Search for "tricks to find cheap airline tickets phone number 1-800-299-7264"

How Muslim Civic Activism Helped Pass California’s Prop 47

By Nick Street

…r pledge cards and enlist volunteers to canvass potential voters and staff phone banks. He said that the positive responses to his phone pitch for Prop 47 were an unexpected surprise. “It’s been amazing to see how many people were supporting this,” Hakim said. “There are more people that think about justice than I realized!” The momentum for collaborative Muslim faith-based activism around Prop 47 began to build earlier this year, when Jawaid and…

Google’s Benevolent Interfaith Big Tent

By Lucia Hulsether

…the story, she returns home, opens Google India, and tracks down the phone number for the sweet shop her grandfather mentioned. Within seconds, she has called the store on her smart phone, and Yusuf’s grandson—who answers—has likewise opened Google to research visas for a reunion too long denied. We can understand the implications of this storyline by putting it into conversation with its longer historical context. The logic of the plot—that Googl…

Gay Marriage Supporters Rally People of Faith for Washington’s November Vote

By Nicole Neroulias

…ch of Christian denominations working with us now.” Discussions during the phone bank covered the Golden Rule, whether the Leviticus view of homosexuality as an abomination also extended to eating shrimp, and how civil marriage licenses are distinct from religious weddings. Most of the calls lasted mere seconds, with people not home or not interested. After an hour working the phones, Scott Holley, 33, cheerfully noted that he had become “unfazed…

The Pope in My Pocket; We Are All Dilettantes Now

By Michael A. Elliott

…or sell for under two dollars). And unlike the internet, the space of the iPhone feels not just private, but personal. Yes, the iPhone might be my means of connection with the world—it is, after all, a phone—but it is also my own little password-locked garden that I carry with me wherever I go. Moreover, I can remake the landscape with a few flicks of my fingers whenever I choose. As a result, the territory necessarily mixes the sacred and the pro…

Spiritual McCarthyism and the Catholic Vote

By Bill Berkowitz

…Obama’s National Catholic Outreach Coordinator] informing him of the three phone calls, requesting that he respond to my question: ‘I would like to know whether the Catholic National Advisory Council for Sen. Obama is still operative.’ He has not replied. Donohue’s statement continued: It would appear, then, that the group no longer exists. It is not hard to understand why. After being criticized by the Catholic League, Archbishop Joseph Naumann…

On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

By Ilana E. Strauss

…Physicsworld.com user asks, “What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?” Where infinity merges with the earth When you dig into pi, you encounter questions that are as much theological as mathematical: is there a pattern to the universe? Or is it fundamentally random? And how do we reckon with the infinite? Some people have always insisted that there must be a pattern behind pi. If only h…

Will Religion Solve the Obesity Crisis?

By Andrew Aghapour

…the finding (reported by The New Yorker’s Jonah Lehrer) that simple mental tricks can dramatically improve our ability to delay gratification. If we pretend that the chocolate cake in front of us is made out of plastic, for example, we can trick our ACC into assessing and evaluating a little bit differently, so that our DLPFC reserves aren’t diminished. In other words, it is much easier to resist temptations if we adjust our worldview so that they…

A Reporter’s Guide to the New Apostolic Reformation

By Frederick Clarkson and André Gagné

…ir multi-national, multi-racial and multi-ethnic character. That said, the numbers of nations and people that we mention are sourced solely on the claims of the groups themselves. We have no way to independently verify these numbers, so they should be used advisedly. Simply put, the global vision of the NAR is based on their understanding of the Great Commission text of Matthew 28:18-20, with an emphasis on “discipling nations” (28:19). Internatio…

Transgender, Scientologist, “Cult Hero”

By Jay Michaelson

…t as such (Urban focuses on the conceptual arguments rather than the dirty tricks), and how it problematizes conventional and academic definitions of religion itself. Taking a convincing and objective tone—sometimes too objective—Urban shows that Scientology was never intended to be a religion but only pursued what founder L. Ron Hubbard called “the religion angle” when its claims to healing ran afoul of government regulators (i.e. they didn’t wor…

RDBook: There is Nothing New About the New Atheism

By Ibrahim Abusharif

…piece.” And religious impulses and experiential modes are vestigial mental tricks, lingering superstitions, imperfect explanations of natural phenomena, or primitive ideas that now need to be expunged because of human progress (evinced by our darkening skies, melted glaciers, uncontainable greed, and shrinking fresh water supplies?). Like art, the core of the checks and ethics that we live by (even in secular societies) and that make civilization…