Search Results for:

cheap airline tickets to john wayne airport phone number 1-800-299-7264

Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

…een working feverishly to finish their projects but had put off purchasing tickets were left out in the cold. It was a different scene in 1997 when I first came to Burning Man and only waited briefly at the entrance as a “Greeter” cast a cursory glance at my car. But the Greeters’ enthusiastic reception remained the same. These Greeters, a dusty naked couple, asked me to get out of my car and embraced me, shouting “Welcome Home!” I had crossed the…

Read More

What a Turn-of-the-Century Anti-Abortion and Contraception Crusader Reveals About GOP Efforts to Ban Abortion Pills by Mail

…items within their borders (as is already the case federally with lottery tickets). A Republican-controlled Congress could then impose a nationwide ban on the mailing of abortion pills or certain contraceptives. (Republican-controlled state legislatures have already demonstrated a willingness to enact questionable legislation for nothing more than its intimidation factor.) Which brings us back to Anthony Comstock. In 1878, the Supreme Court uphel…

Read More

What the Lost Finale is Really About

…and the fact that in the numerology of the show Jack is connected with the number 23. Likewise, the “black smoke” character (eventually avatared by John Locke) leaves us wondering about the ancient story of the Golden Bough in which the priest-king is ritually murdered by his successor. The Golden Bough story was taken up by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, which was the basis for Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Terry O’Quinn’s “John Locke” becomes M…

Read More

No God but Country: The Religion of John McCain Has Something Important to Tell Us

…tters very little to me (as a voter, as a thinker, and as a believer) that John McCain doesn’t articulate a deity familiar to any available denomination of Christianity (or Judaism or Hinduism or Islam). John McCain is, indisputably, a man of courage and intelligence. To suggest that he is not recognizably Baptist (nor ostensibly Episcopalian) is merely to demonstrate that our enterprise of discerning religion from political candidates misses, pre…

Read More

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

…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…

Read More

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

…serves on his national faith leaders team. Florida Family Action president John Stemberger endorsed Rick Santorum. That split was representative of the meeting of religious right leaders in Texas just before the South Carolina primary, which produced a contested “consensus” for Santorum, although many of the attendees were still in the Gingrich camp. Voters I spoke to at the event yesterday, though, either hadn’t heard about the meeting or were un…

Read More

The Lament of the Christian Disney Dad: What Evangelicals Really Hate About ‘Wokeness’ at Disney World

…ing roles can be quite literal. As Kristin Kobes Du Mez shows in Jesus and John Wayne, they’ve often adopted actual movie stars—not just John Wayne but also Mel Gibson and, of course, Ronald Reagan—as their models of righteousness. Or they remake history’s established heroes in their own image, as Eric Metaxas does in his much-criticized biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. More generally, though, evangelicals believe that they’re more deserving of a…

Read More

‘Anti-Romeo’ Vigilante Squads Target Men Suspected Of Being Gay; More in the Global LGBT Recap

…lectorate than it is with straight voters. LePen’s Party, which includes a number of openly gay officials, still pledges to roll back the marriage equality law in favor of civil unions. As AP notes, LePen is not the only nationalist leader who uses fear of radical Islamist violence to attract LGBT support: In the Netherlands, Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders said that his party, which is hostile to Muslims and wants to halt immigration, shou…

Read More

Rage Against the New Age Machine: Three Days at the Osho International Meditation Resort

…the last bits of mine were drained before I “lost” the group at the Mumbai airport. After the nearly day-long flight, we still had a four-hour bus ride ahead of us. When we finally found each other, boarded the bus and found boxed breakfasts of chicken salad sandwiches, I relaxed a bit. That was premature. The bus driver went in circles, clocking eight hours to travel 95 miles. Arriving at Osho, my only goal was sleep. But the registrar at the Wel…

Read More

Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

…e able to make on my own. A few days later, in the frenzy of the Kathmandu airport with scores of tourists trying to get out and battalions of aid workers trying to get in, we found each other and shared a taxi to an off-the-beaten-track hotel around the corner from where he was staying with friends not far from the Swayambhunath Temple famous for its historic sacred buildings and roving bands of ill-mannered monkeys. Pastor Gautham and Rekha Rai…

Read More