Search for "cheap airline tickets to pittsburgh pa phone number 1-800-299-7264"

The Glorious, Ethnically-Challenged, Sisterhood of Spy

By Haroon Moghul

…Why are Pakistanis so good-looking? God knows! Why don’t European police departments seem more prepared for the numerous car chases we bring to their urban cores? ECB policy! Most heretically: Can you be friends with our nemeses? Uh-oh. Spy is much more than irreverent slapstick flick; it’s edgy in its honesty, valuing sororal loyalty to the point of political infidelity. In an age when there is no higher value than being open-minded, comedy might…

Can You Make a Comedy About UFO Cult Mass Suicide?

By Joseph Laycock

…ia claimed that this was intergalactic “bus fare” for admittance onto the spaceship. But Jones was told the money was actually a sort of inside joke. Before 1997 Heaven’s Gate members had spent decades travelling and living “off the grid.” They had run afoul of local laws claiming that anyone without at least five dollars could be defined as a vagrant. So members always carried five dollars and money for a phone call. Benjamin Zeller, author of He…

Are All Religious Experiences Reducible to 16 Desires?

By Andrew Aghapour

…thinking about how people’s “strong” and “weak” strivings inform how they participate in religion. The 16 desires are shared by everybody. We all want the same things from life. We would all rather understand than be confused. We would all rather be praised than criticized. We would all rather have safety than feel anxious. While we all want the same things, we don’t value them to the same degree. Some people value safety above all else, and they…

Kendrick Lamar’s Hip-Hop Jeremiad

By Josiah Daniels

…rick was wrestling with his prophetic vocation even when he was recording TPAB. I don’t think it’s an accident though that tracks from UU didn’t make it on TPAB. Usually a prophecy comes before a lament—e.g. first the Book of Jeremiah then the Book of Lamentations.) What I want to do here is suss out a comparison between the life, times, and texts of the prophet Jeremiah and Kendrick Lamar. Jeremiah was a prophet tasked with guiding the people thr…

The Passion of Katniss: How the Hunger Games Confronts the Trauma of Violence

By Michael Schulson

…So did depictions of the emotional and psychological turmoil that can accompany killing. Still, the more psychologically-charged territory of dramas often exists in a genre apart from the casual violence of action-driven feature films. Sometimes, films obscure both the physical and psychological effects of violence. Other times (think of Quentin Tarantino movies), the physical violence is explicit. But these films are sanitized too, only more subt…

Racial Justice Will Be Top Priority for New Prez of the United Church of Christ

By Frederick Clarkson

…ngage them in actions that effect change in the world. People may actively participate in two or three such communities of faith. They may stay with one for a while, only to move easily and seamlessly into another for no other reason that it feels right to them. They won’t be investing their missional resources of time, talent, and money in building and property, in sanctuaries adorned with stunning Tiffany stained-glass windows and nine-rank pipe…

The Sacred and the Dead: Ten Writers on the End of an American Adventure

By The Editors

…Jim Burklo The Dead sang, plucked, and pounded inexorably onward toward a palpably approaching ecstasy with no knowable when, where, or how… #7 : I Love You More Than Words Can Tell by David Vanderveen It takes humility to admit that we don’t have the answers, that our models aren’t truth itself and that the palaces we build to the religions we’re born into are failed, broken and must be burned. #8 : Deadheads Are Not a Deviant Subculture by Debo…

Terror In South Carolina

By Sarah Posner

…euters reports, the suspected shooter’s Facebook profile shows him wearing patches of the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia and sitting on a car with a license plate bearing the words “Confederate States of America.” He reportedly said, after sitting for an hour next to Pinckney and other worshippers at Emanuel, and after shooting them, and after a worshipper attempted to talk him out of reloading his gun, “I have to do it. You rape…

“What Kind of Islam Is That?”: Talking With Refugees From ISIS

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…Yazidi camp where some 3500 were living in tents in what had been a municipal park. I had to get special permission as a writer from government authorities to enter any refugee camp in Kurdistan or Turkey—though in this case I also had to gain the approval of local leaders who ran the camp. One of them joined in the conversations and urged the Yazidi refugees to tell me what had happened to them. Their stories were particularly harrowing. A middl…

The Only Religion Question Reporters and Debate Moderators Should Ask Presidential Candidates (Kim Davis Edition)

By Sarah Posner

…e point. What they mean to say is not that the government should endorse a particular religion. They mean to say that the government should step aside for a particular religion. While Huckabee may be the most ambitious of the presidential candidates on this issue, others are nonetheless coming to Davis’s defense. Ted Cruz and Bobby Jindal, competing with Huckabee to be the second-tier presidential favorite among religious conservatives, issued mor…