Search for "best european websites to find cheap airline tickets phone number 1-800-299-7264"

The Silly Calls for Congress to Investigate Planned Parenthood

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…—income factors that may have made low-cost clinics more appealing, or the number of abortion clinics in the U.S. and how that has changed over the time period in question, or the possibility that people in private practice would rather not perform abortions for any number of possible reasons, including threats on their lives—you’d be left unsatisfied. Likewise, the report expresses grave concern over the fact that the very same clinics that see…

Does Multiverse Theory Bring Theology Into Science?

By Andrew Aghapour

…to explain the bounty or harmony of the world around us. Given an infinite number of universes, a few of them are bound to be life-friendly at some point, and we’re in one of them. The problem, of course, is that the price of getting rid of God is an infinite number of universes we can’t see. So sober-minded contemporary scientists end up on the same side as (some) theologians in arguing that the multiverse is extravagant, unnecessary, and unscien…

International reax to US Marriage Ruling; Official violence at Turkey’s Pride; Marriage Advances in Mexico Over Church Objections; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…dicted that 30,000 people would participate in the service, but the actual number appeared to number around 2,000. “Our prayers will open the sky and the homosexuals will fall, we will be blessed with victory,” said Lee Young-hoon, head of the leading organization in the anti-LGBT coalition. Mexico: Supreme Court embraces marriage, Church and some political officials resist As we have been reporting, the marriage equality movement has been movemen…

Meeting on the Bridge: Fr. James Martin’s Ministry to LGBT Catholics Becomes a Book

By Kaya Oakes

…to get more upset about these things until I realized a couple of things. Number one, not everyone’s going to like you. Number two, engaging with these people in arguments is often fruitless. Number three, a lot of times they refuse to listen. And number four, a very small percentage of them are actually crazy. There’s a great scene in a movie called The Trouble with Angels from the 1960s. It’s about a Catholic girls’ school outside of Philadelph…

I Volunteer to Root Out Christian Extremism

By Peter Laarman

…rtheless put the number at roughly 338,000. I am willing to work with this number until a better one comes along. Of this number, roughly 8,000 congregations claim upwards of 1,000 members; most are smaller, indeed most are much smaller. My concept is this: I think we can create a Christian Honor Corps (CHC) of perhaps 10,000 persons. Persons like myself who take our responsibility to monitor Christian extremist thought seriously and who are willi…

Glenn Beck’s Salvation Army

By Peter Montgomery

…preachers, he says, America today would be more like France, following the European model of “collective rights, collective issues, collective everything.” In the Tea Party era, ‘collective’ is a four-letter word. Beck and Barton don’t even like the terms “human rights” or “social justice” because they see them as collectivist. In a televised conversation in April, Barton dismissed social justice, saying “That’s collective rights. Jesus was not in…

New Reports Reveal Global Persecution of Nonbelievers

By Austin Dacey

…ects even laws against religious hate speech, which were found in 36 of 45 European states in 2011. It’s the best place in the world to be a secularist. Several years ago I co-authored an article in Free Inquiry magazine, entitled “Atheism is not a Civil Rights Issue,” criticizing atheist activists in the U.S. for comparing their struggles to the struggles of women, African Americans, and GLBTQ citizens. On a global scale, however, secularism most…

Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…pass, cursing unto death those who cannot solve it. Sphinxes also populate European art from the Renaissance on. Gustave Moreau’s 1864 painting Oedipus and the Sphinx is a classic of symbolist art, depicting the Theban king assailed by a feminine monster at once seductive and deadly. The surrealists, including Picasso, were known for engaging mythic imagery, and were particularly intrigued by composite beasts such as the sphinx. Argentine painter…

Growing Up Gay in 666: Fred Phelps in Retrospect

By Scott Blaine Swenson

…ify hate and violence. And while the coincidence of being born under the “Sign of the Beast” in Topeka 666 is still a little unnerving, there are differing opinions about the number’s translation. Some theologians suggest the number should really be 616, in which case, all eyes on Peoria, Illinois….

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

By Spencer Dew

…r, neither an omniscient narrator nor Emersonian Invisible Eyeball, is, at best, a recorder in a room, for a limited amount of time and recording on only one wavelength. We have the sounds of cooking, but not the smell or the taste of that fried fish. While offering us what we would otherwise not hear, this project also highlights limitations that are always on us. Such mapping exemplifies what anthropologist John L. Jackson, Jr. calls “thin descr…