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Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

By Lisa Miller

…houris, dark-eyed women. We all know that Mohammad Atta, who flew American Airlines flight 11 into the Twin Towers on 9/11, was inspired by this promise. But among progressives, the sex promised to the righteous in the Qur’an isn’t sex as we know it, but something mysterious and sublime for which sex is a poetic stand-in. Second, what happens to our bodies in heaven? This is my favorite part of the heaven conversation. For if you believe in heaven…

Make Aeronautic Jobs, Not Jihad

By Haroon Moghul

…nesia preceded the Arab world by roundabout a decade—are responses to economic lethargy, with booming populations ravenous for rights, dignity, and prosperity. In short, thank the world’s largest Muslim nation, Indonesia, for a big order signed on the occasion of President Obama’s visit (230 planes at $21.7 billion!). And thank one of the world’s fastest-growing airlines, Emirates from Dubai, for the other (50 jets at $18 billion). So here’s to co…

Leaving Empire: The Risks of American Insularity

By Ryann Croken

…eetering—superpower. If we want to be in the driver’s seat of a globalized planet, we must know where the road is. Saving the World from the United States Last week, Sarah Palin, a woman who has scarcely left the confines of this country, has shared the headlines with our president, the Kansan-Kenyan-black-white-Hawaiian-Indonesian-American, who has just returned from a whirlwind tour of Asia. Sarah Palin and Obama may or may not face off in 2012,…

“This Pope is a Brazilian!”

By Silvia Alves Fernandes and Manuel A. Vásquez

…threatens to be overshadowed by his comments on gay priests uttered on the plane to Rome, it has generated an enormous outpouring of emotion and fervor. From the time that he stepped out of the plane, he has been mobbed by throngs of excited followers, straining to see and touch him. Francis has relished the opportunity to get close to the people which, among other things, has given his security detail veritable nightmares. What accounts for this…

Close Encounters

By Amina Wadud

…r me, except I admit, at the very last second when I was facing out of the plane, 40,000 feet above the ground. But then I had no time to think, the jump was on. It was fabulous! I used to tell people that in my next life I want to be a bird. In this life I do everything I can to practice. So I’ve been sky diving, parasailing, and now faux flying in a wind tunnel. It’s true I love the air; I love rides in the amusement park that let me soar throug…

Does Analytic Thinking Erode Religious Belief?

By Andrew Aghapour

…received sets of five randomly arranged words (e.g. “high winds the flies plane”) and were asked to drop one word and rearrange the others in order to create a more meaningful sentence (e.g. “the plane flies high”). Some of their participants were given scrambled sentences containing words associated with analytic thinking (e.g. “analyze,” “reason”) and other participants were given sentences that featured neutral words (e.g. “hammer,” “shoes”)….

Denzel’s Profane Preaching: A Religious Movie for the Rest of Us

By Sean S. O'Neil

…m in which Denzel Washington plays a pilot who miraculously lands a broken plane while drunk and high—opens with a scene of a naked woman smoking a joint. But even amid the sex and drugs, this film makes perfect sense as the latest installment of an acting career birthed in Pentecostal spirit. Ever since a woman with the “gift of prophecy” signaled a young Denzel out for future preaching prowess, he has been serious about his spiritual contributio…

After Embracing Female Bishop, Pope Spins Again on Women’s Ordination

By Kaya Oakes

…aced Jackelen at the passing of the peace. This morning, when he boarded a plane back to Rome, Kristina Kappelin of Swedish TV asked the pope if the Catholic ban on female priests was “forever.” “On the ordination of women in the Catholic church,” the pope replied, “the last word is clear.” Referring to John Paul II’s 1994 apostolic letter banning women from ordination, Francis told Kappelin that if the letter is “carefully read, it goes in that d…

Raelian Swastika Campaign Calculated to Stoke Controversy

By Joseph Laycock

This weekend a plane flew over Coney Island and the Rockaways towing a banner with a swastika and an ad for proswastika.org, a new initiative by the Raelians—a religious movement that believes humans were created by ancient extra-terrestrials, and whose insignia is a swastika inside of a hexagram. According to Raelian spokesperson Thomas Kaenzig, the swastika was brought to Earth millions of years ago by our alien forefathers, which is presumably…

The Anglican and the Evangelicals: Insights from the Sudanese Genocide

By Frederick Clarkson

…” “On 17th of June in the morning,” she concluded, “bombing was heavy, two planes, two MIGs and helicopters were bombing Kadugli. I looked at my kids and told them that we have to leave. We relied on God and left. Our travels were long and it took four days to get a plane to be able to leave the region. If we had waited just one day, we wouldn’t have made it out of there alive.” Afterward, the UN’s press office took the unusual step of issuing a p…