Search for "cheap airline tickets fll-ord phone number 1-800-299-7264"

New Poll Reveals Jews May Be Open to Change in Israel Policy

By Benjamin Weiner

…, has been best described by observers as “enigmatic”? How well will these numbers hold up if Israel’s “most favored nation” status is truly challenged by an American administration? Despite some American Jewish alienation from Israeli policy, backing for a bold new direction in the peace process is not entirely solid, a fact reflected in the same survey. 40% of respondents continue to support West Bank settlements, which, no matter how J Street c…

Forget Right or Wrong

By Elizabeth Drescher

…researchers share the unsurprising finding that “young adults engage in a number of religious practices less often than do older Americans.” What they may mean to say is traditional religious practices: weekly attendance at religious services, weekly scripture reading, daily prayer, and weekly meditation. (My guess is as good as yours on the greater expected frequency of prayer in the survey.) The Pew survey design is problematic—and this is wher…

Can Mormon Glenn Beck Unite the Christian Right?

By Kathryn Joyce

…ched at the end of this summer, Kreeft’s larger point has resonated with a number of religious leaders. Echoing Pope John Paul II’s prediction that third millennium could be marked by a unified Christianity, Kreeft predicted: “The age of religious wars is ending; the age of religious war is beginning: A war of all religions against none.” Ultimately, the WCF doesn’t draw the numbers of other global alliances like the World Social Forum. In 2007, f…

Why We Must Reclaim “Religious Freedom” from Christian Conservatives

By Bill Berkowitz

…reciated aspect of the wider trend is something called “religification.” A number of Christian right legal agencies have produced manuals for churches and related institutions, to rewrite such things as job descriptions to extend the legal definition of “ministry” in order to seek exemption from labor standards and civil rights laws, and to inoculate themselves against discrimination lawsuits. Much of this is based on the 2012 U.S. Supreme Court r…

For Buddhism, Science is Not a Killer of Religion

By Paul Wallace

…e hinterlands of Christianity, just a short distance away from Buddhism’s border. I’m a Christian all right, but I can see Buddhaland from my house. It is my proximity to Buddhism that allows me to reconcile science and Christianity in a way that may seem contradictory to reason. Living near that border allows a Christian to be wide open to science and shows that Christianity too can absorb and incorporate modern science into itself with plenty of…

A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

By Brent Hege

…While there are certainly some in the ELCA who continue to oppose women’s ordination, those numbers are small and grow smaller with each passing year. The same, I suspect, will be the case for the issue of gay and lesbian ordination forty years from now. Ironically, these two issues are closely related and contribute to the perceived need for a new Lutheran church body in North America. The ELCA is the only major Lutheran body in the United State…

A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

By Gary Jansen

…that happened over a twelve month period in my family’s life (as well as a number of flashbacks from when I was a young boy). In addition, there were a number of things I didn’t get the chance to explore for a very practical reason: I had a deadline. Working in publishing I’m very conscious about how important deadlines are. Writers need to make those deadlines and because I worked in the industry I wanted to be respectful about that. There were a…

The Episcopal Church ‘Takes a Flying Leap’ into Controversies Old and New

By Elizabeth Drescher

…the Roman Catholic Church on grounds that only baptism and eucharist were “ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel”) is a potentially huge deal, marking as it could a fundamental deviation from a normative Protestant theology. Such a move would likely have the ironic effect of scrambling alliances among Episcopal progressives and traditionalists, as many in both camps would describe themselves as “conservative” regarding the biblical and theolog…

Trump’s Pathological Devotion to Border Walls Isn’t Political, It’s Theological

By Alana Massey

…ship,’ and then he contends that we don’t have a country if we don’t have borders. But we do have borders. We just don’t have enormous, vulgar structures thousands of miles long devoted to them. The chronicle of his rhetoric on borders reveals a more sinister threat to the country and to the world: his pathological devotion to borders is not political but profoundly theological. Appealing to any ethical framework or set of principles as if they mi…

ABC’s Hit Sitcom Black-ish Does God, Pushes Theological Respectability

By Anthony B. Pinn

…e episode is marked by affirmation of problematic assumptions limiting the number of those who qualify as “black” by restricting what constitutes an acceptable relationship to dominant religious claims. For example, Dre wrestles with the origins of his daughter’s turn away from God, and concludes, based on a survey of his co-workers, that whites don’t believe and African Americans do. The implication is sure: belief in God is part of the cultural…