american airlines – airline tickets and cheap f phone number 1-800-299-7264 | Search Results | Religion Dispatches

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

By Daniel Silliman

No other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon H…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…chwriter and comedian best known for his bit part in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Expelled makes the claim that Academic Science has erected a wall around itself and the theory of evolution, and that anyone, including scientists, who dares to question evolution, who tries to scale that wall, is ostracized by the system. This, according to the movie, is an affront to freedom, a basic right upon which America was built. The movie focuses on five or six…

Mitt Romney’s Prosperity Gospel

By Peter Laarman

…ood American jobs fall like manna from Heaven.” He joins this with a very effective appeal to a still-Puritanical American need to avoid indebtedness and accept austerity as the price of redemption. This is what Romney means when he refers to “big things” that need to be resolved. The biggest thing of all, for his purposes, is recovering the will and the capacity to believe. This very much includes believing that some should suffer (working peopl…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…use, and cell phones were the size of a brick. But those aren’t the only differences between Pope John Paul II’s historic 1979 visit and Pope Francis’ virgin trip to the US this week. Pope Francis will find a church that is markedly different in a number of significant ways; so different, in fact, that it calls into question whether we can still refer to the Catholic Church in the US. When JPII made his first visit US, he found a church that was i…

The Economy is Racism: Ending Race-Based Economic Violence is the Real Challenge of This Moment

By Peter Laarman

…ts; they like what can be done by workers who no longer need to report to offices but whose output can be closely monitored remotely. And yes, investors understand that the pandemic will damage or entirely eliminate certain sectors. But that’s okay, too, as long as the Federal Reserve is standing by to provide unlimited long-term assistance to big capital even as the losers drop away. I say all this to make the point that the new normal—with pain…

Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

By Sarah M. Pike

…rapists and social workers, lawyers and emergency room physicians. They staff what Burners have dubbed “the default world” and keep it running, even though they come to the desert to escape it. Desert Pilgrimage The main road to the Black Rock Desert is a seemingly endless two-lane highway running north from Interstate 80 just east of Reno and through the Pyramid Lake Reservation. Pilgrims to Burning Man must navigate hordes of other attendees in…

What a Turn-of-the-Century Anti-Abortion and Contraception Crusader Reveals About GOP Efforts to Ban Abortion Pills by Mail

By Steven K. Green

…k Society for the Suppression of Vice and a special agent for the US Post Office who mounted a nationwide crusade to suppress the circulation of anything he personally found to be morally reprehensible. He often claimed he was merely performing God’s will in an ongoing war against sin. Using an 1873 federal law that he wrote (the “Comstock Act”), he used his authority to seize objectionable material and prosecute people for transmitting “obscene”…

Invited by Allah

By Amina Wadud

…st six months to make hajj. So I go to the American embassy and secure an affidavit stating I have been practicing Islam since 1972. When I brought that to the embassy they said: you need to have a mahram, the male guardian. At the time I was divorced and my son, Muhammad was only six years old, living with his dad while I was away. My father was deceased and all the other living males in my family were not Muslim. There was no office I could do t…

Refusing the Monsters on Maple Street: A First-Person Commentary from the Mass Hysteria at JFK

By Marion Grau

…her shooters nor evidence of any shots fired. The most likely explanation offered for the panic was that the cheering of Olympics fans for Usain Bolt’s performance in the 100 meters sounded like gunfire. In an episode titled “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” from the The Twilight Zone‘s first season, aliens discover that they can conquer Earth most easily by using flickering lights to infuse paranoia and fear in its human inhabitants. They f…

Gingrich Downplays Adelson Money, Stokes Fear of “Second Holocaust” at Florida Church

By Sarah Posner

…ssed here in 2008; the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, an offshoot of the American Principles Project, founded by Manhattan Declaration author Robert George; the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference; Personhood USA, the national organization pushing ballot measures declaring fertilized eggs persons; and Champion the Vote, the get-out-the-vote project of United in Purpose, the non-profit organization funded by Silicon V…