Search for "cheap airline tickets to orlando fl from ohare wi phone number 1-800-299-7264"

The Internet Is Not Killing Religion, Religion is Killing Religion

By Elizabeth Drescher

…and wonder as a sweet piper’s tune sings into the air. It allows us, following Talal Asad’s critique of William Cantwell Smith’s conception of “faith,” to consider what elements of human experience are deliberately and incidentally left out of whatever it is we might understand as “religion” in its institutionalized forms, and why. Who is served by the various exclusions and inclusions of institutional religion? To what ends? And who is harmed? W…

A Question for Hobby Lobby Supporters…

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…hich likens it to the difference between giving someone legal tender to do with whatever they will, and giving someone a voucher for a designated purpose. The brief draws an analogy to the difference between giving someone cash and giving someone a gift card for a steakhouse. If you give someone cash they might use it for steak, or they might use it for something else. If you give someone a gift card for a steakhouse, then if they use it, they wil…

The Abortion Debate, Texas Style

By Dhawn Martin

…a small tam adorned with an orange pompom—an activist for choice. She was flirting with one of the DPS officers. Love and politics in the afternoon, I smiled to myself. But what happened next surprised me. The young woman bent down near the bowed head of the older woman, placed a hand on her shoulder, and said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you’re OK.” The woman in blue lifted her head, smiled, and nodded yes. I couldn’t hear w…

Pope Francis Has Painted Himself into a Corner on Women Deacons

By Mary E. Hunt

…in the processions leading to the men’s ordination. The notion that women with or without “blameless Christian” husbands would become deacons was never on the table. The permanent diaconate has evolved in fifty years with 40,000 plus men (many of them in the U.S.) engaged in ministries of Word, liturgy, and charity. In real terms, this ranges from deacons as glorified altar boys in some places (for example, Argentina where Francis showed less int…

Reactionary White Buddhists Have Joined The Fight Against Critical Race Theory

By Ann Gleig

…ading of the tradition as apolitical, the white backlash to racial justice will be a surprise. As within all religious traditions, however, Buddhist doctrine has been used to both support and resist power regimes. Rather than argue for a “real” interpretation of the tradition, scholars can illuminate the ways in which reactionary Buddhists attempt to naturalize their own positions while simultaneously claiming progressive positions as distorted by…

Magic in the Air: How Intellectuals Invented the Myth of a Mythless Society

By Jason Josephson Storm

…out their various insights inside an occult context, in a social world overflowing with spirits and magic, and how the weirdness of that cultural milieu generated so much normativity. Is there anything you had to leave out? There is a lot I had to leave out. I tend to overwrite, and the first draft was massive and I had to cut a lot. So I ended up eliminating rough chapters on French social theory, American philosophy, Japanese accounts of Western…

Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

By Cathleen Falsani

…mandu on May 1, 2015. Photo by Cathleen Falsani. Chris Heuertz, co-founder with his wife, Phileena, of the Gravity Center for Contemplative Activism in Omaha, Neb., arrived in Kathmandu about 30 minutes after I did on May 1. It was Heuertz’s 21st visit to Nepal, where for 20 years he and his wife worked on behalf the poor and vulnerable, particularly women and children victimized by human traffickers in the commercial sex industry. For many years,…

Hajj Journal: Using the Toilet at the Grand Mosque

By Amina Wadud

…ur steps. The mosque is gigantic, full of beautiful and elaborate designs, with an immense number of repetitions to them. The stairs and the escalators are deceiving, taking two for each floor in one tower and only one escalator per floor in another tower. I never did figure out which was which. I knew the fastest way up to the third floor from my hotel, but this was always early and therefore less chaotic. It also involved a wide ramp straight fr…

Are You Rapture Ready?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…n exactly 7,000 years from the date that God first warned people about the flood. He said the flood happened in 4990 B.C., on what would have been May 21 in the modern calendar. God gave Noah one week of warning. Since one day equals 1,000 years for God, that means there was a 7,000-year interval between the flood and rapture. “We hope that anyone would get a Bible out and try and prove that this is wrong,” he said. I suspect the advent of May 22,…

‘Heretics’ or ‘Atheists’? A Response

By Rachel Ozanne

…ity” appealing. I also want a name that implies the depth of my engagement with the faith, as well as my continued respect for it through my academic study. However, I wonder whether replacing atheist with heretic is the best option. In my life after orthodox Christianity, it is unsurprising that I have found myself associating with nonbelievers and nontraditional believers of many stripes—including many self-avowed atheists. Do these individuals…