Search for "cheap airline tickets for a child phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Texas Court Rules Against Polygamist Raid

By Diane Winston

…ahlia Lithwick, on Slate, compared the Texas takedown to goings-on at Guantanamo Bay. In both cases, government actors hurled themselves at a problem with the best of intentions. The prospect of averting just one more terror attack, or protecting just one more molested child, has a way of making all those technical details seem trivial. But both cases have been plagued by glaring errors of fact and identification: Names and ages and association we…

Prosperity Preacher Creflo Dollar Arrested for Allegedly Assaulting Daughter

By Anthea Butler

…, if Eddie Long can hang on to his pulpit after his many transgressions, I doubt if beating his daughter will be enough to make Creflo stay away from the dollars he needs to make every Sunday. …

Religion Round-Up: What’s Going on in Religion Around the World

By Diane Winston

…slim equals some 20.3 million people—a population almost as large as Saudi Arabia’s. (More to the point, as one of China’s ethnic minorities, Muslims are not bound to the one-child per family policy.) Notwithstanding the fervid prayers of some Olympic contestants, religion probably won’t be a major story during the Summer Games. But the Pew Forum’s findings are worth remembering: A growing number of urban, educated, 20-something Chinese men and wo…

Park51 and the Ground Liberals Are Forced to
Fight On

By Sarah Posner

This post has been updated. My friend Michael Tomasky has a characteristically insightful post about how liberals have framed the Park51 issue too much in terms of constitutional rights and without enough understanding or nuance of the sacred and the profane. “Contemporary liberalism,” he writes, “thinks far too often in terms of rights and speaks of those rights in a way that alienates a lot of regular people.” At the same time, though, he ackno…

Can Mormon Glenn Beck Unite the Christian Right?

By Kathryn Joyce

…nal “pro-family” conferences to transcend theological differences to unite against common enemies: feminism, homosexuality, liberal attitudes towards sexuality and reproductive rights, and the separation of church and state. The WCF followed the rise of a global conservative movement in response to international conferences in the 1990s, particularly concerning reproductive or women’s rights, which they feared could affect US law back home. At the…

A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

By Gary Jansen

…s room was dark except for a small night-light that cast a puddle of light against the wall. As I was in the room, I had a strange feeling that I was being watched. I turned around and saw nothing out of the ordinary. I wrote it off as just my imagination, but after I grabbed the socks and I turned to walk downstairs I felt something, the intensity of which I had never felt before. The only way I can describe it is as if someone had an electric gl…

Evangelicals ‘Crossing the Tiber’ to Catholicism

By Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

…ch, between the legend of my parents’ conversion (anything that happens in a child’s life before he is born is the stuff of legends) and the portrait of the Catholic Church as an oppressive institution that took all the fun out of being “saved,” I understood Catholicism as a religion that a person leaves when she becomes serious about her faith. And yet, Thomas Howard is only the tip of the iceberg of a hastening trend of evangelicals converting t…

White House Position
on Exemption from Contraception Coverage
“Not a Done Deal”?

By Sarah Posner

See update below. Jodi Jacobson reports at RHRealityCheck that the Obama administration feels it “owes” the bishops for helping to pass health care reform. The Bishops have pressed the White House to broaden the exemption for religious institutions under the Affordable Care Act, so they can decline to offer insurance that covers, free of co-pays, contraceptives for employees. The Bishops argue that such coverage violates their religious conscienc…

Gay Marriage Bill Totalitarian Says Head Bishop

By Peter Montgomery

…islature and elected governor of New York pass a law to end discrimination against same-sex couples, that would be equivalent to a totalitarian government deciding “who lives and who dies?” If so, Dolan is forfeiting his right to have his arguments taken seriously by legislators and anyone else. Dolan’s reference to “natural law” mirrors NOM’s use of “natural marriage” and the Manhattan Declaration’s invocation of “natural human reason” to buttres…

Where are the Clergy? A Report from Occupy DC

By Sarah Posner

…stuck in the 1960s in how they frame and address economic issues, yet have abandoned protest strategies in favor of the model of maintaining a Washington office whose purpose is to lobby members of Congress. Other religious activists are too focused on “events-oriented things” like staged arrests, “where they’ve pre-negotiated the thing, which is not to me civil disobedience.” At the same time, national religious political organizations “paternali…