Search for "cheap airline tickets from ny to cairo egypt phone number 1-800-299-7264"

The Great Secret of Constitutional Law: Why Proposition 8 Will (and perhaps should) Be Upheld

By Bruce Ledewitz

…of same-sex marriage, legislative reform efforts were gaining ground in a number of states. Granted, these were usually modest civil union compromises, but they were not sparking the kind of backlash that led to the Proposition 8 effort in California. Such statutory reform could have laid the foundation for further legal development toward full recognition of the right to marry. In retrospect, the federal courts were probably wise to avoid any su…

Is Torture Utilitarian?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ers, a CIA prisoner may be subjected to two 2-hour “sessions” per day. In any given “session,” the detainee may be subjected to as many as six applications of water, each lasting up to 40 seconds. That is eight full minutes of the experience of drowning in a single day. And the technique may be applied on five separate days within a 30-day period. Then comes the final sentence, so bland and understated as to be easily missed. Zubaydah was subjecte…

Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…xploring their spirituality in different ways.’ I think eventually a large number of those people will re-affiliate in some way, shape, or form—but when they do, the actual institutions of religion will be very different because of the demands those people make on new kinds of churches. I look at that whole arc of people who are leaving church because of the failure of the institution, and I don’t see that as threatening. I see that as a really ex…

5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Overthink the New Pew Data’s Impact on Politics

By Sarah Posner

…e is no other religious group analyzed in the survey that has experienced anything close to that kind of ratio of losses to gains via religious switching,” Smith said. Evangelicals, on the other hand, have seen their share of the adult population drop very slightly (less than a one percent drop, but still around a quarter of the U.S. adult population). But their overall numbers are up because they have experienced net gains from religious switchin…

More than Half of Mississippi GOP Primary Voters Believe the President is Muslim

By Sarah Posner

…ondents believe interracial marriage should be illegal; 24% of evangelicals did. Sixty-six percent of respondents in Mississippi do not believe in evolution; among evangelicals that number jumped to 74%. Of all the respondents, 29% believe interracial marriage should be illegal; among evangelicals that number was 33%….

For Buddhism, Science is Not a Killer of Religion

By Paul Wallace

…ng to us doubting Thomases who live by Occam’s razor and won’t believe in anything without sufficient evidence. But here’s the rub: In Buddhism, it seems, you don’t have to believe any of this stuff. You can say with all the gravity you can muster that you believe none of it—except perhaps something about nirvana, perhaps—and no one will tell you that you’re not a Buddhist. Because when you whittle it down to its essence, Buddhism is very simple a…

Muslims in America, Fifty Years Later: New Poll Shows Pride and Optimism In the Face of Bias

By Edward E. Curtis IV

…speech, the group’s criticism of American racism and imperialism struck many ordinary Americans as politically radical and thus dangerous. The globe’s most powerful symbol of resistance to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was the Nation of Islam’s most famous member, boxer Muhammad Ali. In 1967, Ali refused induction in the U.S. armed forces to protest the war, and as a result, was forced to give up his heavyweight boxing crown. In 2017, even…

Creeping Shari’ah… Ahem, Excuse Me… Biblical Law

By Julie Ingersoll

…hole with a model put forth over 40 years ago by none other than RJ Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism. Governor Rick Scott wants to move prisoners from government institutions to privately run facilities and increase the 4300 inmates already held within faith based programs by increasing the number of programs from four to six. While inmates in these facilitates choose the faith based programs over other options, it’s not, as p…

Forget Right or Wrong

By Elizabeth Drescher

…tracked a rapid increase in the number of people who do not identify with any particular faith tradition. However, the so-called “Nones” have been shown in both studies to be moving not so much from belief to unbelief, as from institutionalized expressions of faith in community to all kinds of “something else.” The “something else-ness,” if you will, of American faith practice is likewise tracked in a recent Pew study on religion among the millenn…

The Episcopal Church ‘Takes a Flying Leap’ into Controversies Old and New

By Elizabeth Drescher

…y, CA, who chaired a task force that crafted part of the resolution. “In many ways, the liturgy just approved for the blessing of a lifelong covenant contains many of the same elements as the liturgy for celebrating a marriage in the Book of Common Prayer—declaration of intention, the exchange of vows, exchanging rings or other tokens, et cetera,” Johnson explained. “The liturgy, however, is not called ‘marriage’ and the presiding minister does no…