Search for "best site for airline tickets cheap phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Suicide Bombers and the Prozac God: A Review of Dying for Heaven

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…y pleasure, the unrecognized pathology that motivates suicide bombers. The best qualities of religion, according to Glucklich—trust in a life beyond this one, invocation of a source greater than human creativity or beneficence, for instance—are also its most dangerous. While it may be easy to decode the thesis from a mere glance at the book’s title and subtitle, it’s not quite so easy to accept the premise. Dying for Heaven, released today, is at…

Jewish Past/Israeli Future: A Review of The Invention of the Jewish People

By Shalom Goldman

…where it was published soon after it appeared in Israel, the book became a bestseller. Sand was given the Prix Aujourd’hui—a prestigious literary prize awarded to the best nonfiction book of the year. As French history is Sand’s field, and he is thoroughly at home in French language and culture, his television and radio appearances were quite successful. But the French Jewish establishment was quite critical of the book. From Brooklyn to Jerusalem…

Christianity Today counsels “patience” on Uganda’s anti-gay law

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…not counseling “patience as Ugandan leaders sort out among themselves the best way to preserve their culture’s” religious mores. No, they would be trying to quash or change this pending law. How are their current efforts to change laws in other countries that discriminate against Christians any less racist or imperialist than gays and lesbians working to save the lives of other gays and lesbians in another country? In Kazakhstan, for instance, in…

Do Not Arrest the Pope: New Atheists’ Call for the Pope’s Arrest Isn’t Likely to Produce Justice

By Eric Reitan

…gation, the truth is that neither of these things is likely to happen. The best we can hope for is that more praiseworthy impulses within the Church will prevail—impulses to treat this crisis as a wake-up call, as a call to seriously introspect about the reasons why child sexual abuse is so rampant and the cover-ups so pervasive. We can hope that church leaders will begin to more seriously reflect on the dangers of caring more about the Church’s r…

Can Atheists Simply Ignore Theology?

By Eric Reitan

…at we have to “try on” alternative interpretations to see which offers the best fit with the whole of human experience—not merely with what we experience through our senses, but also with the broader and ultimately more important dimensions of our lived experience, including our moral and aesthetic experience and our sense of the numinous. Is a naturalistic worldview, one which explains away these latter features of our lives (or at least the last…

Papal Profanity: The Vatican’s Pagan Museum

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…central to the work of museums though, I think they are overdetermined as sites of cultural conflict (as well as continued cultural production). Identity is what we argue about most these days. And it is striking how ancient stones and ancient bones have become singular points of contention in our culture wars. The point is that Greek statues at the Getty Museum, just to take one recent and notorious example, are no longer viewed as either idols…

Transforming America’s Israel Lobby

By Dan Fleshler

…nything Al Jazeera decides to transform into yet another symbol of Zionist bestiality, eventually we will hear evidence that Palestinian propagandists and their media allies have distorted the truth. When Israel assaulted the West Bank village of Jenin during the second intifada, at first the international media alleged that hundreds of innocent Palestinians had been massacred, and that bulldozers had crushed houses and destroyed property for no d…

Indonesia Hears Islamist Arguments For LGBT Criminalization; Zambian Churches Oppose Condom Distribution in Prisons; Lithuanian Conservative Manifesto Calls LGBTs Enemies of Freedom; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…lves to be in a same-sex marriage,” reports Nicholas Hellen, “Doubling the number threatens the fragile truce on an issue that has divided the church since same-sex marriages were allowed in England and Wales in March 2014.” Iraq: Interview with Kurdish human rights activist Ayaz Shalal, a human rights activist from the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, was interviewed by the Washington Blade during a visit to the U.S. this month. Shalal said he ex…

‘The Quiet Damage’ Details the Heartbreaking Effect of QAnon on Five American Families — But Critical Questions Linger

By Susannah Crockford

…f this book. It’s based on “hundreds of hours” of interviews in person, by phone, and online over three years. The pacing is fine, and by chapter 10 it becomes truly heartbreaking. Reading about people ruining their lives and the lives of their loved ones, over and again, is not a light read. In that sense it resembles an addiction memoir. This resemblance is made explicit in the afterword in which Cook argues that underneath the disinformation cr…

Intensive Care: Preachers’ Daughters Episode Five Recap

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ll use the term “mix tape”?) While she’s out and completely unreachable by phone, her dad, Ken, goes into the hospital with breathing difficulties and is admitted to intensive care. Taylor finally gets the message, is stricken with remorse and concern, prays for her dad’s healing, and resolves to be more responsible. My Dinner with Frankie: Mark and Cheryl Perry invited their teenage daughter Olivia’s friend Frankie over for dinner. Since Olivia h…