Search for "cheap airline tickets from seattle to manila phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…

What To Do When Fred Phelps Arrives in Your Neighborhood

By Susan Henking

…in overt ways. Cohocton is a small town, with a population in 2009 of about 800 people. It is in upstate New York. It is not my small town, nor is it likely yours; and yet each of these places is someone’s neighborhood. This time, it is only an hour away for me. Picketing as “The Workingman’s Means of Communication” On March 2, 2011, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in response to a series of prior decisions around Westboro Baptist Church’s pi…

US Archbishop and Vatican-Appointed “Overseer” Attends Annual Meeting of Women Religious

By Emily Baxter

…, Florida, was made up of 825 nuns and only three priests, one of whom was Seattle’s Archbishop J. Peter Sartain—the official charged by the Vatican with overseeing the LCWR following last year’s harsh assessment of American nuns. The Vatican came down hard on American sisters last year, admonishing them for doing too much “social justice” work, disagreeing with Church teaching on gay people, and propagating “radical feminist themes.” Not surpris…

Lifestyles of the Rich and Pious

By Patricia Miller

…ed on by three nuns who live in a nearby coach house—very Downton Abbey. • Seattle Archbishop James Sartain, who is currently in charge of making sure that the naughty nuns of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious don’t spend too much time worrying about social justice issues, lives alone in a charming three-story brick Victorian home valued at $3.84 million. • Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, head of the bishop’s Committee on Religious L…

Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

By Grant Gallicho

…be live-streamed, starting Wednesday, June 15). The bishops will take up a number of issues, from the revised liturgy to assisted suicide, but their conversations are sure to be dominated by an issue that has been dogging them since the mid-1980s: sexually abusive priests and the bishops who enabled them. Ten years after Cardinal Bernard Law became the poster bishop for failed religious leadership, new revelations of episcopal misfeasance threaten…

Mormons Prepare to March in LGBT Pride Parades Nationwide

By Joanna Brooks

…en taught my whole life?” For example, my eighteen-year-old son received a phone call from the bishop for an interview to set him on the road to preparing for his missionary service. So we are in the hall, and I’m telling him, “You need to call the bishop.” My son looks at me and says, “Mom, I can’t do this.” We talked over many things he was concerned about. One of them was that he has an openly gay teacher who, he told me, “is one of the most sp…

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…

The Question is: What Kind of Football Does God Fancy?

By Jeffrey Scholes

After leading his team to victory over the Seattle Seahawks last Sunday, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers told reporters that God “was a Packers fan tonight”—a retort to Russell Wilson’s comment that God had “set up” the Seahawks’ win over the Packers in the NFC Championship game nine months ago. The back-and-forth (if one that allows nine months to respond can rightly use the term) elicits eye-rolling from most serious sports fans and…

The Accidental Worshiper: Following the Music

By Tripp Hudgins

…come close. Perhaps the most successful music program was at Mars Hill in Seattle. In her essay “Heaven, Hell, and Hipsters” from Ecclesial Practices ethnomusicologist Maren Haynes writes of their well-wrought strategy of borrowing from Seattle’s burgeoning music scene. “Rather than trying to promote a foreign ritual mechanism,” Haynes says, “Mars Hill’s worship directors reinterpret the ritual environment of a concert, packaging it instead as a…