Search for "cheap airline tickets from baltimore to charleston sc phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Who’s Accusing Who of Mormon-Baiting?

By Joanna Brooks

…t Coke and a dozen pink-frosted sugar cookies that there is no anti-Mormon phonebanking script in use by Catholics for Obama. Anywhere. Is anti-Mormonism real? Yes. But even if one poorly-trained rogue phonebanker veered off script into an anti-Mormon ad lib, it does not make for a concerted anti-Mormon effort. (Leave that to orthographically challenged “Heaven is Easy” ministry in Florida.) May cool heads prevail as the race heats up in its fina…

Whose House? Their House: Just Who Was Held Accountable for the 1/6 Insurrection is Telling

By Susannah Crockford

…ase because of the amount of planning for the Capitol attack that’s been discovered. So far, four of the Oath Keepers charged have pleaded guilty. Jon Schaffer was the first Oath Keeper to plead guilty. He was one of the first to push past doors into the Capitol building and was photographed wearing a tactical vest under a blue sweater and wielding bear spray. He pleaded guilty to two felonies: obstruction of an official proceeding and entering/re…

The End of Jewish Education As We Know It?

By Benjamin Weiner

…unregulated (and fairly uninspiring) patchwork of congregational religious schools. Day schools—full-time programs offering secular education along with religious instruction—came on the scene for those more serious about their Jewish learning. The BJE became a service organization, focusing more on curricular development and teacher support than authoritative oversight. The transformation was not purely dictated by circumstances. CJP, the holder…

‘Biblical’ Disaster in Haiti: Pat Robertson and the Curse of Unyielding Ignorance

By Matt Recla

…es including African gold and diamond mines, the Kalo-Vita vitamin pyramid scheme, the Bank of Scotland, the Family Channel, and the Ice Capades, as well as Age-Defying shakes, antioxidants, and protein pancakes. So is Pat guilty of not practicing what he preaches? Anyone who tunes in to more than a minute of The 700 Club can figure out pretty quickly that Pat’s application of the Greatest Commandment does not extend to those godless heathen Democ…

As a Queer Catholic Woman I Had High Hopes Before the 2023 Catholic Synod on Synodality

By Emma Cieslik

…or in 2023 that “people with homosexual tendencies are children of God,” a number of LGBTQ Catholics and advocates, myself included, got excited for a day or two—maybe even called our parents (if the Church hasn’t driven a wedge between them and us). But then the news cycle passes and, with each expression of anti-LGBTQ Catholic doctrine on diocesan and global levels, these small victories are tarnished with sadness and frustration. This is not to…

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

…would win if parliamentarians were freed by party leaders to vote their conscience. Olympics Postscript: Team LGBT beats every country that criminalizes gays Outsports reports, “The publicly out gay, lesbian and bisexual Olympic athletes in Rio outperformed expectations, with 25 of the 53 publicly out athletes winning medals.” Together they accounted for 14 medals (accounting for team sports such as the four out women played on the US basketball t…

Pope Invites his Flock to Join Facebook: Is the Digital Reformation Here?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…th each other and the text, have the opportunity to reshape the meaning of Scripture itself, and with that the commonly held understanding of the faith. As Palmer insists in The Courage to Teach, “Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts.” This very well could mean that the Bible Christians thought was…

Racial Justice Will Be Top Priority for New Prez of the United Church of Christ

By Frederick Clarkson

…come/offerings to minority communities, as a way of engendering a deeper discussion about reparations, When closing a church, voting to gift its remaining assets or property to a minority owned 501(c)3 Teaching members to confront overt racism when they see it Choosing vendors from minority-owned businesses Creating scholarships for minority students Asking the United Church of Christ to engage in this new sacred conversation is a way of being con…

The Passion of Katniss: How the Hunger Games Confronts the Trauma of Violence

By Michael Schulson

…the New York Times Magazine in a rare interview, “I don’t write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.” The idea for the series came to Collins while she was watching TV. On one channel, there was a reality TV show. On the other, there was footage from the Iraq War. Ergo, the basic premise, which is a kind of Theseus-and-the-Minotaur/“Survivor”/Gladiator mashup: a reality TV show, in a dystopian future, where children kill each oth…

For Clergy Who Ministered Through the AIDS Crisis Covid is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different

By Lynne Gerber

…fferent forms. In the early years, the isolation of people with AIDS was visceral. Many were socially—and sometimes medically—shunned. The pastoral challenge was to make congregations spaces where people with AIDS were seen, welcomed, touched, and included. Nixon remembered how MCC San Francisco shaped ritual around the experience of AIDS. “[W]hether it’s the men coming with their IV poles coming to church [or] laying on the pews, their bodies wer…