Search Results for:

Spirit Airlines Flight 800-299-7264 Booking Phone Number Reservations Toll Free

Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

…what is raised is imperishable… It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.” Generations of Christians have tried to figure out what that “spiritual body” means. I am reminded of a conversation with Owen Gingerich, a Christian believer who is also an astrophysicist at Harvard. He puts the conundrum this way: Human bodies are characterized by change, and heaven, by tradition, is characterized by changelessness. How does that work? Ho…

Read More

The Faith that Faith Produced

…concerned with His relevance to them than any metaphysics. We can only be free if we remove the shackles of faith, these self-ruining feelings of incompleteness, prudery and debasement, and accept the inevitability of our random lives. I don’t mean to be flippant. This is how it seemed to me, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t knock me off my feet. Why spend my existence fighting myself, when I was doing a pretty crap job of it anyway, suffer a…

Read More

What Makes a Human Bomb Tick?

On Christmas Day, 2009, as a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam prepared to land in Detroit, passengers smelled smoke and heard a series of bangs or popping noises. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old man from a prominent Nigerian family, was attempting to ignite an explosive device sewn into his underwear. He succeeded only in igniting himself—after his arrest, he had to be treated for second-degree burns on his hands and crotch. Inst…

Read More

Finding the Missing Airliner with Coconuts

…ala Lumpur International Airport and attempted to locate Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 using a magical ritual that combined Islamic elements with shamanic practices. On Thursday Ibrahim Mat Zin, also known as Rajah Bomoh Sedunia Nujum, delivered a press conference (in which he demonstrated a squint that bore an uncanny resemblance to Pat Robertson.) He initially stated that he had been invited to perform his ritual by one of Malaysia’s “top leade…

Read More

The Battle for the Bible Against Christian Nationalism Seeks to Continue Historic Campaign

…ory of recognizing that the state can use its power to take away religious freedom.” The kind of religious freedom the panelists discussed, of course, isn’t the Orwellian distortion posed by the Christian Right in both its Catholic and evangelical wings, in which religious freedom is invoked in order to justify the oppression of others, but the liberatory idea of religious freedom for all, including the non-religious, that traditional Baptists hav…

Read More

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Men “Stand Up” for “Religious Freedom”… On a Plane

…“Hundreds of ultra-orthodox Jewish men delayed takeoff of a transatlantic flight by refusing to sit next to women, and then caused chaos once it was airborne [by standing in the aisles for the entire flight and refusing to occupy their seats].” Obviously a congested plane aisle isn’t the end of the world (although one can imagine it might be a safety issue in some situations), and the news reports have treated it as a kind of amusing oddity. But…

Read More

The Role of Spirit in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement: A Conversation with Activist and Artist Patrisse Cullors

…er about her great-grandfather, a medicine man. Her interest in indigenous spirituality led to Ifà. For Cullors, spirituality saves souls. “When you are working with people who have been directly impacted by state violence and heavy policing in our communities, it is really important that there is a connection to the spirit world,” she said. “For me, seeking spirituality had a lot to do with trying to seek understanding about my conditions—how the…

Read More

New History Finally Recognizes Afro-Creole Spiritualists

…n empty signifier. Bodies were merely temporary envelopes that encased the spirit. Spirits mattered, raced bodies shouldn’t. This was a strong critique of American racism and white supremacy. The Afro-Creole Spiritualists sought to dismantle the U.S.’s racial hierarchy, while the Moorish Science Temple of the 1920s placed its members outside it. By claiming an identity other than “black,” “colored” or “Negro,” the Moorish Science Temple’s members…

Read More

Snake-Handlers, False Messiahs, and a Few Great Souls: 14 Who Died in 2014

…lity into their DNA. John-Roger Hinkins The “way-shower”of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA), John-Roger Hinkins died at 80. Raised Mormon, Hinkins was a high school teacher in Southern California when he discovered “soul consciousness.”He founded MSIA—pronounced “messiah”—in 1971, teaching one could achieve a totally positive state of being with the help of the Mystical Traveler Consciousness he embodied. MSIA attracted celebrity f…

Read More