. I wonder if a Times columnist might not want to consider the use of statistics in his work, like this one: 99% of all American women who have had sex have used some form of birth control, 98% of Catholic women. Are they of the Devil? Would Douthat like Pope Francis to cast them out like Satan? Why on earth does Douthat have a platform? Believe it or not, I’m leaving some stuff out here. And we still haven’t gotten to the worst part about th…

Is Torture Utilitarian?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…easure pleasure and pain, and that by maximizing the pleasure of the greatest number of people, you may be able to justify the infliction of pain on a select few. We see that strange logic at work in these memoranda. First, the CIA justified waterboarding with the “ticking time bomb” scenario. Can you justify torture if you know the prisoner possesses information about a dirty bomb that’s about to be detonated, or a second 9/11-style attack? The p…

The End (of Religion) is Near, Scientists Say

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…especially applied to arenas of social life that don’t lend themselves to statistical or quantitative analysis. Like health care. Like education. Isn’t this what we who are educators or health care professionals grapple with on a daily basis? The number-crunchers are forcing us to speak their language and play their game, though they make no parallel effort to learn ours. And that is precisely what this not-so-benign linguistic analogy suggests….

To Be Queer, Gifted, and Black: A Conversation with Theologian Pamela Lightsey

By Nyasha Junior

…ell. I’m thinking especially about Traci Blackmon, who was in Ferguson and St. Louis. I’m also thinking about Willis Johnson and Starsky Wilson who were also in that area. These clergy have been integral parts of Black Lives Matter and integral parts of the protest against militarized police and excessive police force against citizens in the Ferguson area. There are other clergy nationally who have been involved, and I think that needs to continue…

Who Is “Sam Bacile?”

By Sarah Posner

…n planned ahead of time, and was not spurred by the film. And in the weirdest twist of the day in the who-is-Sam-Bacile mystery, actors in the film denounce it and say “Bacile” misled them. Cindy Lee Garcia tells Gawker: The script she was given was titled simply Desert Warriors. “It was going to be a film based on how things were 2,000 years ago,” Garcia said. “It wasn’t based on anything to do with religion, it was just on how things were run in…