Search for "cheap airline tickets from orlando to charlotte nc phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Raelians’ “Clitoraid” Met With Suspicion in Burkina Faso

By Joseph Laycock

…in Western Africa. (Raelians have been making missionary trips to Africa since 1982.) Three years after French urologist Pierre Foldés invented a procedure in 2004 to repair the damage of female circumcision Clitoraid was founded for the purpose of making the procedure available to women throughout Africa. Boisselier, formerly of Clonaid, became the organization’s president. While Dr. Foldés has publically distanced himself from Clitoraid, his stu…

Does Religion Condemn Homosexuality?

By Michael Bronski

…Abrahamic traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—provide little convincing evidence to justify legal or social discrimination against LGBT people. What the Bible does or does not really say about homosexuality is less the point than how living, breathing historical people organize meanings and judgments around sexual activity and how we think about our bodies. What of Christianity, the dominant religion in the United States? A large majorit…

Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…he new law was approved, representatives of The Gambia’s National Intelligence Agency have been reportedly conducting door-to-door enquiries to identify, arrest and detain individuals believed to be homosexual, and some of those detained have allegedly also been subjected to violent attacks and mistreatment, Mr. Zeid said. In other countries, similar laws have also led to an increase in violence against members of the LGBT community, including mob…

7 Women Scholars On the Gender Divide in Religious Studies, the Power of Mentors, and Leading While Female

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…has held positions at Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, Princeton, and the Claremont School of Theology. At the end, I was convinced that religion could be transformative and definitely was worth studying. Eventually, I entered grad school at the University of Chicago interested in two broad sorts of questions: the recurring set (why do people believe, do, and experience things that I find surprising or implausible?) and t…

‘My Name is Legion’: Sources and Forces of White Supremacy in the U.S.

By R. Drew Smith

…story or in the world today has the Negro been better off. The life expectancy of the Negro increased when he was transported to America. He was not taken from freedom into slavery, but from a vicious slavery to degenerate chiefs to a generally benevolent slavery in the United States.” While clergy were among the leading proponents of 19th-century white supremacy, the 20th century witnessed the coming-of-age of an assortment of rank-and-file white…

Religious Leaders Need ‘Empty the Pews’ Which Chronicles the Darker Side of the ‘Nones’ Phenomenon

By Kaya Oakes

…m a fundamentalist background. While there’s doubtlessly a great deal of sincerity in those denominations, the issue for a queer person, as evidenced by this book, is that the pain Christianity has caused them will take more than a rainbow banner or a “welcome” sign to address. All of which leads us to the question I asked myself several times while reading the book: who is the intended audience? I suspect Stroop and O’Neal want other exvangelical…

Francis Must Make Changes to Have a Real Effect

By Patricia Miller

…he way. Obviously, my dogma/doctrine typo was just that, as was the difference in Francis’ and Benedict’s net favorability rating, which is 11 points, not 6. But my point remains. Given the near-consensus that Benedict’s papacy was pretty much a disaster for the church, I find it a bit surprising that three-quarters of Catholics still had a generally favorable view of the guy. To me, as I said, it suggests that most Catholics don’t pay much attent…

Union Busting for God: Catholic Colleges Invoke “Religious Freedom” to Violate Catholic Teaching

By Kaya Oakes

…larly known as the “Great Apostle of Charity,” which makes DePaul’s resistance to adjunct organizing all the more ironic, since at least a quarter of adjuncts are so poorly remunerated that they qualify for Medicaid or food stamps. The greater glory of the bottom line The powerhouse religious order of Catholic higher education is the Jesuits, who run twenty-eight colleges and universities throughout the USA. Tuition and fees at Jesuit colleges ran…

The Anti-Trans Hate Machine’s Conspiracies Don’t Stop at the US Border

By Annika Brockschmidt

…inionist Erik Prince on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. It’s also no coincidence that the article’s illustration had previously featured a picture of a cartoon mouse, a well-known German kids’ cartoon. Julian Reichelt, the disgraced former editor-in-chief of “Bild,” Germany’s largest right-leaning tabloid, who was fired after a New York Times investigation found claims of sexual harassment and inappropriate sexual relationships in the work plac…

What’s So Troubling About Funding a Playground? How Trinity Lutheran Undermines the First Amendment

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…of the ruling is unclear. (More on that later.) Both Justice Gorsuch in concurrence and Justice Sotomayor in dissent criticized the majority’s attempt to create a line between religious identity and activities, though they ultimately arrive at opposing conclusions. Gorsuch asked, “Can it really matter whether the restriction in Locke was phrased in terms of use instead of status (for was it a student who wanted a vocational degree in religion? Or…