Search for "how to find cheap airline tickets online phone number 1-800-299-7264"

On the Ethics of the Tibetan Self-Immolations

By José Cabezón

…e path of not hurting others for the sake of our freedom.” Chung Tsering, “Online Articles on Self-immolation,” 102. The view is similar to one by Boepa Bhumo (“Tibetan Woman”), who posted on a Time magazine blog on Feburary 15, 2013: “Tibetans who have immolated in Tibet could have used this tactics to burn few Chinese together along [with themsleves]… but they never adopted such [a tactic] because we have never believed in any forms of violence….

Promise Keepers Launches Effort to Support Messianic Jews in Israel

By Sarah Posner

…fundraiser for MJBI, which was keynoted by Glenn Beck, Bernis claimed “our numbers are growing and growing,” because “the Bible predicted that the day would come when the blindness would come off the eyes of the people it all began with,” referring to the Jews. The organized opposition to Messianic Judaism in Israel is largely ultra-Orthodox. Still, in the larger culture, proselytizing is not socially accepted, and evangelists typically try to con…

Global LGBT Recap: World Vision Caves, World Congress of Families Vamps, God Weeps

By Peter Montgomery

…r the LGBT community.” As if to confirm Kornilov’s fears, video circulated online of a group of Russian thugs beating members of a St. Patrick’s day flash-mob performance after mistakenly assuming they were pro-gay demonstrators. UK: Inflammatory Rhetoric in Wake of Mosque Free Speech Controversy Last week we mentioned a controversy over the BBC’s cancellation of a debate about when being gay might become acceptable within Islam. Dr. Mohammad Nsee…

The Mormon Version of Infallibility

By Holly Welker

…f its members as individuals. “Utah has the highest rate in the country of online porn consumption, mental illness, and passive-aggression,” he says. “For a state to lead in any one of those pathologies is enough for me to step back and say, ‘Hey, what’s going wrong here?’ But for Utah to lead in all three markers is persuasive evidence that we have serious things wrong in our culture.” Part of the pathology is summed up by Dallin H. Oaks’s imperi…

Global LGBT Recap: Adventists Talk About, Not To, LGBT People; British Muslim Group Welcomes Gay-Rights Activist; Homophobia Exports Continue

By Peter Montgomery

…ank event on the costs of homophobia: video of that event is now available online. Global/South Africa: Seventh-day Adventists Talk About, Not To, LGBT People This week in Cape Town, South Africa, the Seventh Day Adventist Church has been holding an international invitation-only all-expenses-paid summit in Cape Town, South Africa, entitled In God’s Image: Scripture, Sexuality and Society Summit. The conference’s welcome letter says the purpose of…

Is Coverage of Liberal Religion a Media Fail?

By Sarah Posner

…Amanda Hess added that when one also takes into account tech hires, “these online platforms represent the merging of journalism (which is a traditionally white and male-dominated field) with technology (which is even more so!). If anything, their marriage should only produce more powerful white men.” BuzzFeed’s Deputy Editor-in-Chief Shani O. Hilton, who has worked at making BuzzFeed’s newsroom more diverse, noted that how this takes far more eff…

For Love or Threat: Pro-Life Prayer Includes Names, Photos of Abortion-Rights Advocates

By Alana Massey

Watching the abortion debate play out online rather than in real life, it can appear to the casual observer that violence and threats are primarily things of the past—a vague and dark period of the early 1990s sandwiched between Waco and Mogadishu. But with an impending Supreme Court decision over clinic buffer zones and large numbers of clinics shutting down in the face of new regulations, hostilities between activists outside abortion clinics h…

Global LGBT Recap: Francis’s First Year; Homophobia and Development; African Activists Push Back

By Peter Montgomery

…g on any of them.” The Vatican has marked the anniversary by publishing an online booklet of quotations by Pope Francis. Notably, the Vatican’s quote collection does not include what is almost certainly the most famous line of his papacy, his “who am I to judge?” response to a question about gay priests. In a reflection on his first year, Sr. Jeanine Grammick calls those five words, “an unambiguous departure from the harsh language of his predeces…

Scott Lively Defends Anti-Gay Uganda Work in Federal Court

By Peter Montgomery

…ay activists in the public arena. Lively’s lawyer, Harry Mihet, said in an online conversation hosted by The Huffington Post on Tuesday that the case is “ridiculous and frivolous.” He echoed claims that Liberty Counsel has been making that the lawsuit is an effort to silence Lively and others for expressing their personal beliefs about homosexuality. CCR Attorney Pam Spees countered that Lively’s work in Uganda has gone well beyond the expression…

What Robot Theology Can Tell Us About Ourselves

By Michael Schulson

…t people don’t connect faith to the seemingly commercial details of, say, iPhones, or robots that care for the elderly, or the dynamics of personal relationships conducted over Skype, even though these changes have a bearing on the way we relate to other human beings. As an alternative to this silence, Staley’s work touches on two possible modes of religious response to technology, which I’ll call—because sci-fi topics deserve sci-fi names—the Str…