Search for "cheap airline ticket paris phone number 1-800-299-7264"

ISIS, ISIL or Daesh? Either Way, Obama Gets it Right

By Haroon Moghul

…ve them, President Obama has been extremely reticent to commit substantial numbers of ground troops to wars that have no clear exit strategy. He can however get away with this because he’s worked hard to build alliances and partnerships with other countries who bear some of the burden, put their own troops into the fight, and help us in the common war against ISIS. Many of these partners are Muslim, if they do not explicitly consider themselves Is…

Sarah Posner to Mark Silk: Dems don’t need to cater to the center-right evangelicals.

By Sarah Posner

…rumpy point is that the likes of Jim Wallis and Mara Vanderslice and Katie Paris and Burns Strider are not the real left, but rather the house liberals of the Democratic Party—actually it’s important for Wallis to pretend that he’s not—who are more priestly than prophetic in their witness for peace and justice.” That’s not quite right. My point—and I wouldn’t characterize it as grumpy, but that’s Silk’s prerogative—is that a network of political i…

Prominent Russian Orthodox Church Rejects Pro-Putin Patriarch Kirill, Raising Tensions Within Orthodox World

By Katherine Kelaidis

…be abandoning attempts to appease Moscow by offering up Russian-tradition parishes in Western Europe. This proposal will be placed before the entire St. Nicholas community at a special General Parish meeting on March 26th. Until then, in the middle of Lent, St. Nicholas will not hold services due to safety concerns. This very troubling situation should raise alarm bells far beyond Amsterdam. While church and state still remain officially separate…

Predicting the Future of Religion: A Thought Experiment

By Ed Simon

…r upswing evangelicals and Pentecostals will hold strong or increase their numbers. Our historian looking back on the twenty-first century may indeed lament the collapse of mainstream Protestantism in the United States, which at one time undergirded so much of American identity. She may lament that the country now seems split between an irreligious half and an evangelical one. What about the Roman Catholic Church in the United States? In many ways…

A Comedy Writer Confronts ‘Mind-Shredding Evil’ in Uganda

By Frederick Clarkson

…e because he always knows exactly when the Ugandan Army is coming, in what numbers, and what kinds of weapons they are carrying. Indeed. The occasional skirmish not withstanding, Kony has apparently enjoyed high-level assistance in sustaining his lifestyle while evading Ugandan troops ostensibly tasked with stopping him. Back in 1996, according to a document reprinted by Bussmann, the Ugandan and Sudanese governments knew exactly where Catholic sc…

The No-Selfie Doctrine: A Theological New Year’s Resolution

By Richard Amesbury

In an interview in the current issue of The Paris Review, James Wood asks Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard if he has ever experienced religious ecstasy. “No,” Knausgaard replies, “but they say one of the main things about religious ecstasy is a feeling of selflessness—that you yourself disappear. I feel that when I read Dostoyevsky.” I am less familiar with religious ecstasy than I am with the dark night of the soul. As my own Grand Inquisi…

Challenging Both Homophobia in Islam and Populist Bogeyman of ‘The Homophobic Muslim’; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…e door, open to anyone. … One of the first inclusive mosques was set up in Paris in 2012by Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, a gay imam from Algeria who now lives in France with his male civil partner. He is working with Ms Ates to help set up inclusive mosques elsewhere, including in Britain. “Europe is the place where we can work on, what we consider to be, the reform of Islam,” he tells me during a visit to the new mosque in Berlin. “Because we have freed…

My Congregation Tried to Help a Syrian Family Settle in the US

By Thomas Warming

…tility, suspicion, even violence, as Muslims in many states have? Would my parishioners still want to befriend them, or would they be cowed or converted by the mean-spirited rhetoric that has been flying loose recently? It’s that last question that has me thinking that my faith doesn’t need protection, thank you very much. Something has shaken loose in the American psyche this week, a vein of paranoid xenophobia that for a long while has been infl…

Elizabeth Smart Kidnapper Guilty, But Not Insane

By Joanna Brooks

…th delusional thinking. Smart, who returned from LDS missionary service in Paris for the trial, provided extensive, detailed testimony of her harrowing nine-month, multi-state captivity, proving her own resilience and helping by her example to terminate a view once held in conservative quarters of Mormondom that death was preferable to loss of one’s virginity. What is striking for me is the line drawn by prosecutors between delusional and non-delu…

Sanctuary and the Second Amendment: Do Guns Deserve Special Protection?

By Rosalind C. Hughes

…can remain safe from the claims of the deceased’s family upon their blood (Numbers 35:9-34). This sanctuary is limited to manslaughter, not murder, and it’s not to be exchanged for a financial ransom. It’s an interrupter, not an excuser, of bloody violence, “for blood pollutes the land” (Numbers 35:33). In early Christendom, the designation of churches as places of sanctuary was enshrined in Roman law, and the practice of religious sanctuary conti…