Search for "cheap airline tickets from ny to cairo egypt phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Churches Can No Longer Hide the Truth: Daniel Dennett on the New Transparency

By Andrew Aghapour

…ches that are moving away from doctrine and more into allegiance and ceremony and letting people be more relaxed about what they actually believe. Now, how well this is going to work, I don’t know. I think there’s a place in the world for organizations that are bound together by tradition, by music and ceremony and texts that they treat as sort of mythic texts, and I think the religions that survive this period are going to deserve to survive. The…

Must We Burn Something to Get Attention?: 50 Years After the Catonsville Nine

By Jason C. Bivins

…“Redeem the times! The times are inexpressibly evil. Christians pay conscious, indeed religious tribute, to Caesar and Mars . . . And yet, and yet, the times are inexhaustibly good, solaced by the courage and hope of many.” Cynicism is understandable, and despair more so. But instead of siding with cheap, whitewashed nostalgia, let us note that certain moments in the past remind us of the future that may yet still be achieved….

Fear of a Catholic Ghetto

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ented from holding public office. In the mid-nineteenth century, while the number of Catholic hospitals was growing, the Know Nothing party organized around shared fears that Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany were overwhelming the country and acting against white Protestant interests. So the fear of a Catholic ghetto must be understood in light of a real history of Catholics being marginalized during the very time that their health car…

Changing the Jewish State and the State of Jews: J Street and the Future of Israel

By Mark LeVine

…rations. No Israeli government has ever considered Palestinians as having anything close to equal rights within the territory of Eretz Yisrael/Palestine, and none have condoned anyone, particularly from the Diaspora Jewish community, openly criticizing its policies and actions. What makes J Street a “unique problem” is that in order to be simultaneously “pro” Israel and Palestinian people have to fundamentally change the very nature of their Jewis…

In a Time of Irrational Fear and New Media: The Deadly ‘Dance Plague’ at 500

By Ed Simon

…nace Germans,” concluding that nothing ingested has been “found to induce anything resembling dancing mania.” Witnessing the Strasbourg pandemonium, and without better explanation, the German humanist Otto Brunfuls compared it to a variant of ancient Dionysian cults that would drunkenly rampage, remarking “What else is it but Korybantism … when, transported into delirium, they were led to dance in union without cease?” Anxieties of an uncertain er…

The Bible is a Good Book, But God Didn’t Write It

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…tes I’ve ever watched run for office and I would be embarrassed at almost any one of them being the president of the United States. If the Democrats had any sense they’d run against the Ebeneezer Scrooge Republican Party because they keep running around saying, “Bah, humbug,” and anybody that’s poor ought to stay poor because they probably deserve to be poor and we’ll tax them a little more to be sure they remain poor. I don’t know why they think…

Dylann Roof Was Wrong: The Race War Isn’t Coming, It’s Here

By Willie James Jennings

…l their strength until weakness of mind, body, idea, institution, and company are rubbed away through the heat generated by life forces exposed in conflict. We could associate many names, schools of thought, life philosophies, or corporate policies with this confession, but its origins are irrelevant at this point. What is crucial is its embodiment, because it is poison. Europeans coming to this country began drinking this poison as they joined th…

This is Not a Religion Column: Christian Candidate Quiz Bowl

By Jeff Sharlet

…story of right-wing defeat and liberalism ascendant doesn’t unravel like a cheap suit on a blue dog Dem voting more money for the war. “Fundamentalism” is bigger than Ted Haggard, bigger than Jerry Falwell, bigger than the president, who, if defectors from his regime are to be believed, has lost all but a sliver of his religion. It’s bigger and older and more enduring than the political coalition currently called the “Christian Right,” soon to be…

With Methodist LGBTQ Vote and GOP Support for Trump, White Protestantism Has Hit Bottom

By Peter Laarman

…ose reading of Scripture is cramped, at best. Seen in this context, it’s a cheap dodge for liberals within the UMC to blame churches and delegates from the Global South for the vote to retain (and even heighten) the denomination’s ban on all things queer. Yes, the UMC does have a much heavier Global South representation in its governance than any of the other “sisters”; fully 41% of the delegates in St. Louis represented churches outside of the Un…

Seeking Broad Appeal to US Christians, ‘God & Country: The Rise of Christian Nationalism’ Glosses Over Critical Context

By Chrissy Stroop

…a significant component of American evangelicalism for decades, and, as many have argued, there’s no sharp dividing line between complex social phenomena like religion, theology, culture, and politics. For example, when this distinction proliferated in the run up to the 2016 election, religion scholar Daniel Miller wrote here on RD, “Any analysis of the ‘Trump phenomenon’ in its relation to evangelicalism is off from the start if it begins with t…