Search Results for:

cheap airline tickets from san luis obispo to san francisco phone number 1-800-299-7264

Can I Get Some Birth Control Pills With That Slushie?: Unpacking the Contraceptive Mandate Rollback

…usly espoused this idea that contraceptives are so widely available and so cheap that the mandate was unnecessary. He said “all you have to do is walk into a 7-Eleven or any shop on any street in America and have access to them.” Opponents of the mandate have consistently belittled the idea that contraceptives are a significant health care cost for women despite the fact that, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, birth control comprises betw…

Read More

The Moral Bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Asceticism

…is unethical, I wonder how he imagines those clothes in China are made so cheaply, and whether an industrial factory qualifies as a gauntlet. If Rhinehart washed his clothes himself, however, he would need a washing machine, which takes energy, and he couldn’t say he lived on a battery anymore. A commenter on Rhinehart’s post aptly called this brand of asceticism “consumption laundering”; because Rinehart doesn’t do the consumption himself, it do…

Read More

Buddhism And Politics in Myanmar: An Author Interview

…mese monk asked this American to talk with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi about vipassana (insight) meditation, as she had recently started to rediscover this part of her heritage. This was a time of incredible intellectual ferment for her—you can see it in some of her writings and speeches of the period—when she was attempting to weave together Buddhism, democracy, rights, etc. Hearing about these discussions fascinated me, and while the retreat was sort o…

Read More

News Flash: Buddhist-Majority Countries Just as Complicated as Muslim-Majority

…under not good, and the country’s most famous democratic personality, Ang San Suu Kyi, has been disturbingly quiet, preferring not to speak out; whatever her reasons may be, her silence is as they say deafening. In addition to the country’s long history of ethnic and sectarian conflict, the plight of its Muslim population continues to worsen, with evidence of human trafficking of Burmese Muslim refugees now surfacing. The violence threatens to sp…

Read More

Death Couture: Not For Halloween Only

…gh the agency of her narco-devotees. Local Religion, Globalization, and La Santa Muerte Although the origins of La Santa Muerte developed locally and unrelated to criminality, there is no doubt that the devotion is changing. Like language, symbols as objects of devotion are constantly in flux. Images that once helped to ease the fear of death have now come to embody that fear on both sides of the border. As savvy marketers, drug cartels have appro…

Read More

Evangelicals ‘Crossing the Tiber’ to Catholicism

…tholic Christianity as a factor in his conversion, but he also points to a number of other courses that he took at King’s that led him to the point of conversion. He says of the college’s curriculum that it is “not a ‘great books curriculum’ but it draws heavily on the liberal arts tradition.” He adds, “You can’t study the liberal arts without confronting the rich history of Catholicism.” Indeed The King’s College is a microcosm of the larger comm…

Read More

Trump’s Pathological Devotion to Border Walls Isn’t Political, It’s Theological

…in 250,000—some of whom are going to have problems, big problems—is just insane. We have to be insane. Terrible,” he said at a rally in Beaumont. It was noted that the 250,000 number was seemingly pulled from thin air, a ghastly specter of invasion at a scale larger than most of our cities. There were later comments about poisonous Skittles made by one of his idiotic children. *** Consider the travel ban clearly targeting Muslim-majority countries…

Read More

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

…he early afternoon, cameras in hand. It is not uncommon for tourists to outnumber monks in the debate courtyards during this time. This is obviously disruptive, making a spectacle out of a serious educational pursuit. Monastic response to the Chinese government policy of limiting monastic enrollments is at least in part the result of a clash between the secular, materialist, security-concerned worldview of the Chinese state, and the religious, tra…

Read More

A Startling Number Believe You Can Be Jewish Jesus Follower; Why It’s Not As Crazy As It Sounds

…that number seems staggeringly high. A full third? Once you delve into the numbers, though, 34% doesn’t seem quite so high. Really, Pew has asked an excellent question—a question that reveals the full tangle of ambiguities and inconsistencies that surround the topic of Jewish identity. First, some background: when the researchers at Pew set out to conduct this survey, they quickly ran into a problem that’s been under discussion for at least two th…

Read More

Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It

…tails ties to the Reichsbürger milieu. Experts attribute the stark rise in numbers to a heightened awareness and the agencies’ attempts to reduce the number of unreported cases. The conservative Minister of the interior of the previous Merkel administration, Horst Seehofer, had always refused to conduct a study of right-wing sentiments in the police and military, in spite of the warnings of social scientists who urged him to commission one. For ye…

Read More