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

Why It’s Heresy to Read the Bible Literally: An Interview with John Shelby Spong

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…tes a Jesus narrative to carry the Jewish Christians from Rosh Hashanah to Passover. The reason Matthew wanted to expand Mark was that he wanted Jesus stories for the whole year so he has another five and a half months to cover. One of the crucial insights is that because Matthew can’t hold off the baptism of Jesus until Rosh Hashanah where Mark introduces it, he has to do it at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry because he can’t tell his story if h…

When Auschwitz Becomes a Poké Stop

By Karen E. Park

…is new territory. For years now we have been able to escape our physical spaces with our phones. But Pokémon Go doesn’t just allow us to avoid a “real” place in favor of a “virtual” one. It has instead transformed our real spaces into virtual ones. It may have been bad manners to play video games at a cemetery, or to take a selfie at a funeral, but with Pokémon, the funeral, the cemetery, and now even the Holocaust memorial and 9/11 memorial, hav…

We Declare You Restored: How Christian ‘Forgiveness’ is Deployed to Enable Abuse and Corruption

By Greg Carey

…ered hundreds of instances of sexual abuse in Southern Baptist life and a “pattern of intimidation” on the part of Southern Baptist Executive Committee members toward sexual abuse victims (p. 176). Meanwhile, Auburn University has its own troubles concerning its handling of sexual assault cases. When USA Today contacted over 100 universities to request public records concerning Title IX complaints, Auburn was one of six who failed to comply. Aubur…

Under Water: Waiting for the Flood (of Awareness) in Louisiana

By Drew Konow

…ting an opportunity to sit with the magnitude of our pain, to nurture that pain into empathy, and to transform that empathy into power and solidarity—putting our hearts and lives on the line to find creative ways to address systems that construct hierarchies of oppression, make pain invisible, and compound suffering. Once the water levels recede there will be mildew, endless piles of paperwork, jambalaya fundraisers, innumerable hours and countles…

Whose House? Their House: Just Who Was Held Accountable for the 1/6 Insurrection is Telling

By Susannah Crockford

…an official proceeding. This is one of the longest sentences received by a participant in the attack so far. During sentencing, the prosecution called Jake Angeli the “literal flagbearer” for the insurrectionists because he carried a spear with an American flag tied to it. Wearing a horned fur hat and no shirt, he screamed through a bullhorn encouraging people to fight against the elites “drinking our blood, eating our babies.” He was among the fi…

The Forgotten Nones: The High Cost of Fleeing Fundamentalist Religion

By Andreea Nica

…s immersive, consisting of a significant time commitment, a high degree of participation, and intense involvement. Heather, a 29-year-old female exiter of evangelical Christianity, explains her religious experience as deeply connected to family and friends in the community: I was raised in the church, attending services as far back as I can remember. As a child, we would attend Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and mid-week services. As a teenager,…

But ‘Natural’ is Better, No? ‘How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science’

By Andrew Aghapour

…c your… mysterium tremendum? Is the novel coronavirus awful? COVID-19 is a part of nature, a dangerous part, one that I desperately wish didn’t exist. But it is there, alongside all the other terrors of the natural world: the suffering of children, disease, death itself. And yet, our existence—that of humans, of the world, of something instead of nothing—that is also a product of nature, of organizing forces that came beyond and before us, and I’m…

Culture Wars Masquerading as Social Science: New Survey Illustrates Evangelicals’ Election Year Anxieties

By Chrissy Stroop

…evangelicals call the survey’s results into question. Referring to a white paper on Lifeway’s methods that he called “light on details,” Djupe noted, “If the data were gathered from a reliable online panel and Census quotas were applied, then this is a procedure used by many academics. We tend to believe that such samples can reliably test statistical relationships, but may not yield as reliable of estimates as probability samples taken over a pho…

Thomas Jefferson’s Bible Rejected the Supernatural Jesus in Response to the ‘Stupidity’ of Those Who Deified Him

By Gordon Haber

…into it like I did, and he built upon the idea of religion as an important part of the American past and present. He saw the Jefferson Bible as an important American historical object. It wasn’t just something left behind by a Founding Father, it was an object with a particular resonance. It seems so obviously an object that reinforces Jefferson’s deism, and yet some insist it is evidence of his orthodox faith. Christian nationalists cannot accept…

For Clergy Who Ministered Through the AIDS Crisis Covid is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different

By Lynne Gerber

…bers that “when the drumbeat of death slowed down in ‘96, ‘97, there was a palpable feeling of deep depression among a lot of people who worked in AIDS. A deep grief,” which he attributed to losses unattended to. “Think about all the un-mourned people who’ve died.” Mitulski said. “And the fact that they died in solitude. We’ve got to deal with it or it’s going to fuck people up for a long time.” In a 1999 sermon, given three years after protease i…