Search for "cheap airline tickets from peoria il phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Obama to Cave on Bush Tax Cuts: Letter to the Washingtonians, Chapter 1

By Daniel Schultz

…ious leaders and activists eager for more compromise. You have preached civility while media leaders suborned violence to advance their partisan positions, drooled over the phantom middle, begging and pleading and whining for peaceable politics while, on count after count, our irrational, uncompromising, hateful, and corrupt (but smiling) leaders ground the people down. You have ignored or failed to understand how our political system is designed…

Much-Married Newt Gingrich Converts to Catholicism

By Bill Berkowitz

…untry that wants to impose its will on the rest of us” — as he told Fox’s Bill O’Reilly shortly after the passage of California’s anti-same-sex marriage constitutional amendment— or claiming that President Barack Obama was paving the road toward a new power-grabbing dictatorship, or feigning outrage that Obama would be invited to speak at the commencement ceremonies at Notre Dame University, it is apparent that Gingrich hasn’t gotten the kinder, g…

Conservative Christian Teenagers Prepare for Politics

By Robert Kunzman

…re’s an inevitable tension between creating this powerful group identity while still preserving room for ideological diversity, or at least the room to question dogma and consider alternative perspectives. This is not to say that Nancy Pelosi should be made to feel at home, or that GenJ leadership shouldn’t advocate certain policy positions or political candidates. But if the tenor and content are so one-sided that participants would have a hard t…

Gay, Christian, Pagan, Artist: How Matt Morris Defies the Borders of Spiritual Identity

By Jesse James DeConto

…akerism is its emphasis on silence as a form of worship. I tell you what, silence and stillness sounds pretty good right about now. You once wrote that Druidic studies called you “to look at the world as an enchanted, alive, vibrant and magical place.” Does Jesus make that same call on you? Sometimes that’s more difficult to see in a Christian context because of the way that Christians think about God as Creator. There is this reaction to animism,…

Sometimes You Can’t Say a Word

By Jonathan L. Walton

…me a reality and my racially tempered optimism was given reason to momentarily rejoice, I could barely speak. My phone rang repeatedly and text messages were rapidly received and transmitted. But the ensuing conversations were little more than inchoate utterances often conveyed by cracked voices extending from tear-filled faces. Little thought was given to the momentous economic obstacles that this nation currently faces. Nobody mentioned Presiden…

Gen X, Gadgets, and God

By Elizabeth Drescher

…religious practices to the activities of daily life. But where blessing mobile phones, family pets, bicycles, and so on gets it wrong is in failing to invite the spiritual experience and creativity of believers back into the formal faith setting. Believers in the Digital Reformation are extensively shaped by a dialogical culture—a culture of near-constant conversation and collaboration. The digital adaptation of the ancient and medieval social rea…

Republicans in Favor of Reproductive Rights

By Katie Toth

…issues around abortion had not drastically changed from previous years. Just over half of Americans think abortion should be “legal under certain” circumstances, only 2 percent more people than last year. Meanwhile, 25 percent of Americans (compared to 27 percent in 2011) said abortion should be legal in all circumstances, and 20 percent (22 percent in 2011) said the procedure should always be illegal. …

Good Mourning Modeled by Chaplains and Clergy at the Oakland Ghost Ship Fire

By Kaya Oakes

…hotographs through the fencing to create a makeshift shrine, because the building is still sealed off from the public. At the Lake Merritt vigil this past Monday, attendants were asked not to bring candles out of respect for those who had died in flames. Instead, they brought glow sticks and cell phones, and for several hours, the sky above the lake lit up, not in the orange, red and yellow of fire, but in eerie shades of blue. Oakland wore the co…

How Not to Rescue Muslim Women

By Shabana Mir

…? When she wraps her head in a veil and stands up for her Islamic prayer, will he throw up his hands at her inability to throw off Islamic slavery? When she says why thank you for your help, but I need my husband out of Guantanamo and my son out of your Musharraf’s jail, and then I’d like to open a Qur’an school for girls—what will he say then? When she says she’s got her own ways of effecting the revolution, and it doesn’t involve selling out bro…

The ‘Evolving’ Story of Teacher Who Burned Cross into Student’s Arm

By Lauri Lebo

…led suit in June. “But we were offended when Mr. Freshwater burned a cross onto the arm of our child. This was done in science class in December 2007, where an electric shock machine was used to burn our child.” Dennis sighs on the phone when she thinks back on the past two years. “It’s changed our lives,” she said. “But I think we just had to do what’s right for our son. He was wronged.”…