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

Obama’s Gay Marriage Support Shocks Black Church

By Anthea Butler

…an interesting crossroads for the relationship between the president and African-American churches in the 2012 election. The prevailing narrative in the media is that black churches are wholesale against same-sex marriage. From the 2004 elections to Proposition 8, this narrative has dominated, despite the fact that there is significant support from African Americans in and outside of the church for same-sex marriage. Media outlets portrayed the re…

Blood and Politics — Christian White Nationalism in the Age of Obama

By Bill Berkowitz

…e creation of a new White nation-state carved out of the lands of North America. While these ideas were present in the movement from its re-inception in the mid-1970s, they only became dominant in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War ushered in a new era. Across the globe, nationalism became a language of opposition to the New Global Order, and racial and ethnic nationalism became more salient than its liberal civic opposition. Books such as B…

Mormonism’s “9/11 Mosque Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…igion in America, have no business contributing to public rage against the number one most disliked religion in America. Nor in trafficking in falsehoods like “Islam is an ideology, not a religion,” a line I’ve been hearing from a few Mormons in recent days. Islam is in fact a religion for which Mormon leaders from the time of George A. Smith and Parley P. Pratt in 1855 have expressed respect. A religion with prophetic origins. A religious…

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

By Jason Josephson Storm

…anese man asked me, curiously, if these sorts of things didn’t go on in America. Before I could answer (and describe America’s own enchantment), a European patron jumped in, assuring everyone that Japan was much more spiritual and magical than the West. He looked to me to confirm the sentiment, which I did my best to refute. But that reflexive response reinforced in me a suspicion that had been bothering me for some time already—which was that by…

Hobby Lobby: Key to a More Liberal and Less Religious America?

By Rebecca Sager

…le’s private hearts and minds, and moving people out of the pews across America. The number of nones (people with no religious preference) is on the rise, with over 20% of all Americans claiming this status, and many point to the increased politicization of religion as the cause. This trend of legal victories will, in the long run, very likely create a more secular America. Recent data indicate that this process is already clearly under way. A pol…

Faith-Based Bailout Part 3

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…t markets. The subtext of story number one, which will likely become story number two in the next day or so, is the partisan sniping that has already consumed the issue. A conservative core of House Republicans now claim, with a semi-straight face, that a partisan floor speech from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually turned them against a bill they came prepared to vote for. The speech “was” partisan—in the extreme, and far too much so for my tast…

Religious Leaders Need ‘Empty the Pews’ Which Chronicles the Darker Side of the ‘Nones’ Phenomenon

By Kaya Oakes

…stical data on Nones, compiled by the sociologist Ryan Burge—and a growing number of books exploring the narrative stories of Nones have appeared in recent years, including a book of my own. Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church Chrissy Stroop and Lauren O’Neal Epiphany Publishing November 29, 2019 What many of these articles and books share in common is a sense of confusion or despair. The primary question they ask is often framed in the…

Bonnaroo 3: With a Buzz in Our Ears

By E. David Morgen

…roup of Birmingham college students who had been persuaded by one of their number that this was worth the wait. It was. It is hard to describe the experience of standing in the second row of a rock concert, untold numbers at your back, without sounding trite. In a world in which it is possible to conduct nearly all communication via one machine or another, to travel from one climate-controlled setting to the next without exchanging so much as a mo…

Bonnaroo Dispatches: Stages

By E. David Morgen

…ng to judge you.” Recent studies suggest that while the number of young Americans who consider themselves religious or spiritual remains roughly constant, their spiritual practices are changing. They are more likely than their parents to consider themselves unaffiliated with any particular practice, or the version of the religion they practice boils down to injunctions to a vague sense of morality, fairness, and happiness, what Christian Smith cal…

A Match Made in Hell: Demons Have Become a Serious Force in US Politics — But We’ve Seen This Show Before

By Michael E. Heyes

…lculations, one-third of evangelicals don’t vote, and when you factor this number against the number of votes needed to tip battleground states like Pennsylvania, there’s not much convincing that needs to be done to turn the election for Trump. It might seem like a small affair, until you realize that JD Vance was one of the speakers at the Courage Tour event in Pennsylvania. Predictably, demonic rhetoric underlies a lot of the Tour. From what I’v…