Search for "cheap airline tickets to la paz bolivia phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Special Hell: Progressive Catholics Reckon With the Rise of Trump

By Patricia Miller

…’s heard from. “It’s all over the demographic landscape—older and younger, lawyers, blue collar workers, etc.—all used the word fear.” The big question they all have, Krueger said, is how they should move forward as Catholics, especially because the institutional church is offering little guidance. On one hand, the Catholic bishops have focused on the church’s traditional support for immigrants and immigration, which would appear to be a repudiati…

55% of Utah Mormons Believe LGBT People can “Change”

By Joanna Brooks

…studied and understood. Any doctrine that would be used to exclude a good number of the earth’s people from full equality before the law and God should be very carefully examined. When it comes to gay issues, most Mormons have only the muddiest understanding of what life is like for gay people or about the doctrinal reasons their LDS leaders say and do the things they do. In fact, most Mormons have only the muddiest understanding about what their…

The Devil is in the Details

By Amina Wadud

…wearing clothes I know I won’t be taking, so I don’t have to worry that my last laundry is missing something I need there, because I’m still wearing it over here. The other thing is making amends with my children. All week I’ve been trying to keep my notes generated about this that and the other. It’s kinda hard when you are also excited about this trip and when you continue to interact with them—even to the point where they can get annoying! But…

What Pence and Kaine Reveal About Divides in Catholicism

By Patricia Miller

…at diverged that tells us something critical about how Catholicism—and the larger religious landscape—has evolved over the past few decades. Both Pence and Kaine were raised in Midwest, middle-class, observant Irish-Catholic families. Pence started out as a Democrat, voting for Jimmy Carter in 1980, but like many other more conservative-minded Catholics switched alliances to the Republican Party, voting for Ronald Reagan in 1984. The Jesuit-educat…

Do Space Aliens Need Baptism? The View From Gliese 581g

By Paul Wallace

…ter some contemplation, I’ve decided that it’s not preposterous after all. Last week, a new planet—Gliese 581g—was discovered orbiting a star a mere 20 light years away in the constellation Libra. This in itself is not too big a deal, because the discovery of planets orbiting other stars (termed “exoplanets”) has become a weekly occurrence. But this planet is special because (1) it’s massive enough to retain an atmosphere, and (2) it resides squar…

Commies, Blacks, Jews, the UCC and Other Threats to America

By Daniel Schultz

…the nation, and gays and lesbians should enjoy equal protection under the law. Good that they think we’re a bunch of wild-eyed radicals. If I and the members of my denomination scare Glenn Beck, that’s a good thing. It means they’re off-balance. Same goes for the ever-execrable Mark Tooley, writing the same hack piece for the 40,000th time at the Weekly Standard. He strains at gnats because ultimately he has nothing else to fall back on, no compe…

Halloween, Evangelicals, and the Macabre

By John W. Morehead

…al academic journal. Also, new books are being produced that draw upon scholarly historical and ethnographic approaches to the study of forms of paganism, and critique has been brought to popular evangelical books on witchcraft, with evangelicals and pagans even coming together as described in Beyond the Burning Times (Lion, 2009). Halloween is also a good time to confront monsters. Monster Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), a series of…

We Were Here Before September 11th

By Amina Wadud

…they are Muslims and they are the primary spokepersons about this new popular trend of Islam in America. Some even made a considerable amount of money off of their version of the “I am your friendly neighborhood Muslim; and I am an American;” as if Muslims didn’t exist in America before they became spokespersons. Or maybe it is the “friendly” part. For surely Islam became erroneously equated with terrorism after September 11th. Don’t get me wrong…

Why Anti-Gay Bullying is a Theological Issue

By Cody J. Sanders

…acitly welcoming or pseudo-affirming position to come out and publicly proclaim their places of worship as truly welcoming and affirming sanctuaries for people of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities. I cannot count the number of times I have heard well-meaning, good-hearted people respond to this appeal, saying, “Things are a lot better for gay people today than they were several years (or decades) ago. In time, our society (or churc…

The American Media’s Longterm Ambivalence About the Papacy

By Peter Manseau

…f approach aside, Time and Life nonetheless told Catholic stories with similar relationship to authority. The notion that a religious organization as large as the Catholic Church might naturally include internal dissent was for the most part beyond the newsweeklies’ narratives of Catholicism in America, at least through the first four decades of publication. Only with the shifting cultural sands of the 1960s and early ’70s did Time’s Catholic cove…