Search for "cheap airline tickets from san joses costa rica to managua nicaragua phone number 1-800-299-7264"

A Monumentally Different Kirk Cameron

By Julie Ingersoll

…nything but. Cameron recently returned from the Reconstructionist-inspired San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival (SAICFF) hosted by Doug Phillips and Vision Forum (I wrote about SAICFF and his previous participation here and here) where he and Phillips discussed the theological background to the version of American history presented in the film, showing the subtle influence of Christian Reconstructionism and R.J. Rushdoony’s Biblical Phi…

GOP “Stealthcare” Bill Reveals Catholic Bishops’ Priorities

By Patricia Miller

…ough the Senate as potentially devastating to many vulnerable populations. San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy called it a “breathtaking” assault on Catholic social teaching that will “deliberately fall apart in the coming years from market forces and ever smaller amounts of government revenue.” Montana Bishop George Thomas warned of “potentially catastrophic effects” on the lives of “children and the elderly, the seriously ill, the immigrant and the…

The Critiques of Evangelical Writers Opposing Christian Nationalism Fail to Recognize Evangelicalism’s Troubling History

By David Hollinger

…ng, the mainline denominations were most definitely still in control of American Christianity. Catholics were smaller in numbers and had a much weaker class position. The mainline churches had growing memberships, media connections, and they dominated all three branches of the federal government. In 1963, mainliners were proud to publish Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” in their house organ, The Christian Century, while F…

By the Way: Fractured Religious Right Endorses McCain

By Randall Balmer

…ition and Focus on the Family, and Jim Garlow, pastor of Skyline Church in San Diego. Also present were Rick Scarborough, founder and president of Vision America, and David Barton, president of WallBuilders; both men have fashioned entire careers out of their denials that the founders ever intended church and state to be separate entities. The meeting (as reported on the website) contained more than the usual over-the-top Religious Right rhetoric…

Selective Sympathy and the Mumbai Chabad House

By Naomi Seidman

…eir own. Chabad tried to mimic this network for Israeli backpackers and American Jewish business travelers. Mumbai, it was clear to me, was a natural place for a Chabad House. Even after I left Orthodoxy, I didn’t entirely lose sight of Chabad. When my mother came to visit me on the West Coast, we both stayed at the Chabad House in San Francisco, where she could be sure the food was kosher. I enjoyed myself, I’ll admit. It wasn’t Boro Park, the Or…

Laura Bush Disses “Dear” Gay Friends

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…begun issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and county clerks in Sandoval, N.M. had issued 26 marriage licenses before a court put a stop to that practice. Despite Bush’s urge to put an end to such progress via an amendment to the Constitution, Massachusetts married its first gay couple that May, while thirteen other states enacted state constitutional amendments to ban the practice. It was against this divisive backdrop that First Lady…

The ‘Spiritual Warfare’ Worldview of Trump’s Conspiracy Doctor is Part of a Transnational Movement

By André Gagné

…ts of continuity within the social context. Anderson notes that for many Africans Pentecostals, traditional beliefs and practices about the “spirit world”—ancestors, curses, evil spirits, nature spirits, witch familiars, etc.—undergo a translation into the biblical categories of “evil spirits” and “demons.” There is, therefore, continuity and discontinuity in the belief in the “spirit world”; continuity, because the “spirit world” isn’t dismissed;…

Women as Head Pastors Was Final Straw for Southern Baptist Convention — Not Scandal, Sexual Abuse, or Dalliance with Dictators

By Caroline Matas

…our nation.” Since then, Warren has made countless trips to the Central African country, even as Kagame’s documented human rights violations have drawn increasing criticism internationally. When Warren hosted President Kagame at Saddleback Church in 2019, Rwandan pastor and activist Christine Coleman told the LA Times that the event was akin to “inviting Hitler to a Holocaust remembrance event.” If SBC leadership was troubled by Warren’s ongoing…

The Theology That Inspired the Poway Synagogue Shooting (and New Zealand) Remains Strikingly Commonplace

By Ivan Strenski

…, on the one side, from the theological vision of their “replacement” incessantly preached in his church, on the other? Is someone going to argue that everyday behavior and religious formation occupy different universes of discourse and practice? If so, why bother with preaching, teaching or theologizing at all? In fixating on Earnest’s Orthodox Presbyterians, let’s not forgot the Christian figures and denominations that have countered the notion…

It’s the Theology, Stupid: Why the Shocking SBC Report is Anything But Surprising

By Chrissy Stroop and Jessica Johnson

…l too intimately, I’m frankly quite scared at where things are going in America these days. The Christian Right is raging as its foot soldiers, lobbyists, and politicians work to impose theocracy on the entire country, and I’m exactly the kind of “demonic” Other they’re currently fixated on. Their violent apocalyptic fantasies have already translated into violent action, as on January 6, and I think we’re only going to see more political violence…