Search for "cheap airline tickets to chicago o"

The Surprisingly Short History of Popular Yoga

By Andrea R. Jain and Michelle Goldberg

…pted in November when a yoga instructor received an email from from the school’s student union saying that her services would no longer be needed. Citing problematic legacies of “cultural genocide” and “western supremacy,” the email stated some students felt uncomfortable with how yoga was being practiced. Now the class is back with a new instructor—a South Asian instructor—who worries she was hired only because she’s Indian. The incident was the…

“I Speak to God in Public”: Are Young Black Millennials Reclaiming a Theology of Resistance?

By Joshua L. Lazard

…r, independent artist Chance the Rapper dropped a mixtape titled Coloring Book that received immediate critical acclaim. One of the undeniable threads in the critique was just how much Chance’s personal faith and spirituality were an integral part of the music. Many speculated whether or not the mixtape classified as part of the gospel genre given that superstar Kirk Franklin was featured prominently on a track. So it was no shock that during his…

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

…on and contraceptives; he even went after writers of medical journals and books that provided gynecological advice. Comstock proudly declared that over the course of his crusade, he secured the conviction of some 2600 people for facilitating access to abortion and contraceptives, as well as for purveying obscene materials. (He even boasted that he was responsible for approximately 15 suicides of people he’d investigated.) Margaret Sanger, the foun…

“Saints Are Only Human”: Leaving the Church, But Heeding this Pope’s Lessons

By Elizabeth Colmant Estes

…avis. A gay man who refuses to vacate his Roman Catholic pew, Robby’s Facebook post on the topic read: “The Pope went to see Kim Davis to ask for forgiveness for his part in the history of bigotry that formed her messed up beliefs that got her ass thrown in jail.” I get where he is coming from. But to me, the most important thing about the papal visit was not the agenda he upheld, but the stance he held up. At the National Shrine of the Immaculate…

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

By Sarah M. Pike

…ge students, massage therapists 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 horde…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…ewing Ben Stein’s new documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, is stooping to a level I probably shouldn’t. But then I recall my scientist colleagues who have employed similar reasoning to avoid the evolution/creation conversation, and that this avoidance may have indirectly led to the production of such movies in the first place. It turns out that the movie has much to teach us—though certainly not in the way the producers intended. Hosted…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…rch-conservative Dinesh D’Souza’s election-year documentary (based on his book The Roots of Obama’s Rage) with my 19-year-old daughter, Chassé. As someone who is now a secular progressive single mom of seven kids, five of whom live at home, I wouldn’t normally choose to spend our family’s perpetually-insufficient income to see this Obama-bashing movie, let alone take along one of my kids. But we went because I wanted to see the movie that our form…

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…in 1996, I’ve wanted to write about it. I was in my early years of grad school at the time and it didn’t take long to see that I’d stumbled into an extraordinary cultural petri dish in which people were consciously playing with art, symbol, and ritual in order to explore, expand, and reinvent the boundaries of late-modern culture. Burning Man started as an impromptu gathering among a handful of friends on a San Francisco beach in 1986 and was mov…

Betrayed at the Polls, Evangelicals of Color at a Crossroads

By Deborah Jian Lee

…stor from an immigrant family. Despite their differences, a bromance had bloomed. The drive into the country echoed the setup of the critically-acclaimed horror movie Get Out, in which a black photographer accompanies his white girlfriend to her family’s estate. As the landscape gave way to highways flanked by thickets of conifers and low-slung warehouses, Jeff reassured George that his brown body would be safe at this white party. Of course, as a…

Why the World Needs Religious Studies

By Nathan Schneider

…Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state who had just written a book about why religion is so important. What I remember her saying, which stuck with me and probably a lot of the other graduate students in the hall, were things like this: “Our diplomats need to be trained to know the religions of the countries where they’re going.” And: “I think the Secretary of State needs to have religion advisors.” I hadn’t really thought of it that w…