Search for "cheap airline tickets from baltimore to charleston sc phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Did North Carolinians Vote Against their Own Beliefs?

By Peter Montgomery

…their families and deny them equal rights as citizens. The second saddest number comes with its own silver lining. Public Policy Polling reported on Sunday that most North Carolina residents believe that gay couples should have access to some legal protections. But because most voters didn’t understand just how extreme and far-reaching the amendment before them today was, they would vote for it to “protect” marriage. According to PPP: In some sen…

‘It’s a Gay Problem,’ and Other Myths From the Catholic Church’s Sexual Abuse Crisis

By Joelle Casteix

…ize abuse, and encourage the continued cover-up. If we want to address the scope and scale of the problem and put an end to the crisis and those who enable it, we must first work to dispel the myths and stereotypes that aim to silence victims and normalize criminal sexual behavior. A problem of “homosexual priests” This is a complicated issue, though it’s not a murky one. It’s important to begin by noting that, according to experts, there is absol…

Packed with Threats of Political Violence, Media Largely Ignore the NAR’s ‘Million Women’ Rally in DC

By Frederick Clarkson

…lor thought it was less. But certainly tens of thousands attended, and the number may even exceed a hundred thousand. Whatever the actual number at the Mall, the audience was much larger since the event was live-streamed on Facebook, YouTube, and Rumble and translated into several languages. The Jumbotrons that lined the Mall were alternatively closed captioned in English and Spanish. It’s difficult to imagine any other religious or political even…

A Peek Inside the ‘Onion’ of Scientology

By Kristin Rawls

…ou won’t be punitive. Current Scientologists and ex-Scientologists have described Scientology to me as an onion, and celebrities are on the outside of the onion. David Miscavige resides in the center, and the Scientology experienced by members of the Sea Organization, which Miscavige heads, is vastly different than the Scienotology experienced by someone like Tom Cruise. There have been allegations of abuse, for example, and an overwhelming numbe…

Punks vs. Monks: Rockers Speak Out Against Genocide in Myanmar

By M. Sophia Newman

…bjected to denials of the rights to travel, marry and have children. The discrimination appears rooted in the ethnic group’s Muslim faith, which makes them a tiny minority in the majority-Buddhist nation. The most notable participants in the violence are a movement of Buddhist monks called “969”. The movement, which is led by a monk named Wirathu, has used a nationalist stance to campaign against the Rohingya, in part by falsely alleging that the…

Like a Virgin

By Donna Freitas

…lained how it took her a full two years to “repackage” her virginity and described all the many and diverse steps she took before she began to call herself a virgin again. To call her proud of this effort and its result is an understatement. She fairly glowed. So I began to see Born Again Virginity as a rather creative, useful, empowering category that some women were using to “come out” to friends and peers about sexual behavior, while still reta…

The Harlot Shall Be Burned with Fire: Biblical Literalism in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

By Sarah Sentilles

…nt steps. Almost everyone in the theater gasped when the cat’s body was on screen. People turned away, horrified. I did, too. I’m trained. But when the screen was filled with photographs of a woman—raped, naked, her mutilated face unrecognizable—no one made a sound. What are We Being Asked to See? The main character, Lisbeth Salander, is raped twice in the film. In the first, Lisbeth is forced to engage in oral sex, which, according to the Departm…

Coffeehouse Churches and the ‘Party-on Messiah’: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, Part 3

By Mark Dery

…all, a blown-up detail of Christ’s sorrowful face from some Renaissance fresco—nightly devotions not unlike those performed by numberless teenage fans, in bedrooms across America, before pin-ups ripped from rock magazines like Creem or Circus or Hit Parader, except in my case the object of my obsession was the Son of God. I caught myself thinking how passionately I loved him. And I wondered what that meant. And I realized I didn’t care. Soul love…

Feeding on the Faithful: How Supernatural Thinking Empowered the Third Reich

By Eric Kurlander

…two audiences: their fellow scholars and the lay public. This is not easy. Scholarly disciplines have never been more specialized and the competition for grant money and publication more difficult. But if one wants to reach a wide public, one has to strike the right balance between historiographical complexity/originality and accessibility, between exhaustively documented, archival-based primary research and a story-driven narrative unencumbered b…

$50 Billion Fundamentalist Free Fall

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ese initial investors… and for everybody else. It’s also called a “pyramid scheme,” and so long as the base of the pyramid is larger than the tip, the system is, if not quite secure, then stable at least. When numbers of new investors decrease, as is inevitable in a finite universe, the seismic shocks ensue. What triggered this now is the overwhelming feeling of crisis on Wall Street and throughout the country. Simply put, a number of Madoff’s inv…