Search for "American Airlines 1800-299-7264 Manage Flight Booking"

#SorryNotSorry: What U.S. Christian Denominations Teach About Homosexuality

By Stephanie Russell-Kraft

…ed.” 83% of members believe homosexuality should be accepted by society. American Baptist Churches USA (Mainline Protestant) Members (as of 2009): 1,310,505 In 1992, the American Baptist Churches USA General Board affirmed a one-sentence resolution on homosexuality: “American Baptist Resolution on Homosexuality”: “We affirm that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” In 2005, the board added the same language to…

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…w tweaks, Buddhist practices of mindfulness meditation fit right into this American tradition. Since the 1970s, Americans have used quiet, awareness-based contemplative practices to calm and focus their minds. Much of this is thanks to Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an eight-week course. Kabat-Zinn studied mindfulness meditation under the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh, but he has emphasized the psychological a…

What Does it Mean to Call “God” a White Racist?

By Willie James Jennings

…hed perceived cultural impediments to their full assimilation into a white American identity. American Christians must take on the difficult work of understanding how whiteness has been woven like a cancer into their Christianity. It is the power of that whiteness to shape our social worlds—defining good and bad, beautiful and ugly, true and false—that is at heart the reason this wound will not heal. It is the reason why some people deny our grote…

AFA: Native Americans Lost their Land for Not Being Christians

By Daniel Schultz

…cture which in turn justifies and makes sense of the otherwise nonsensical American proposition. It all comes down to this: the American story that Fischer so vigorously defends never happened. That he continues to spout this stuff has less to do with God than with his need to stay on top of the heap. With the minority population continuing to surge in the US, look for voices like Fischer’s to get ever shriller—and ever less relevant to the beauti…

The Children of Bellow and Roth: New Book of Short Fiction Takes On the Male Jewish Experience

By Stephanie Russell-Kraft

…ely a theme in a lot of stories. That’s something that’s particular to the American Jewish experience for you? I don’t know if it’s American, but maybe it is, in terms of, I think, my expectations for [how] Jewish people behave. My experience of America is fairly limited. I know New York and I know L.A. I wouldn’t be able to discuss what the Jewish community in Nebraska feels like. But in my experience I’ve found we’re much more comfortable in our…

With Christian Schools At Risk In Israel, Crickets from American Christian Conservatives

By Sarah Posner

…situation “a ‘death sentence’ for Christian schools in Israel.” Given the American Christian right’s interest in religious freedom, particularly for Christians, and particularly in the Middle East, where Christians are enduring and fleeing persecution, one might expect a massive outcry over this. Just imagine the objections to unequal treatment, by any government, of any Christian organization. But when I reached out to three major conservative C…

Poets and Preachers: How Black Literature Blurs the Lines Between Sacred and Secular

By Josef Sorett

…ence in mind when writing? I wrote Spirit in the Dark both for scholars of American religion and for scholars of African American literature, as these are two of the academic fields in which I was trained. However, given the broader interest in black writers and literary movements (i.e. the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts movement), as well as in African American religion, I hope that the book finds a general academic audience (and perhaps even…

Female Deacons: Pope Francis Walks It Back, Women Clergy Weigh In

By Kaya Oakes

…those religions, with the first Orthodox female rabbi recently hired by an American synagogue, but the Mormon excommunication of Kate Kelly, an advocate for opening the Mormon priesthood for women, unfortunately mirrors a familiar pattern for American Catholic advocates of women’s ordination. In the most high-profile case, peace activist Father Roy Bourgeois was dismissed by his religious order in 2012 for participating in the ordination of a Roma…

The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism

By Lauren Sutton

…intellectual history. Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism Mark Stoll Oxford University Press (May 29, 2015) In Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism, Stoll, a professor at Texas Tech University, explores the religious roots of environmentalist concepts of nature. Doing so, he challenges the preconception that conservationism and religion are inherently hostile towar…

Indonesian Clerics Issue Anti-Gay Fatwa; Anti-Civil Union Peruvian Lawmaker Cites Hitler; Is Christianity more ‘un-African’ than Homosexuality?; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…raised more than $376m worldwide. The Guardian story reviews the influence American conservative evangelicals and groups like the American Center for Law and Justice s on anti-gay legislation in Uganda and elsewhere. Africa is by and large conservative, and many poor countries are susceptible to charity with a socially conservative agenda. It’s within this context that many US evangelical churches go to Africa to win the battles that are being los…