Search for "cheap flights airline tickets deals phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Something So Broken: What’s Frightening About Beasts of the Southern Wild

By Michael Pasquier

…htub and its inhabitants. Correspondingly, Zeitlin believes that “religion deals with these big questions, and it gives you an answer, and makes people feel all right about dying.” He sees Beasts as a kind of folktale that “address[es] incredibly key issues about how you should live and what the right thing to do is, which is really what I’m the most interested in—like the questions that religion takes on.” And for someone who doesn’t consider him…

A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

By Gary Jansen

…mber 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 number of frightening episodes that my wife experienced that I didn’t have t…

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…

Living Between Worlds: Muslim, American, Five Percenter

By Hussein Rashid

…st/producer affiliated with the Wu-Tang Clan. It seems appropriate. Knight deals with the ciphers, the hidden knowledge the Five Percent trade in. But this is also a knowledge that is extremely public via cultural production; it’s available, yet so many people miss it. This metaphor of unrealized wisdom is a wonderful opening for the book. Knight continues, mixing academic musings with popular culture, and quoting Ebrahim Moosa on the stigma of as…

Greek Abbot Arrested for Role in Financial Scandal

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…andal started two years ago, when the revelation of some very sketchy land deals brokered by this same monastery rocked the Greek government. These business-savvy monks had traded some relatively worthless land by a lake in north-central Greece; land that had been ceded to them by a Byzantine emperor centuries before for extensive real estate holdings in Athens, costing the Greek government (and the taxpayers) an estimated $130 million or more. It…

New Spencer Book Denies Existence of Muhammad

By Hussein Rashid

…eems like an odd claim, since there’s a whole academic sub-speciality that deals with non-Muslim accounts of the early Muslim period. Perhaps one of the most important of these works is written by St. John of Damascus, who writes about how his family served the Muslim empire from within 20 years of Muhammad’s death. He uses the term “Ishmaelites” as opposed to “Muslim,” so perhaps that is Spencer’s technically correct claim, but St. John is clearl…

Religious Affiliation, ‘Mankind’: India’s Anti-Corruption Activist Leads Second Freedom Struggle

By April L. Bogle

…good move. When I got to the lobby another something told me to dig out my phone and check it for messages. Sure enough, I had one from an unfamiliar number. A woman’s voice said Bedi was still sleeping, exhausted from the previous day’s overseas flight, and needed to reschedule our interview for that afternoon. I called the number back, convinced the opportunity was lost. “I’m here at the hotel now, but I’m booked solid this afternoon—” “Hold on,…

Penn Jillette’s Signs You May Already Be an Atheist

By Steve A. Wiggins

…rust I have in the TSA before, Jillette’s rant in “Penn’s Bacon and a Kiss Airline” was like finding a long-lost brother; another guy who feels it is criminal to be viewed naked by strangers—involuntarily—is a true freedom fighter. This is a comedian with a conscience. He may come down on the wrong side of many traditional issues (global warming and sexual mores, e.g.), but he is keenly aware that too many people suffer. Theodicy in motion. In the…

What the Lost Finale is Really About

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…soul) damned.” To be lost is not merely a geographic problem for marooned airline passengers, or for men unwilling to stop and ask for directions—it’s a spiritual and moral condition. These days a google search turns up over 500,000,000 hits (that’s half a billion); not too surprising for a basic and often-used term. Similar numerical results come from google searches on terms like “run” and “hide.” Meanwhile, “found” yields over 1.3 trillion hit…

The Religious Implications of Nudity

By Steve A. Wiggins

…ance-enhancing drugs. The sense of freedom and fun (and free food, even if airline food) was exhilarating. The airport has now become a place of horror. Do they have full-body scanners? I wonder as I’m herded into a long, bovine line. Abattoir or boudoir? Why is this bothering me so much? Don’t Touch Me There Even cursory reflection reveals my embodiment issues are buried deep in my religious upbringing. I was a teenage fundamentalist. That remark…