Search for "Spirit Airlines 1 800-299-7264 Manage My Booking"

God Grows Up: Robert Wright’s Evolution of God

By Robert Wright

…n on the Web. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? 1) That religion, at the time of its origin back in hunter-gatherer days, had anything to do with morality. Divine sanctions against stealing, lying, etc., aren’t much needed in a hunter-gatherer village, because it’s harder to get away with these things in the first place when you live with a very small number of people. 2) That ancient Israel was monotheistic from the ge…

Why David Sometimes Wins: What We Must Learn From Cesar Chavez

By Frederick Clarkson

…ppi in 1964; and when he returned to his native Bakersfield, California, in 1965 to see for the first time, the plight of Mexican-American farm workers through “Mississippi eyes.” He soon got involved with the farm workers’ movement and over the next 16 years served in a variety of positions, including organizing director and as a member of the board (1973-1981). Getting Out of Egypt Why David Sometime Wins opens with an eye-opening history of lar…

You Are More Than Your Brain: A Revolutionary Theory of Consciousness

By John Stoehr

…anist, the so-called “science wars” at the end of the 20th century ended in 1996. That’s when physicist Alan Sokal managed to publish an article in the journal Social Text that was in fact a collage of postmodern literary theory. It was essentially a hoax. Science won and has been winning since. Glaser wrote: “The humanities receded from battle, cowed by the reductive powers of scientific fundamentalism, embarrassed by the now unfashionable discur…

Transgender and Christian: Finding Identity

By Jori Lewis

…ould be no talk of drugs or passing or surgery. Here, they would be doing “spiritual surgery” to break down those negative walls of Jericho that have kept them from recognizing themselves as spiritual beings. On a sunny summer day she held court before a small audience, including me, of exactly five. The topic was less coherent, more episodic, and loosely about the importance of metaphysics. “We take from the Bible that God is neither male or fema…

Not that Kind of Fundamentalist Memoir

By Mandy Van Deven

…ere to rank Bauer’s fundamentalist upbringing on an extremity scale of 1 to 10, I’d likely score it smack dab in the middle. Her non-denominational church was certainly evangelical, putting forth the belief that one must sublimate one’s time, talents, and resources on a ubiquitous quest to, as Saint Paul instructed, die to self. Bauer’s childhood spiritual guides did their part to fill her with rapture anxiety by screening A Thief in the Night, an…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…ate and prepare him for entry into a new social and spiritual realm; in the 1600s and 1700s, these rituals created a buzz of fear and suspicion around the Masons, which only added to their popularity. Masonic lodges proliferated in America from the 1720s onward. They were a religious movement as well as a social networking sensation, a pre-electronic Facebook. At first they recruited only affluent gentlemen and professionals, then later a broader…

National Association of Evangelicals Supports Immigration Reform, But Elsewhere Discord Reigns

By Donna Schaper

…s to become “legal” because there’s no process for them to do so. There are 12 million undocumented immigrants here now. It is neither realistic nor humane to try to round them all up and deport them. Even if it cost only one thousand dollars each to detain and deport them, that price would be absurd—and it actually costs a whole lot more. And think of the human cost. What would happen to the children they left behind? Or the jobs they left behind…

The Gospel of Contradiction: An Interview with Mary Gordon

By Nathan Schneider

…hit? People went to fundamentalism and to very anti-intellectual forms of spirituality because that kind of scholarship wasn’t feeding their hunger. There has to be some way, I hoped, of using reason and our analytical skills while also dealing with resonance, mystery, paradox, and conundrum. Literature, it seems to me, is one way. Words like “beauty,” “love,” and “consolation” don’t really have a place in a scholarly diction, and those are terms…

Sex and the Chosen People: Be Fruitful and Multiply, Etc.

By Mandy Van Deven

…Worrying and Love Religion. From the decision to be an atheist when she was 13 years old to her ultimate, though somewhat reluctant, choice to become a rabbi, Ruttenberg’s story shows the ways religious practice is complicated yet valuable for its complexity. This month she will release a third, perhaps more controversial, book entitled The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism. Like Yentl’s Revenge, The Passionate Torah is an anthology. The book’s co…

The Abandoned Orphanage: Hillary Clinton’s Mother Teresa Moment

By Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce

…Clinton’s religious history, we studied her relationships with a number of spiritual mentors, including Tikkun’s Michael Lerner, who was soon replaced by “sacred psychologist” Jean Houston, who famously helped the First Lady get in touch with the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, after Mother Teresa died, Clinton invoked the spirit of the nun as her guiding light so religiously that one might be excused for wondering whether she meant it more tha…