Search for "cheap airline tickets from kingston jamaica to fort lauderdale phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Why the Church is Struggling to Hold Onto Millennial Catholics

By Kaya Oakes

…tholic faith influences her work. Partially as a response to the dwindling number of young Catholics, the campus ministry group FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students), similarly to Opus Dei, sends missionaries – many of whom are recent college graduates themselves — out to secular college campuses, where they run bible studies and other group activities. A version of the FOCUS handbook on Wikileaks emphasizes adherence to church teachi…

Pope’s US Visit Provokes Intense Attention; New Vatican Book on Man-Woman Complementarity & New Int’l Report on Christian Role Models for LGBT Equality; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…y, assist LGBT refugees The Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers reports on efforts by LGBT advocates in Europe to identify and assist LGBT refugees from Syria, Iraq and other countries. European advocates with whom the Blade has spoken in recent weeks said it is exceedingly difficult to identify refugees and migrants who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. They have nevertheless joined efforts in their respective countries to provide assistan…

Church and State in Japan: The Case of the Yasukuni Shrine

By Mark R. Mullins

…the Class-A war criminals enshrined several decades ago. Over the years, a number of individuals have made personal visits to the Yasukuni Shrine and requested that enshrinement be cancelled and the names of their family dead be removed from the shrine register. In addition to appeals from Japanese families, there are also Koreans and Taiwanese who have been dismayed and angered to learn that Yasukuni’s generous enshrinement policy extended even t…

Mormonism’s Black Issues

By Joanna Brooks

…horities. African-American Mormons and their allies have also undertaken a number of unofficial efforts to raise consciousness about Black Mormon experience and concerns, like the well-received 2007 documentary Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons. (Experts estimate there are now about 1 million Mormons of African descent worldwide.) But without an official, explicit clarification of earlier teachings on race, many older Mormons continu…

Cruz and the Evangelical Illusion

By Sarah Posner

…“We brought them with no expectations and we were highly pleased with the number who decided Ted is the right man to be of the president of the U.S.” When judging these statements (particularly the words “very diverse,” “significant standing” and “the number”), keep in mind that Barton is known (among evangelicals) for playing fast and loose with facts. Three years ago, the evangelical publisher Thomas Nelson halted publication of one of Barton’s…

Who Bombed the Boston Marathon?

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…ted. Only 149 groups existed before Obama was elected in 2008. In 2012 the number had expanded to 1,360. Not all are plotting terrorist attacks, of course. But some are. In September 2012, Daryl Johnson, a terrorist analyst for the US Department of Homeland Security testified before a Senate committee that there was an “upsurge” of potentially violent non-Islamic extremist activity in the United States. So fingers point toward right-wing Christian…

It’s Not About Cake: Anti-Gay Vendors Want a Constitutional Right to Discriminate

By Sunnivie Brydum

…e-providers like bakeries and florists, dress-shops, hair salons, and “any number” of other businesses could claim that their services are in fact a form of constitutionally protected artistic practice. “The claim at issue here sounds as if the business can put up a sign in its window that says, ‘We sell cakes for heterosexuals only,’” Melling explained, taking ADF’s logic to its natural conclusion. “There’s an immediate consequence of that, and t…

It’s Not Me, It’s You: Catholic Values Dumping Trump

By Patricia Miller

…e after a humiliating demotion by Pope Francis for publicly opposing his effort to modernize family doctrine. That pretty much leaves Cardinal Charles Chaput shouting in the wilderness. It’s no coincidence that the high point of white Catholic defection from the Democratic Party coincided with the period of 2012 through 2014, when the Catholic bishops made opposition to the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act the centerpiece of their…

Dispelling the Zombie Myth of White Evangelical Support for Trump

By Robert P. Jones

…who seldom or never attend church (17% in 2023 to 24% in 2023), but these numbers are far below the proportion of the general population who have opted out of religious services (54%). And while there has been some fluctuation among the “super attenders,” those who attend church once a week or more, a majority of White evangelical Protestants still report attending church this frequently—a rate more than double the general population (54% vs. 24%…

Why Religious Exemptions Matter

By Sarah Posner

…le for the exemption. This will, Catholics for Choice argues, increase the number of employees of Catholic organizations who would be deprived of contraception coverage, even if they aren’t Catholic themselves (or are Catholics who dissent from the church’s opposition to birth control). HHS notes in its rule that “the exemption should not exclude group health plans of religious entities that would qualify for the exemption but for the fact that,…