Search Results for:

cheap airline tickets from newark to flodia phone number 1-800-299-7264

Mormon Leaders Slam ‘Counterfeit’ Gay Families; Vatican Resists Gay Ambassador; ISIS Executes Man for Homosexuality; Global LGBT Recap

…‘family shame’ and violence Reuters’ Alisa Tang reported this week on the number of LGBT people in “largely patriarachal and conservative” Asian countries who are flocking to cities and increasingly leaving their home countries to escape the “family shame factor” and live more freely. Activists say including sexual orientation and gender identity in laws, policies and programs to prevent violence against women and children would reduce family vio…

Read More

YOU Are Spiritual But Not Religious: The Secret Spiritual History of the Choose Your Own Adventure Books

…at happens in this story!” The first book sold 8,000 copies, an impressive number for an independent press. The series was then bought up by Bantam Books and re-branded Choose Your Own Adventure in 1980. An initial marketing push gave 100,000 copies of The Cave of Time to librarians, who loved the concept and the effect it had of getting kids to actually sit down and read. Selling for $2.95 apiece, more than 50 titles were published over the next…

Read More

A Secret History of Satan

…n, in some cases public policy. The book makes the case that a significant number of Americans believe in the same Devil believed in by Puritan preachers and 19th-century evangelists. This cannot be dismissed. Its essential to understand why this is so, what historical conditions gave rise to this phenomenon and what does it tell us about the United States. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I had several groups in mind, all of…

Read More

It’s The Apocalypse, Stupid: Understanding Christian Opposition to Obamacare, Civil Rights, New Deal and More

…method of occupying until he comes were very, very different. There were a number of important and substantial issues that were not on white evangelicals’ radar screens, but for black evangelicals, they were absolutely central to what it meant to be living in an apocalyptic age. For them a sign of the End Times was not the supposed lawlessness of Martin Luther King, Jr., a claim made by some white evangelicals. No, for African Americans a sign of…

Read More

The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church

…le from its ranks and fights against their rights, ignores the diminishing number of priests and the effects of this shortage on Church communities, and calls on Catholics to form the “perfect society” resembling the ecclesiology of Opus Dei. It is no surprise that Pope Benedict comes from a country—Germany—where the percentage of Church members attending Sunday mass is one of the lowest in the world. Strict adherence to orthodoxy will not be popu…

Read More

Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act

…ry of brutal union suppression by employers who figured out that it’s much cheaper to take the penalties currently handed out for labor law violations (which are extremely weak and rarely delivered) than to allow workers to unionize without interference in free and fair representation elections. By the Numbers The cold, hard facts are these: Polls consistently report that 60 million Americans would join a union tomorrow if they could, which clearl…

Read More

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

…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…

Read More

RDPulpit: Rick Warren and the Limits of Empathy

…Rick Warren signed a statement of concern about global warming, joining a number of the new breed of evangelicals, much to the chagrin of the old guard like James Dobson. The press began to talk about the expanded agenda of the “new evangelicals,” an agenda not limited to the old shibboleths of abortion and opposition to gay marriage. The Five Non-Negotiable Issues Despite all the above, on a number of issues critical to women’s lives, he remains…

Read More

Resurrection of ‘Comstock Laws’ Would Threaten Access to Abortifacients — But Even That Fear Misses Bigger Picture

…ncy. As historian Andrea Tone has shown in detail, Lysol was just one of a number of unregulated contraceptive products advertised in women’s magazines and in newspapers. Comstockery, in other words, endangered women by creating an environment where quackery and scammers could thrive. Unsurprisingly, a harsh cleaning product had adverse effects. A 1936 book by Rachel Lynn Palmer and Sarah K. Greenberg, M.D. called Facts and Frauds in Feminine Hygi…

Read More

Review: Is the Religious Right Dying?

…or point to evidence that a new religious left may be asserting itself. A number of progressive Christian blogs, such as Street Prophets and Faithful Democrats are afire with discussion of a different kind of marriage between religion and politics that emphasizes peace and justice issues instead of socio-moral concerns. In the baffling 2008 presidential primary season, Republican candidates aligned with the religious right failed to make much hea…

Read More