Search for "cheap tickets china airlines phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Is Monsanto Satan? The Pleasure and Problem of Conspiracy Theory

By Alan Levinovitz

…of Satan’s minions. It all started with MSG. While I was living abroad in China, I found that many expatriates insisted they were highly sensitive to MSG, yet multiple double-blind, placebo-controlled trials had led allergists to conclude MSG sensitivity is largely psychosomatic. In itself, this wasn’t surprising: the mind is well-known for having powerful positive (placebo) and negative (nocebo) effects on health. What surprised me was the dogma…

Win For ‘Natural Family’ Crowd at UN Human Rights Council…

By Peter Montgomery

…ng liberal social mores.” It was backed by 29 countries, including Russia, China and many members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, such as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. America, South Africa, South Korea and 11 European countries (including Britain, France and Germany) voted against, on grounds that it put too much emphasis on traditional family structures. South Africa unsuccessfully tried to insert language that took account o…

The Risk of Teaching Theology in a Public University: A Response

By Martin Kavka

…mmunity. The theologian does not know the meaning of tact. The bull in the china shop is her patron saint. Her scholarly discipline, theology, is hotter than Burning Man and louder than her ex-boyfriend’s madras shorts. Hence the resistance from the lovers of the multicultural public, who fear the incursion of such bad passion into the public university. In releasing it from private ownership, Sheehan thinks that the public university can cool it…

GOP Candidate: Obama is Taking Your Freedom to Find the Lord

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…e” to be Christian. In our modern day, Christians even thrive in Communist China where they can actually be persecuted for being Christians. So, his argument is ridiculous on its face—no one can take away a “choice” for Christ. What I find great about America is that we will always have the opportunity to choose whatever religion we wish to follow—since such a decision is between you and your god or gods. No one can stop you from making that choic…

Cafeteria Christianity in the Age of Social Media: What’s Old Is New Again

By Kate Blanchard

…ng battle to define “true” Christianity. It didn’t have to be this way. In China, for example, most folks have no problem mixing and matching three or more religious traditions, and the idea of a unified Hinduism was more or less invented in the modern era. But most traditions have at least some who take a my-way-or-the-highway approach and have particular shibboleths upon which no compromise is possible. (What would mainstream religion coverage l…

Are We Living Through World War III?

By Haroon Moghul

…that this was primarily, or exclusively, politically-motivated violence. A number of commentators seem to believe Mateen was struggling with his own sexuality. But Cohen does not hesitate to assign Mateen to larger, world-historical forces: Islam is in epochal crisis. Its Sunni and Shiite branches are mired in violent confrontation. Its adjustment to the modern world has proved faltering and agonized enough to produce a metastasizing strain of vio…

What Penis Theft Tells Us About Belief, Culture, and Our Brains

By Vlad Chituc

…e disease in a Chinese school. In a little village called Fuhu in southern China, they call it suo yang or suk yang, depending on the language. One of the students was playing Ping-Pong and he felt his penis shrinking. He began to panic and went home to tell his parents. His mother held on to his penis while the dad called the local healer. She was an 80-year-old woman, and she remembered other panics. She believed it was caused by an evil wind th…

Free Will, Fate and FiveThirtyEight: The Theology of Election Polls

By Alan Levinovitz and Michael Schulson

…hmic-uncanny—that sense that there’s an actual truth out there, encoded in numbers and data trails, that few of us can see or understand, and that contains a realer picture of our lives than even we know. And those select people who can tap that hidden reality have a special aura of power. AL: Yes! Although for some reason I have no problem with people who tap into the hidden reality of physics to make magical machines like the one I’m typing on….

From Organized Religion to Organizing Religion: Brian D. McLaren Wants Christians to Be Better

By Peter Laarman

…’m reminded of something that a friend who consults with the government of China was told by a Communist official: “We know that our current economic system isn’t working. We know we need a new one. Whatever it is, it will still be called communism because our constitution requires it to be so named.” I don’t know what a just, generous, and sustainable economic system should be called, nor do I know how to get from where we are to where we should…

American Horror Story: Hotel and Monotheism’s Dirty Little Secrets

By W. Scott Poole

…Mucalinda sheltered Gautama during his awakening under the bodhi tree. In China, dragons became, not beasts to be slain, but embodiments of Tian/T’ien, the very balance that brought cosmic harmony to the universe. Such concepts are mostly unknown to Western European and West Asian monotheisms. Monotheism exhibits a peculiar talent for creating monsters of moral degeneracy, horrors of perversity. The idea of one God creates irresolvable tensions,…