Search for "airline tickets cheap last minute phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Alabama Senate Considers Giving Church Its Own Police Force; Irony Reportedly Dead

By Daniel Schultz

…. Christian! Enter to win a $50 Amazon gift card! Click HERE to take our 2-minute reader survey. If you’re keeping score at home, the story so far is that the Alabama Legislature is trying to allow an individual megachurch to establish its own police force. It was blocked once by a governor who has since been brought down by one of the largest—and weirdest—sex-and-corruption scandals the U.S. has seen in a long time. The bill will almost certainly…

Humiliating “Kim Davis Bill” To “Protect” Anti-LGBT County Clerks Passes Texas Senate

By Sunnivie Brydum

…an old book. Enter to win a $50 Amazon gift card! Click HERE to take our 2-minute reader survey. Sure, the procedural details of the bill could just be considered housekeeping, but simply reading the protocol for who can issue a license if those elected to do so refuse is daunting. If a county clerk, their deputy clerks, and a judge all refuse to sign and issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple, the bill allows the clerk to appoint someone—w…

Douthat’s Wager: Go to Church, Even If You Don’t Believe

By Jonathan Malesic

…he faithful. Enter to win a $50 Amazon gift card! Click HERE to take our 2-minute reader survey. The argument Douthat makes is similar to one made by another conservative Catholic, the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, more than 350 years ago. The argument known as Pascal’s Wager is the idea that it’s better to believe in God than not, because even if the odds in favor of God’s existence are pretty remote, the cost of belief is r…

The Problem with Moral Nuance on Abortion for Democrats

By Patricia Miller

…s horrible.” Enter to win a $50 Amazon gift card! Click HERE to take our 2-minute reader survey. Groome distills Clinton’s entire history of discussing reproductive rights in a nuanced and complex manner to her obviously angry response to Donald Trump’s contention in the third presidential debate that abortion was basically viable fetuses being ripped from their mother’s wombs days before birth. “I strongly support Roe v. Wade,” she said. Was it t…

Is The Religious Left Emerging as a Political Force? No.

By Daniel Schultz

…lling the same story about this Religious Left that’s going to be here any minute now! for a very long time. Hell, I’ve even been a part of some of those efforts. And yet the movement never does arrive. It never arrives because the left (or at least the Democratic party) is too diverse and its priorities too different for anything like a mirror-image of the Religious Right to coalesce. Also, nobody on the left wants anything like the obnoxious aut…

International Protest of Anti-Gay Persecution in Chechnya Grows; more in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…d conflict.” Enter to win a $50 Amazon gift card! Click HERE to take our 2-minute reader survey. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, reportedly told Putin at a meeting last week that the reports are untrue. Elena Milashina, the reporter who exposed the allegations reported that the story has generated the biggest reaction they ever seen in years of covering Chechnya, and told the Washington Post that she wil…

Why Hulu’s “Handmaid’s Tale” May Be the Wrong Adaptation for Trump Era

By Christopher Douglas

…ly abortion. Enter to win a $50 Amazon gift card! Click HERE to take our 2-minute reader survey. Though evangelicals (unlike Catholics) initially exhibited a range of responses to Roe v. Wade, moderate evangelicals were activated and radicalized by Francis Schaeffer’s documentary How Should We Then Live in 1977. The 10-part series, directed by his son Frank, was a broad stroke history of the Christian West, concluding with the solemn threat posed…

It’s Complicated: When “None” Doesn’t Even Begin to Cover It

By Tucker FitzGerald

…most grieved voice of the night pushed back, “Why should I spend one more minute engaging a text that was used to traumatize and shame me? That’s still weaponized against my existence? I have no obligation to redeem the Bible.” It would make sense if that was everyone in the room’s stance. And yet it wasn’t. Some of us, maybe, are capable of this sort of clean divorce. But for many of us, it doesn’t seem that easy to walk away entirely. Once on N…

VIDEO: “First-Generation, Indian-American Muslim Kid” Makes Fun of the President. Onstage.

By Sunnivie Brydum

…’s made him a standout senior correspondent on The Daily Show. The full 25-minute speech is worth watching (see video at the bottom of this post), but for those short on time, we’ve excerpted the faith-based funnies Minhaj, who has written for RD, offered at the annual event fondly known as “nerd prom.” “Who would have thought, with everything going on in the country, that a Muslim would be standing on this stage — for the ninth year in a row, bab…

Maybe Instead of Solidarity, The Religious Left Should Try Being Indivisible

By Daniel Schultz

…a “deeper” politics rooted in a “fuller” understanding of the gospel. The number of scripture verses you can quote doesn’t matter a bit. Nor does how many more of those verses speak of social justice than sexual ethics. It does not matter how “prophetic” people are. Nor does it matter how spirituality informs one’s politics. We live in a secular and hyper-partisan age. These things motivate almost no one. In fact, even the very idea of a religiou…