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

A Startling Number Believe You Can Be Jewish Jesus Follower; Why It’s Not As Crazy As It Sounds

By Michael Schulson

…of American Jewry, there are moments of polite incredulity. To wit: 34% of American Jews think that “a person can be Jewish if they believe that Jesus was the messiah.” In other words, a full third of Jewish Americans think that followers of Jesus Christ—i.e. Christians—can also be Jews. Jews and Christians have been othering each other for centuries, and, theologically speaking, Jesus isn’t messiah material for religious Jews. So, at first glance…

Religious Leaders Condemn National Prayer Breakfast; Offer Alternative American Prayer Hour

By Sarah Posner

…-gays bill pending in the Ugandan parliament. “Prayer is a good thing, and Americans ought to gather to pray, but we better be careful what we pray for,” said the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, the Ninth Bishop of New Hampshire and the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal church, speaking at the National Press Club Tuesday morning. “We have a duty to confront those who are praying for those things that would break God’s heart.” “I call upon our pr…

“Dark” Skin No Longer a Curse in Online Book of Mormon

By Joanna Brooks

…sionary growth in Mexico, Central, and South America. Over the years, some American Indian and Latin American indigenous Mormons have actively claimed a “Lamanite” identity and positioned themselves as the direct heirs of the Book of Mormon. (I have heard Navajo LDS friends tell me that what they read in the Book of Mormon resembles stories they’ve heard from their grandparents.) Today, the Church’s greatest convert growth in the US is among Latin…

Keepers of History or Dangerous Idols: The Case Against Statues From an Unlikely Source

By David Zvi Kalman

…eliminate the idea of America. The tie between memory and statuary is more American than Americans realize. Given that many Americans don’t know that the Civil War happened after the War of Independence, and that the president this week misidentified a sculpture while defending its importance to memory, it’s questionable whether our memorializing strategies have been all that successful in the first place. Given this dubious track record, we would…

Mormons Fight Marriage Equality in Mexico; Is Catholic Church Italy’s Anti-Gay NRA?; Nigerian Anglicans Cut Ties With UK Diocese; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…reports BuzzFeed’s Lester Feder. Armenia: Folk dancing group kicks out gay American Kyle Khandikyan, a 23-year old American living in Armenia was kicked out of a folk dancing group after the instructor learned that he was gay. Khandikyan, who currently lives in Yerevan and first came to Armenia through Birthright Armenia as a volunteer with PINK Armenian, was told by the instructor that he did not belong to this “nation,” that he was “not Armenian…

Touched by a Michael Landon: America’s Jewish Angel

By Peter Manseau

…t trafficked in well-meaning revisionist history can tell us nothing about American Jewish culture in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Yet the story of how “Oyfn Pripetshik” came to be sung in Walnut Grove may tell us something about the enduring place of Jewish languages in American culture today. “The Craftsman” was the first television job for a young writer named Paul Wolff, now a professor of screenwriting at the University of Sout…

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…

Keep Jews Interesting: It’s Time to Stop Being Defined by Anti-Semitism

By Shaul Magid

…have the chance to create something different. The final word goes to the American scholar of Judaica Jacob Neusner. In his 1981 book Stranger at Home: The Holocaust, Zionism, and American Judaism, Neusner argued that an obsession with the Holocaust or anti-Semitism, painting the Jew as a victim—the foundation of American Jews’ civil religion—is essentially an act of Jewish self-hatred because it perpetuates derogatory Jewish stereotypes. The sol…

“Americans Hate Muslims, Too” (And Other Impediments to U.S. Advocacy for Religious Freedom Abroad)

By Chad Bauman

…e value the expressions of evangelical Christian piety so common among the American political class, and do not dismiss them—as many Americans do—as cynical political machination. Stories in respected media outlets warn of aggressive evangelical campaigns “emanating from America,” and “backed by the highest of the land,” and are often accompanied by sound bites or pictures—in this case of George W. Bush, Jr., speaking in front of a large mural of…

Sit Down and Shut Up: Pulling Mindfulness Up By Its (Buddhist) Roots

By Max Zahn

…ly white set of practitioners, even though they are probably a minority of American practitioners. “So much of the Asian diasporic and Asian-American face of Buddhism has been erased and dismissed from the mainstream versions of the dharma in the U.S.,” said the BPF’s Katie Loncke. The outsized visibility of white celebrities and CEOs practicing mindfulness highlights the longstanding tension between the immigrant Asian Buddhist community and the…