Search for "cheap lan airlines december tickets phone number 1-800-299-7264"

High Ark: A Geologist on the True Meaning of Noah’s Flood

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…t, but Mount St. Helens did blow up! That’s why I spend so much time on Harlan Bretz in the book [a 1930s geologist who studied the landscape of eastern Washington state] who had such a hard time getting the scientific community to pay attention to his evidence for a catastrophic flood. But there’s a distinction to be made here between “large,” maybe even “regional” and “global.” Right, exactly. I’ve never understood how creationists are perfectly…

Vatican Instruction on Cremation Rankles Many, But Give it a Second Look

By Karen E. Park

…night dancing with, someone who I had spoken to just a week before on the phone, her laughter weakened but still familiar. When I thought about her ashes being scattered around Boston I felt a momentary panic. Where could I ever go to find her again? Last week, just in time for the Feast of All Soul’s Day, celebrated each year on November 2, the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released a new Instruction regarding the…

Is Herman Cain’s Long-Running Minstrel Show Finally at an End?

By Anthea Butler

…ney. But not without bumps in the road: prominent Southern Baptist Richard Land has cautioned Newt to be very apologetic about his past. Still, repentance would suffice. What Republican voters and the party can’t stomach is the arrogance of a black man who won’t repent. Cain’s lack of repentance and consistent lying exposes the fact that he isn’t a real card carrying member of the religious right. His black Baptist upbringing has taught him otherw…

Why It’s Heresy to Read the Bible Literally: An Interview with John Shelby Spong

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ntroversial. I don’t like being controversial. I get abused a lot in mail, phone calls and that sort of thing. I don’t enjoy that. But, if you are controversial in the public arena, the people who have given up on Christianity say, “My God, there must be something more to this story than I realized.” So, being controversial is my doorway to the generation of my own children. “The primary issue in the Christian church today is to get away from orig…

Why We Can’t Afford to “Wait And See” How Trump Dismantles LGBT Rights

By Sunnivie Brydum

…al Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana, FADA would provide carte-blanche cover for businesses, individuals, health care providers, and possibly even government officials to outright refuse service to LGBT people and certain women. What kind of “certain women,” you ask? The kind who dare to become pregnant without being married to the person who impregnated them. (The bill has no exemptions for those who became pregnant as a result of rape…

“Reason to Worry”: An Anti-Semitism Scholar Opens Up on Trump, Misogyny and the Future of Anti-Judaism

By Michael Schulson

…s amount to the equivalent of however many billion sightings. I think that number was inflated. But it doesn’t matter much. What’s the difference between ten billion views and, say, one billion views? It’s all bad. It’s just this question of magnitude. It’s a little bit like you’ve seen the tip of the iceberg, and someone tells “You know, 90% of it is underneath.” I had a similar experience when I was working on my first book, Communities of Viole…

Can You Make a Comedy About UFO Cult Mass Suicide?

By Joseph Laycock

…fined as a vagrant. So members always carried five dollars and money for a phone call. Benjamin Zeller, author of Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion, has also noted that Heaven’s Gate members engaged in a lot of self-deprecating humor because they were aware that mainstream society perceived them as crazy. This research led Jones to conclude that a comedy about Heaven’s Gate might not be as inappropriate as it sounds. “I could never make a come…

Romney Had No Clue as to Obama Ground Game

By Joanna Brooks

…n Ohio. And eavesdropped on an Obama canvasser. I mean, I spent 45 minutes phone-banking the parking garage of a lowly San Diego field office with four children under nine years old hopped up on Doritos and doing laps around my folding chair, and even under those suboptimal circumstances I could tell right away that Obama’s data was even better than it was in 2008 and that there was hardcore focus on the 18- to 29-year-old set. And, mind you, I’m…

Terror In South Carolina

By Sarah Posner

…ow what happened to Walter Scott is because a bystander filmed it with his phone. In making his plea, Pinckney invoked the biblical story of Doubting Thomas, the one of Jesus’s disciples who would not believe Jesus had risen from the dead until he saw him with his own eyes and touched his wounds with his own hands. “It was only when he was able to do that, he said, ‘I believe,’” Pinckney said of Thomas. Some people, said Pinckney, are like Thomas…

Where are the Clergy? A Report from Occupy DC

By Sarah Posner

…ide. Others emerging from the Starbucks across the street, talking on cell phones or carrying laptops. Conversations on the park’s benches. For a city accustomed to itinerant protesters, a population glued to mobile devices, as well as the homeless sleeping in the shadows of the halls of power, it quite possibly looked like any other day in the heart of the nation’s capital. That passersby appeared to ignore the protesters was appropriate: Occupy…