Search for "= Copa Airlines Reservations 800-299-7264 Copa Airlines Official Site Copa Airlines Flights"

Unmasking the “Veiled Prophet” Behind a 135-Year-Old St. Louis Tradition

By Spencer Dew

…orced the notion of a benevolent cultural elite,” as the St. Louis city website puts it. The organization still runs a debutante ball where men of high society display their daughters to one another once they come of age. “The preeminent formal gala for introducing young ladies,” as the Veiled Prophet Organization puts it. The gala gives the young women a chance to feel like princesses, guarded by men made up in Orientalist drag as “Bengal Lancers…

Exclusive: Christian Right Bill Mill, Project Blitz, Hasn’t Gone Away, It’s Just Gotten More Secretive

By Frederick Clarkson

…of a secret. When RD first reported on Project Blitz in April 2018 the website featured their annual state legislative playbook of model bills and talking points. They also named the members of the State Legislative Prayer Caucuses that drew on the model bills for their own legislation. But in the face of public scrutiny, RD’s revelation of a second playbook and the unwanted media attention that followed our reports (from The New York Times, Salo…

A Recent Local Controversy Reveals the Theocratic Heart of ‘Project Blitz’

By Frederick Clarkson

…-old Historic Fort Snelling. There had been a flap over how the historical site had expanded its educational mission beyond the fort’s military history, to include the Dakota name for the area, Bdote, “with history spanning 10,000 years,” including “Native peoples, trade, soldiers and veterans, enslaved people, immigrants, and the changing landscape.” Some Republican legislators didn’t like it. While the cut passed the Senate, it was ultimately bl…

Kung Fu Nuns, The Beatles, & Amish Healthcare: The Week In Religion… Poetically

By Christopher Marchsteiner

…ruction of a new ER out of fears that it would be built on top of a burial site for Jews. Tensions between religion and government are high, especially after archeologists determined that the bones were not even Jewish. A court ruled that a Catholic father is allowed to take his daughter to Mass after the mother issued a restraining order that prevented him from exposing the child to any religion other than Judaism. The recently passed health care…

Where Were They Radicalized? No Answer is Complete Without Addressing Evangelical Churches and Schooling

By Chrissy Stroop

…ing cable “news.” https://twitter.com/C_Stroop/status/1350557148225277952?s=20 From the very start, Christian schooling and homeschooling advocates have had powerful influence in the Trump administration, not least through the appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. And more recently, we’ve observed the overlap between promoters of evangelical education and the events of January 6, in the person of newly-elected Illinois Representati…

Christianity Today counsels “patience” on Uganda’s anti-gay law

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…seek simply to be allowed to live openly and with dignity. Open Doors’ Web site lists the top countries where Christians are persecuted like North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia. Everywhere they are persecuted, Christians are working to change the system, through prayer, protest, or other actions. Yet, they would deny this kind of action to gay and lesbian people simply because we should take our time and stop and “listen” to why the peopl…

“Giving Godhead”: A Bloody Vision of Religion’s Deepest Influence

By Spencer Dew

…d Cemetery, Brooklyn, involves a grave for the secrets of visitors to that site. That piece, evoking notions of confession and absolution, mortality and temporality, sinks a spade into a whole cluster of theologically fraught ways of thinking and being, raising—as Jack Neudorf pointed out in Art Forum—some important questions for an age in which digital oversharing of confidences generally occurs sans any sense of catharsis. In an earlier series o…

Updated: Gay Activist Beheaded in Uganda…
Is it a Hoax?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…gay sermon a few weeks ago, is now missing. The New Vision, a Ugandan news site, reports that he was “mentally stressed” but does not mention his support for gays and lesbians. The reality in Uganda is that the gay and lesbian community is under constant threat of violence or death, and religious leaders in the United States like Lou Engle and others have a direct responsibility in fueling the flames of hatred in that country. Colin Coward, at the…

Religion vs. Girls’ Education

By Susan Henking

…all Muslims agree with this ruling, including the unnamed author of a Web site entitled Read Islamic Books where shariah is marshaled to argue against sending daughters to college. And, as I was reminded, reading comments on that same Chronicle article, nor do all the non-Muslim religious people in the United States (or elsewhere) believe their daughters should be exposed to college or university education; some Americans, it turns out, refuse to…

Betrayed at the Polls, Evangelicals of Color at a Crossroads

By Deborah Jian Lee

…n and heard.” Hong is the creative director of Willow Chicago, a satellite site for the megachurch Willow Creek, and has spent the bulk of her life in evangelical communities in the South. At the retreat, Hong remembers “this weight coming off.” When the emcee invited the women to “take off our sharp edges…the tears just started flowing,” she says. “We didn’t realize how burdened we were. It was an amazing day.” This sentiment has been echoed repe…