Search for "cheap airline tickets from fl phone number 1-800-299-7264"

The War Within: Religion and Our Tangled Relationship with Our Bodies

By Michelle Lelwica

…or in pain. Rather, such shame is a culturally conditioned reaction that reflects a confluence of religious and philosophical narratives that associate virtue with a body that’s under control—a body epitomized in the commercially-fabricated fantasy of physical perfection that pervades popular culture and that undergirds many mainstream medical and self-help discourses on health and healing. Second, the lines distinguishing “religious” from “secula…

What Irish Marriage Vote Means for Catholic Church; The Lonely Fight for Equality in Belize; Progress and Backlash in Tunisia; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…publicly buck the church. Raw Story cited post-election comments from Tony Flannery, a Redemptorist priest who was stripped of his ministry in 2012 for his outspoken views on contraception and the ordination of women. “The last thing the Irish bishops should be doing is further alienating the young generation who the Church, to a fair degree, has lost already,” said Flannery. The impact of the vote could extend well beyond Ireland. The vote was ce…

Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act

By Peter Laarman

…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…

The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church

By Paul Gorrell

…period of contraction through strict orthodoxy, he wants to maintain the influence of Catholic moral theology on the larger global society. For instance, the Vatican maintains its presence at the United Nations, where it opposes resolutions like the recent one in support of gay rights. We might call this strategy “the tyranny of the minority.” Through the “small Church” ecclesiology of Benedict, many Catholics are already being encouraged to take…

Global Religious Right Asks ‘How Far Can We Get?’; And More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ay men in the republic. Instead of investigating and punishing those who inflicted the horrors, Mr. Kadyrov, a violent provincial boss who enjoys the blessings of Russian President Vladimir Putin, immediately went after the Moscow newspaper that brought the situation to light. Reporters have been threatened and denounced, and forced to flee Russia. … Mr. Kadyrov appears to enjoy a certain impunity. His men are suspected of carrying out the murder…

In the Papal Pocket: Benedict XVI and the Press

By Mary E. Hunt

…sure softball questions, few dissident voices, and reverent talk about the number of ciboria necessary to serve communion in baseball stadiums. And, we are all supposed to know what ciboria are (for the record, they are the goblet-shaped metal vessels that hold the hosts—that is, the wafers—used for communion). Catholic terminology is about the only thing used liberally in these exercises. Television hosts like Tim Russert fairly swoon over their…

Are We Entering the End Times for Mainline Seminaries?

By Elesha Coffman

…s in both the number of churches that could support such positions and the number of people eager to take the more challenging, but lower paying, church jobs that remained. Some seminaries shifted their missions to serve the academy or society more broadly, while others trained more part-time, second-career and lay pastors. These shifts were less abrupt than decisions to close or merge a seminary, but they were often quite jarring for faculty and…

For Conservatives, the Future Looks Dim… and Gay

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ble.” But those “moral objections” seem to be of less concern to a growing number of Americans: Just under half of Americans (45%) say they think engaging in homosexual behavior is a sin, while an equal number says it is not. Those who believe homosexual behavior is a sin overwhelmingly oppose gay marriage. Similarly, those who say they personally feel there is a lot of conflict between their religious beliefs and homosexuality (35% of the public)…

Is Twitter Doing Enough to Remove Extremist Content? An Ex-Employee Weighs In

By Sofi Hersher

…g to identify potentially radical organizations and individuals. The Green Number, or Numéro Vert, is a private telephone hotline in France where family and friends can report someone they fear may become radicalized. And in the U.K., Prevent is a program that essentially creates ‘trigger warnings’ for teachers and institutions to report the potential for radicalization. I do not mean to condemn or even criticize these programs, merely to point ou…

Conservative Evangelical Eric Metaxas, Doing Twitter Theology, Claims ‘Jesus Was White’

By Eric Vanden Eykel

…te this, Metaxas’s tweet has been severely “ratioed,” which means that the number of responses far exceeds the number of “likes” and retweets. This is generally an indication that a tweet’s contents are either deeply controversial or profoundly ignorant (or both). In short: Twitter users have pushed back on Metaxas, and they’ve pushed back hard. In response he’s deployed a Trump-ian combination of backpedaling and doubling down on his initial clai…