Search for "airline tickets to utah cheap phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Mormons Now Losing Billions to Affinity Fraud

By Joanna Brooks

…ct for authority over critical thinking and skepticism. A Mormon taste for the miraculous doesn’t hurt either. Fraud peddlers have been known to call down church membership lists and enlist returned missionaries fresh back from service and hungry for work. Their capital? Utah County, Utah, home to Brigham Young University, and the beating heart of the Book of Mormon belt. A friend from a northern Utah farmtown remembers that her dad always said: “…

LDS Church Issues New Statement on Immigration

By Joanna Brooks

…e a politically significant portion of the population, such as Arizona and Utah. Russell Pearce, the author of Arizona’s infamous SB 1070, is a member of the LDS Church. And last week in Utah, an anonymous group calling itself “Concerned Citizens of the United States” distributed a watchlist with the names, social security numbers, and other personal information of 1300 alleged undocumented immigrants. (Several state workers are now under investig…

LDS Church Praised for “Good Sense and Sanity” on Immigration Policy

By Joanna Brooks

…as on immigration? Here is the Church’s recent statement in support of the Utah Compact: As a worldwide church dealing with many complex issues across the globe, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints promotes broad, foundational principles that have worldwide application. The Church regards the declaration of the Utah Compact as a responsible approach to the urgent challenge of immigration reform. It is consistent with important principl…

Mitt Romney and the Ghost of Anti-Mormonism

By Joanna Brooks

…American population. The Republican primaries gave that small slice a megaphone: the artificial loudness of their voice makes people overestimate their number. That said, it will be interesting to see what happens now in the general election when you may begin to hear from another voice that is anxious not so much about Mormonism per se but about any candidate that is too religious. And if Mormonism is anything in the American mind, it is a group…

Yes, It Can Be Hard to Be an Atheist in America; Now We Have the Data

By Chrissy Stroop

…y to overcome judgement from religious family members.” American Atheists’ Utah Director Dan Ellis also recently commented, “When I came out as an atheist, I experienced discrimination from family members,” adding that he “lost friends—even ones who weren’t particularly religious.” Gill, herself a transgender lesbian, noted in our phone conversation that the Secular Survey’s questions about identity concealment were indeed meant to get at “a comin…

Mitt Romney’s Prosperity Gospel

By Peter Laarman

…I fervently wish that Mr. Obama would say a bit more about the problem of cheap grace. Reminding us that people who work very hard for very little are not the abusers of cheap grace, but that others in well-feathered nests who are preaching sacrifice might be in real trouble on the cheap grace front. Obama cannot and should not condemn those in the electorate who buy into Romney’s “there will be showers of blessing” message, but he probably does …

How Much Did Jesus Care About Sex?

By Peter Laarman

…cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap…We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale; we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition…Was there ever a more terrible and disastrous instance of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme that Rod Dreher can toss into his debate with Andrew Sullivan without…

Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry Charge Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street

By Jay Michaelson

…es ECI’s leadership – knows this to be the case. Which makes ECI’s video a cheap lie — yet another in a long litany of desperate efforts by the far right to convert the largely liberal American Jewish community to neo-conservatism, hawkish policies on Israel, and the belief that “Barack Hussein Obama” is a Muslim. That said, there actually are two interesting forms of antisemitism going on here. First is the antisemitism of ECI itself. To tug at…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…ans would be attracted to, appreciate and consider careers in science (the number is decreasing annually). I bet we’d have more productive conversation among students and leaders of science and religion around the many profound issues in our nation that engage both: abortion, medical care, stem cells, homosexuality, and genomic research. The battle rhetoric would fade and, more than likely, movies like Expelled wouldn’t be made in the first place….

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…