Search for "cheap airline tickets costa rica to seattle phone number 1-800-299-7264"

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…

Why Taxing the Rich is the Godly Thing

By Peter Laarman

…t capital strike. The hardworking and hard-pressed folks sitting up in the cheap seats would cheer him on—and maybe even think about voting for him again, and voting for Democrats this fall. One little problem with this scenario: Obama has surrounded himself with once-and-future high-income individuals who are themselves highly susceptible to supply-side dogma that says the rich must be curtsied to and coddled if the nation is to prosper. We shoul…

Watching Preachers’ Daughters Right After the Boston Bombings While Teaching a Class on Augustine’s Confessions

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…the reductive “purity” rhetoric with something reductive of my own, like a cheap criticism that Christianity is anti-sex and anti-body. Which brings me to Augustine’s Confessions, and specifically, reading Augustine’s Confessions with my Intro Theology class this week. Internet, I love Augustine Confessions. I love, love, love, love Augustine’s Confessions. I love it even when I want to throw it across the room and curse. It’s a complicated love,…

Why the ‘Confession & Redemption’ Path is Unlikely to Help Falwell Recover from Sex Scandal

By Chrissy Stroop

…aders caught up in sex scandals, and most commentators predicted this same cheap grace for Falwell when he was recently forced to take an indefinite leave of absence from Liberty after posting a picture of himself with his pants unzipped, his arm around the waist of a similarly (un)dressed woman who was not his wife, and a glass of something that looked suspiciously like alcohol in his hand. According to two experts on evangelicals and gender, how…

In a Time of Irrational Fear and New Media: The Deadly ‘Dance Plague’ at 500

By Ed Simon

…e of nationalism was emerging in individual states, the media explosion of cheap print caused a type of epistemic collapse where truth itself was uncertain. With such uncertainty, Europeans experienced the simultaneous birth and death pangs of two different eras, where medical historian John Waller claims that this dance phenomenon was a “hysterical reaction … one that could only have occurred in a culture steeped in a particular kind of supernatu…

Playing Hooky: Will Boycott of Catholic Church Spur Reform?

By Nathan Schneider

…l that divides us, whatever it is. The bread and wine we use is materially cheap and unsatisfying; what we experience in them is supposed to come from a wealth beyond. In the presence of God, and among people of different races, classes, and opinions, the mass should nourish us in our common humanity. So whom exactly is one harming by boycotting, by staying home in solitary prayer? The earthly Church might miss your money in the collection—that’s…

SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

By Michael Schulson

…ualization. But SoulCycle is also part of a larger gamble: namely, that Americans will be willing to meld the forms of spirituality and the forms of capitalism in more and more blatant ways. In this, SoulCycle has a lot in common with prosperity gospel preachers, ethical consumption marketers, and other moneymakers testing the frontiers of luxury and soulfulness. Let’s not be naïve: spirituality has been profitable for a very, very long time. In o…

Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

By Randall Balmer

…a far higher status than simply “good.” He’s something of a demigod in America by Heart, quoted so extensively and frequently that he probably merits billing as co-author. Which raises a vexing question. Who really wrote America by Heart? The blogosphere has vibrated with talk about Jessica Gavora, whose name does not appear on the cover but whom Palin thanks for her “most important work on America by Heart.” This would not be the first time that…

The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

By Frederick Clarkson

…outlining eliminationism in American history, from Native Americans and African Americans, through Chinese and Japanese immigrants and more. He shows how eliminationist rhetoric was often followed by “an actual campaign of violent eliminationism.” This history is presented with a note of urgency, because the eliminationist rhetoric as currently featured by elements of the conservative movement, “is in many ways,” he stresses, “the signature featu…

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

By Andrew Aghapour

…growth in world Muslim populations will increase not only in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but also in North America. Their demographic study validates your prediction that there will be more religious switching within Western culture from Christianity to non-affiliation. But the percentage of unaffiliated believers will actually go down as a percentage of the global population. But of course that’s a projection, and it’s based on the an…