Search for "cheap airline tickets from orlando to pr phone number 1-800-299-7264"

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

By Rebecca Sager

…evidence pretty clearly shows that rulings like Hobby Lobby, the recent Supreme Court’s decision to allow prayer at public meetings, and the new “religious liberty” laws that actually put more religion into public spaces will actually cause Americans—especially younger Americans—to move even further away from organized religion than they have already. By pushing religion into the public sphere, the religious and political right is unintentionally…

LGBT Christians Respond to Southern Baptists’ Call For Kindness, Understanding

By Mike Greer

…ings with Moore, about a dozen LGBT Christians and LGBT advocates did meet privately with the same number of conference participants for dialogue on Monday evening, though they agreed that they wouldn’t comment about it afterward. In addition, Matthew Vines, author of God and the Gay Christian, met privately and off-the-record with Al Mohler during the conference. ThinkProgress also interacted with clergy and laity in those public sessions. It wil…

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

By Kaya Oakes

…moved away from the worst aspects of Christianity, what they called “the repression, the shame, [and] the hypocrisy,” due to the realization that many church teachings were “actively harmful.” While a few contributors to Empty the Pews acknowledge that their post-institutional faith is still a work in progress, for the most part these writers have departed religion without much in the way of regret. More than a few of the essays share a narrative…

Bonnaroo 3: With a Buzz in Our Ears

By E. David Morgen

…roll that’s the staple of festivals like Bonnaroo, but the organizers here pride themselves in providing a mix of music that goes beyond that category. This year’s festival includes bluegrass, soul, country, hip-hop, and a special, indoor stage that recreates the feel of a New Orleans jazz club as a venue for acts from that city. One of the pleasures of Bonnaroo is that a substantial number of the 75-80,000 attendees are curious and savvy fans of…

Bonnaroo Dispatches: Stages

By E. David Morgen

…ls us that even though she does not actively proselytize, she has had a surprising number of conversations about her faith during her time at Bonnaroo. “The people here are trying to fill themselves up with something.” When she tells that she believes “there is a spiritual war going on right now,” we ask her which side Bonnaroo is on. Neither, she says. As the yoga proceeds behind us, she says that the experiences people have at Bonnaroo can be a…

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

…s, the Devil was the first communist. On the popular level, TV hosts like Oprah and Geraldo produced content that helped convince Americans that their country was overrun by Satanists. The “victims” of “Satanic cults” lined up to speak on shows like these to confirm America’s darkest fears. By the mid-90s, it became clear that of the twelve-thousand accusations levied over nearly 15 years of the Panic, not a single one pointed to any organized cul…

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

By Michelle Lelwica

…we make about different bodies (our own and others’). Third, institutions, products, and programs that are supposed to help us “improve” our health can be quite damaging. This is apparent in the antagonistic approach to physical improvement that commercial, medical, and self-help discourses commonly encourage. Have you ever noticed, for example, the colonial paradigm implicit in familiar calls for us to blast belly fat, fight cancer, conquer chron…

The Messiah is Not Coming

By Peter Laarman

…in the United States (in all denominations and faith traditions) generally presupposes the existence of middle-class families as primary stakeholders. There are other models, of course: congregations as communities of resistance among the poor, and congregations as communities of self-congratulation and spiritual uplift among the rich. But middle-class congregations were the norm, and middle-class congregations are having a horrendous time coming…

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

By Jason Josephson Storm

…le shared anecdotes with me about various protective talismans and ghostly premonitions. After a number of the patrons had shared such anecdotes, one Japanese 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, wh…

The Fourth of July Is Not America’s Birthday

By Peter Laarman

…ches (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists) whose forebears, in the preceding century, had battled the proto-Catholic Stuarts back in the Mother Country. In the English Civil War, these middle-class sectarians, mocked as “Roundheads,” routed the aristocratic Cavaliers. They were driven to resistance and even to regicide by their fear of episcopacy: they feared that their model of congregational governance would be outlawed and they would be…