Search for "800-299-7264 Copa Airlines Toll Free Number Flight Reservations"

Snake-Handlers, False Messiahs, and a Few Great Souls: 14 Who Died in 2014

By Daniel Silliman

…ican religious history, including There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America and Martin Luther King: An Inconvenient Hero, Harding taught at Illiff School of Theology in Denver, Colo. for more than 20 years. Nelson Bunker Hunt A Texas billionaire remembered mostly for his business exploits, Nelson Bunker Hunt bankrolled the religious right. He underwrote many Campus Crusade’s projects, including the 1967 “Berkley Blitz,”the $6 mil…

Reading Beinart and Lerner as Gaza Burns

By Ira Chernus

…he [imagined] danger through aggression and power.” As Beinart argues, the number of American Jews who act out of fantasied oppression is declining. But their political strength remains much greater than their numbers. Yet curiously Lerner, the professional psychologist, downplays this and the other psychological wellsprings of support for militant Zionism. Instead he focuses time and again on compassion for the very real historical sufferings of…

Violent, Genocidal Anti-Palestinian Rhetoric Moving to US?

By David Sheen

…adventures of the Israeli government, regardless of the Palestinian death toll. But they have at least paid lip-service to the sanctity of human life and expressed regret for the souls lost on both sides. As Israel’s latest assault on Gaza enters its fourth week, however, we are witnessing a significant rhetorical departure. Yet as reprehensible as remarks from American Jewish leaders have been, the dehumanizing discourse among political and reli…

World Congress of Families Draws Anti-LGBT Activists to Budapest; More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…fficials tell media to play down Taiwan marriage ruling According to Radio Free Asia, “China’s state propaganda machine has warned the country’s media not to ‘make a big deal’ of” Taiwan’s marriage equality ruling. The government of Hong Kong has appealed a ruling by the city’s high court that the city must provide spousal benefits to civil servants who married same-sex partners abroad. Alfred Chan, the South China morning post reported that the c…

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ramadan

By Haroon Moghul

…: Sudden boost in revenue at grocery stores anywhere Muslims live in large numbers. Hint: If you think buying food while you’re hungry can help the economy, grocery shopping in Ramadan could save the Eurozone and prevent a Grexit. Suhouri: Suhur: Meal you eat right before the fast begins. Houri: Shatteringly beautiful, apparently human but not actually human companion provided to you in paradise, assuming you make it there. You don’t like the fact…

Why are Nuns and Monks in the Streets? (Parts I & II)

By José Cabezón

…of learning is being strictly regulated. In reality, there is no religious freedom in Tibet.” It may seem strange to an outsider that the regulation of monastic institutions—for example, the control of the number of monks in monasteries—should be such an important issue for Tibetans. Let me try and explain why monks and nuns risk years of imprisonment, and indeed their own lives, to protest this and other governmental policies aimed at controlling…

In ‘God Hates Fags’ Case, Free Speech Trumps Free Exercise

By Julie Ingersoll

…his religion (as well as his privacy rights). The Phelps case relied on a free speech claim instead of freedom of religion, and they won. So as the Supreme Court sees the right to freely practice one’s religion as “constitutionally irrelevant,” religion has been reduced in popular rhetoric to the right of the dominant religion to be free of any challenges to its dominance: wishing someone “happy holidays” in thought to violate the religious freed…

The Lesser and the Greater Pilgrimage

By Amina Wadud

…exuberance. Sorta like skydiving tandem before following up my lessons for free-fall skydiving. That way I can focus on the details I am trying to learn now and be better prepared. As far as umrah, the lesser pilgrimage, goes; it stands to reason that people can visit the ka’abah any time of the year. And so it is. There are still the same ihram prescriptions. There are still certain rites that should be performed. But unless a journey to Makkah c…

Distant Churches and the Isolated Poor: Lessons from Katrina, Ten Years Later

By R. Drew Smith

…ded social resource scarcity for those most in need. What this large-scale flight of social resources left in its wake was not an urban demographic characterized by upward mobility but by severe poverty and social isolation. Between 1970 and 1990, the percentage of persons living in neighborhoods with a poverty rate of 40 percent or higher grew from 7.8 to 15.8 percent for blacks and from 7.0 to 9.5 percent for Hispanics, and by 2010 the proportio…

Refusing the Monsters on Maple Street: A First-Person Commentary from the Mass Hysteria at JFK

By Marion Grau

…John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, as I waited to board a flight back home to Oslo. I was there on Aug. 14, 2016, when, after years of the “War on Terror,” one of North America’s most important international airports seized up as panicked reports of “multiple active shooters”—later discredited as false—swept through the terminals, sending passengers, law-enforcement, and airline workers scrambling for cover and eventually onto the…