Search for "airline cheap discount ticket travel phone number 1-800-299-7264"

COVID-Denying Father Sergei is Just the Latest Example of the Russian Orthodox Church’s ‘Holy Man’ Problem

By Katherine Kelaidis

…e strange holy man from Siberia. An Arizona renegade But you don’t need to travel back to early 20th-century Russia to find an example of a destructive Orthodox monk superstar. Just outside the town of Florence, Arizona, 63 miles southeast of Phoenix, in the middle of the desert, stands St. Anthony’s Monastery. Though built to resemble the great monastic houses of the medieval Christian East, there’s something too clean, too luxurious about St. An…

McCain’s Prosperity Preacher

By Sarah Posner

…erial prosperity to all believers who have enough faith,” with even higher numbers of Pentecostals and charismatic Christians agreeing with that statement. Go to any Word of Faith church, tune in to TBN, or read reams of books written by Word of Faith evangelists, and you will find the movement’s trademark selective literalism of both the Old and New Testaments, picking out verses that seem—regardless of hermeneutics demonstrating otherwise—to rei…

Secret Treasure, Bible’s Real Housewives, & ‘Dear Lord, please don’t let me f-up’

By Michael J. Altman

…on’t let me f-up,” was possibly the first to be uttered in space. Is space travel a spiritual experience, then? The Church of England has temporarily barred gay priests with partners from appointment as bishops while it figures out what to do long-term. Civil unions are now legal in Illinois, and that has put the state’s authorities at odds with Catholic Charities who do not want to offer adoption to same-sex partners. A bill in California that wo…

Savita Halappanavar’s Heartbreaking Death

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ay “This lady might die if she doesn’t have an abortion, and no, she can’t travel to England!” cost crucial hours and days. No, we don’t know for sure. Just like we don’t know whether antibiotics alone might have saved her. But where there are only guesses—where we’re speculating on how wider social histories and values affect individual lives—it’s best to be evenhanded. If such a hard stance against any abortion is supposed to be part of some bro…

Queer Nuns: Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are “Serious Parody,” Forcing Us to Redefine Nuns

By Melissa Wilcox

…n perspectives on the order. Because they’re a non-profit organization that gives all of its monies back to the community, some will ask only for the cost of travel; honoraria generally go to the Sister’s house rather than to the individual member….

Will SCOTUS’s New Zeal for “Neutrality” Affect its Decision on the “Muslim Ban”?

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…l choose to engage in the same rigorous assessment of these factors in the travel ban case with regard to the president’s considerable history of disparaging statements about Muslims and his call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” The Court has prepared itself for a potential about-face in Trump v. Hawaii by distinguishing in its Masterpiece decision between the words of lawmakers and those of the decision m…

What Happens When There’s Nothing Left to Say About Marriage

By Sarah Posner

…epiphany. Franklin Graham has a meltdown. And Scott Walker decides to time-travel. It might be the start of a joke: three white evangelical men walk into a bar (or a Chick-Fil-A). . . But it’s not. This is what happens when there’s nothing left to say about marriage equality. Campolo, a moderate evangelical, issued a statement today “urging the church to be more welcoming.” The statement isn’t headlined, “I now support gay marriage.” Instead, Camp…

Romania’s “Witch Tax”: Magic Meets Bureaucracy

By Joseph Laycock

…e. In 2006, it was estimated that there are some 4,000 witches in Romania. Travel guides advise tourists that witchcraft is a normal part of Romanian culture and that in rural areas it is still common for individuals to consult a witch before seeing a doctor. Many witches see themselves as loyal Romanians and conduct rituals to protect their country from natural disasters. In 2004, a ritual was done to curse Swiss referee Urs Meier, whose decision…

Confronting the Abusive Legacy of Native American Boarding Schools

By Philip Arnold

…s stories of children being taken from their homes, sometimes by force, to travel long distances to live at these schools, sometimes for many years. The children were forced to cut their hair, wear military uniforms and, most tragically, stop speaking their native languages and performing their traditional ceremonies. In some cases, children were incarcerated for trying to escape, and died or were murdered in these schools. All of the students wer…

Resurrecting Marley at 70: Rastafari History in 5 Songs

By Darren J. N. Middleton

…Rastafari history, and it scores the many Rasta pilgrims who, to this day, travel to Jamaica’s northwest coast to memorialize the event annually. 5. Tarrus Riley, “King Selassie H.I.M.” 100,000 Jamaicans greeted Haile Selassie at the Kingston airport when he made his state visit to the island on April 21, 1966. Rasta elder Mortimer Planno, who influenced the University of West Indies’s sociological Report on the Rastafari movement in 1960, and who…