Search for "buy first class airline tickets cheap phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Healed of the Sin of Religion: At Church with Sara Miles

By Lisa Webster

…church that I have the least in common with—is that it is a meal you can’t buy. In the world, you can buy fifty different kinds of artisanal bread and fancy vintage wine if you have the money. Or you can’t, if you don’t have the money. But at this table nobody can buy the bread and wine. It’s just given away. And so that is how we run the food pantry. You can’t buy it, you can’t earn it, you can’t deserve it. You make the point of not making peopl…

How a Pioneer of Branding Invented Christian Fundamentalism

By Daniel Silliman

…. Throughout the 1890s amid growing populist discontent, groups of working class and lower middle class evangelical radicals were using beliefs and practices similar to Torrey’s to challenge the rising professional classes and in some cases the entire capitalist order. So, this message of Moody’s and Torrey’s that was supposed to bring social order starts to bring disorder. By 1901, everybody was bailing on Moody and they were losing their financi…

The Forgotten Struggle Over Gender and Bigotry in Christianity

By Stephen J. Patterson

…the church is the last truly segregated public space in America. How about class? Does Christianity have anything helpful to say about class? Perhaps. You might hear “blessed are the poor” on any given Sunday, but more likely you will hear “blessed are the poor in spirit.” The words of Jesus are assumed to be about your spiritual life, not your finances—unless, of course, you attend one of the larger, far more successful churches where the “prospe…

Invited by Allah

By Amina Wadud

…ccurred to me it would be a very easy to make hajj from there. I bought an airline ticket and was in contact with the family of one of my graduate school friends. They would pick me up from the airport and host me during my stay and the days of ritual. Nice plan. So I went to the embassy to get the visa and was denied because (as an American) I needed proof that I was Muslim. How do I prove I have been a practicing Muslim for a decade? I went to t…

An Open Letter to CEO Jeff Smisek On United Airlines’ Blasphemous Safety Video

By Austin Dacey

…ual recompense. In the video message that was played before my last United Airlines flight, you expressed your desire to greet each and every passenger; you invited us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. If I could greet you now, I would want to know: were you unaware of the monstrosity that was about to follow? There, rising above the hiss of the pressurized air, as the video monitors snapped to the image of an engorged sun bursting from be…

An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

By Haroon Moghul

…h buildings, starting right around the same time. Talk about luxury on the cheap; it’s hard to deny a feeling of similarity. (The tower is to the Burj as a certain toupee is to hair: might the Trump Tower inadvertently mimic an Islamic motif?) The regal twin palm trees in the foreground are the world’s tallest, at some 3,500 feet each. Recently a falling coconut crushed an entire apartment complex, punching a massive hole that has filled up with…

Gingrich Downplays Adelson Money, Stokes Fear of “Second Holocaust” at Florida Church

By Sarah Posner

…ughter Bella was hospitalized.) Organizers said they had distributed 1,800 tickets, and the pews in the church were nearly full, with several hundred, if not nearly a thousand people in attendance. Gingrich was the only candidate to appear; Staver, the “forum’s” moderator took pains to point out that they had invited the other candidates. Santorum and Ron Paul had commitments outside of Florida. Mitt Romney, the candidate Staver and other leaders…

Confessions of a Hater

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…asy, friendship began to take root. After that, he stayed more often after class, one day whipping out his phone to show me a photo of a white supremacist leader standing up in a convertible during what was obviously a white pride parade. The red-faced, fist waving man in the picture was flanked by two little girls sitting in the back seat, arms crossed with very pronounced frowns on their faces. “They don’t look all that happy,” I remarked to my…

Are School Districts Getting the Message on Government-Sponsored Prayer?

By Lauri Lebo

…aid the boy was being deprived of educational instruction during the Bible class and that the class violated the First Amendment. Shelly warned board members that the district could be forced to pay $100,000 to $800,000 when it inevitably lost. Board members voted 6-0 last week to immediately end the Bible class, drawing boos from a crowd of students, parents and community members who had shown up to speak in support of the program. In the Chattan…

Hookers for Jesus: Sex and Salvation on the Strip

By Nicole Greenfield

…ng Prostitution, Sex-Trafficking, Slavery Annie Lobért grew up in a middle class family on a tree-lined street in Minnesota. Her upbringing was strict, and she hated the rules that her mother and her father and the church imposed on her. “So naturally when I hit the age of a teenager,” she told Joy Behar in a television interview, “I just went wild.” Lobért did drugs and she slept around. She was insecure and felt unloved, so she started stripping…