Search for "search for airline tickets cheap phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Purpose Driven Atheism: Secular Maharishis Seeking True Believers

By Frank Schaeffer

…o eternally unanswerable questions: the quest for ultimate meaning and the search for the origin of everything? At a time when Islamist extremists strap on bombs and blow up women and children; when the United States has just come staggering out of the oppressive thirty-year-plus embrace of the dumb-as-mud, hate-filled religious right; when evangelicals are bullying, harassing, and persecuting gay men and women in the name of God, it’s understanda…

How Trump’s Assertion of “Power to Pardon” Tramples the American Sacred

By Spencer Dew

…f law.” The Russia investigation must be pursued without interference—as a search for facts, an attempt to settle the question of “whether an American president violated his oath to uphold the Constitution by committing criminal acts.” As Richard North Patterson writes in the Boston Globe: This is not the case of an unconstrained federal government targeting a private citizen or lower officeholder. Trump is the world’s most powerful man; he can di…

ISIS Claims Responsibility for Orlando Massacre; Legal Gray Area in Jordan Amid Rising Fundamentalism; Push and Pull on LGBT Human Rights at UN; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…r of the INCISE (Intersectional Centre for Inclusion and Social Justice) research institute at Canterbury Christ Church University, will give an introductory talk before the Bishop of Buckingham, Bishop Alan Wilson will speak on “Same-sex marriage and the queering project of Jesus.” He will discuss the U.K.’s experience with the introduction of same-sex marriage and describe the impact of changes in the U.K. marriage practice on both church and st…

Anti-Gay Activism Falling Victim to Capitalism?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…the rest of us. They believe a general anti-bullying policy will do when research has repeatedly shown that to make a difference, bullying policies need to be specific – especially in the area of LGBT people. As Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network, made it clear last year, “when school level policies actually mention sexual orientation and gender identity, rates of bullying and harassment go down, and th…

How Would Religion Respond to Extraterrestrials? A Thought Experiment

By Ed Simon

…hile that corner of the night sky near NGC 6809 is still pulsing out prime numbers. –Rome, December, 2055 _________ The article that may one day be written about religious responses to E.T. will of course bear little resemblance to the fiction above. But, religion aside, the possibility of confirming alien life is less remote than you might think. On May 21, 2014, Dan Werthimer, scientific director of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Life) at…

Huckabee Says Obama is “Pretending to Be a Christian”

By Carlos Wilton

…p is to shop one’s spiritual seedling around to various local churches, in search of the one with the best garden soil in which to plant it. Should the seedling fail to flourish, it can always be transplanted elsewhere. (Or not. Some try to go it alone, expecting their plant to thrive in the light afforded by the flickering image of an evangelist on a television screen.) In time, believers took on the theology of their host denomination, seldom aw…

Biblical Inerrancy’s Long History as an Evangelical Activist for White Patriarchy

By Stephen Young

…lis, a New Testament professor and founder of the Institute for Biblical Research, provides a perfect example in his 1957 Christianity Today article, “Segregation and the Kingdom of God.” It contests Christian “integrationists” by labeling them “Secular,” asserting that they have their “roots in a secular view of the Kingdom of God,” and associating them with “Christian communism” as opposed to biblical truth. Similarly, in early 1960s Baptist deb…

How Are the “Nones” Raising Their Children?

By Christel Manning

…also a sociologist of religion, and NYU is an academic publisher, so my research was subject to peer review. This is the first research-based book about None parents, and it’s filling a real gap in the literature that I hope will be of interest to scholars as well as others interested in understanding the Nones, such as clergy, policymakers, or media persons. Are you hoping to just inform readers? Entertain them? Piss them off? My main goal is to…

Times’ Link of NOI With Capitol Killer is Based on Flawed Comparison Between Rightwing Christian Nationalism and Black Religious Nationalism

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…that God is just: That his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!” Was it Minister Louis Farrakhan? Rev. Jeremiah Wright? Some other Black liberation theologian? No, no, and no. These words were penned by Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of In…

Goliath the Israel Slayer: Why Max Blumenthal’s New Book is a Painful Read

By Shaul Magid

…r someone like me who stands very much on the left. Blumenthal went out in search of the ugly—and he found it. Occupation is an ugly business; it makes people on all sides look ugly, think ugly, act ugly. Jewish figures as disparate as David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Hannah Arendt, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz told us that prolonged occupation would destroy Israeli society. They were right. In that sense, Blumenthal hasn’t taught us anything new, althoug…