Search for "mit airline flights cheap tickets phone number 1-800-299-7264"

PCUSA’s Nod to “Traditional” Marriage Understandable, but Not Accurate

By William E. Smith

…ce kinship systems determine what counts as incest and, thus, who is off-limits to marry. The medieval Catholic Church embraced a complex and very expansive system of prohibited family members. The Church initially restricted legitimate marriage to people beyond the 7th degree of kinship, though it was later reduced, at the 4th Lateran Council in 1215 C.E., to the 4th degree. The Reformers, whose ideas helped shape marriage laws and sensibilities…

The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

By Tony Keddie

…itutional rights.” There are, as with most of Reed’s biblical analogies, a number of basic textual and historical problems here. To scratch the surface: Roman citizenship would have been rare among the earliest followers of Christ; Paul probably was not a citizen himself (this detail appears in the romanticizing later narrative of Acts of the Apostles, but not in Paul’s own letters); and, the “emperor’s household” in Philippians was a reference to…

How to Make Nones and Lose Money: Study Shows Cost of Catholic Sex Abuse Scandals

By Kaya Oakes

…e individuals mirror the statistical notion that even though an increasing number of Americans consider themselves religiously unaffiliated, that doesn’t necessarily mean they do not believe in God. Botton and Perez-Trugila indicate that sex abuse scandals cost the church money and participation, but not necessarily faith. For many Millennials and members of Generation X, who make up the largest percentage of the religiously unaffiliated, the sex…

Dieting, Sex, Jesus: The Body as Moral Battleground

By Lynne Gerber

…had been engaged in fat activist community, conversation, and action for a number of years and I wanted to take the opportunity that academic work provides to really hone in on questions that always engaged me: how has fatness come to have such a potent moral charge in American culture? Why do weight loss practices such as dieting generate such strong moral and religious feelings—and why do people use languages of virtue and vice, sin and salvatio…

The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…

Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) and the Rise of Extreme Evangelicalism

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…d several years, made themselves something of a home, and even converted a number of the Waorani. The evangelical conversation about Elliot and the five who died before her evoked their commitment to God—though the language of “adventure” was woven through this rhetoric. In the Victorian culture of the nineteenth century, a movement arose called “muscular Christianity,” which involved evangelism through sport programs, but also celebrated a certai…

Jim Wallis’ Egregious “Memo to Nation’s Leaders” on Stupak

By Daniel Schultz

…bly suggest that both sides in this debate need to remember the very small number of women who in real life will be involved in this dilemma, compared to the impact on a very large number of women who will be denied their “health” if the reform bill does not pass.” This relies on a disingenuous interpretation of statistics from the Guttmacher Institute, which that organization has been decrying for a good week now. Many more women would be affecte…

Let’s Get Lost: Mapping Religion in the 21st Century

By Spencer Dew

…map (as compiled by Salatomatic, an Islamic guide to mosques) compiled the number of mosques per state, while the second, using U.S. Department of State data, charts the number of refugees arriving in each state (from October 2014-July 2015), and the third offers “a compilation of Islamic terror activity by state” pairing the names of organizations with U.S. cities (for instance, Boca Raton, Florida, is flagged for “Al Qaeda”). The source for this…

RD News Round-Up—Nov. 4, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…ide epidemic of rising medical costs, disparate levels of care and growing numbers of uninsured or underinsured Americans,” the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy recently reported. “You’re describing the perfect storm,” Neil Calman, CEO of the Bronx, New York-based Institute for Family Health, a speaker at the event, responded to an audience member’s comment: “People are going to find the situation will get increasingly worse and go…

Women’s Liberation Through Submission: An Evangelical Anti-Feminism Is Born

By Kathryn Joyce

…o, like those men of old, know what to do.” DeMoss has collaborated with a number of her fellow speakers before. In 2002, she edited a compilation of essays on submission and headship entitled Biblical Womanhood in the Home, which drew contributions from Kassian, Hunt, and other complementarian matriarchs, such as Dorothy Kelley Patterson, who with her husband, Paige Patterson, created the homemaking degree and curriculum introduced at Southwester…