Search for "Copa Airlines Business Class Flight 800-299-7264 Ticket Booking Reservation"

Southern Baptists Embrace Minorities, but Not Gays

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…glacial pace on apologies and skip the next 150 years and get on with the business of apologizing to them now. A petition started by several organizations including the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists, Believe OutLoud, Faith in America, GetEQUAL, Soulforce and Truth Wins Out reads in part: “Given the arc of justice and the trajectory of history, there is no doubt the SBC will offer a full-fledged apology to the LGBT community in t…

NPR “Ex-Gay” Report Neither “Fair” Nor “Balanced”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

One of the reasons I left the news business nearly ten years ago was because the media’s idea of “balanced” reporting had become increasingly neurotic and, well, unbalanced. Our modern media believes that balance means finding one example of a story it has decided to pursue on one side of the issue, and then find another single example on the other side of the story then simply compare and contrast. Voila! Balance. That’s what NPR has done in thi…

Do iPads Cause Religious Experiences?

By Andrew Aghapour

…did next that caused a brief media flurry and garnered coverage by MSNBC, Business Insider, and over two hundred blogs, news sites, and forums within days of the documentary’s release. Riley tracked down an Apple super-fan, Alex Brooks (editor of World of Apple), and had a team of neuroscientists study Brooks’ brain with an MRI scanner as he was shown pictures of various mp3 players, computers, and gadgets. The goal of the experiment was to dete…

Why Liberal Religious Arguments Fail

By Peter Laarman

…ople who love and respect them are coming out right along with them. The classic instance is the faithful older church woman—a devoted and beloved member of the community—who, at just the right moment in a congregational meeting, stands up and says, “Well, friends, I guess we can argue about all of this until the cows come home. All I know is that ________, my ________, is as dear a child of God as I will ever hope to be.” She then goes on to te…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…Saints lend themselves to musical treatment, and if the Mormon mission, a classic rite of passage, lends itself to theater, the same cannot be said about the Book of Mormon. It’s simply too hard to read—even for most Mormons. It’s misleading to imply, as the musical does, that this scripture was somehow pragmatically useful to converts of the nineteenth century. In fact, for Joseph Smith and his followers, the existence of the translated text—pro…

Values Voters Summit: Preaching Wins the Morning

By Sarah Posner

…right base, Romney was at a disadvantage. He was boring, technocratic, and business-like, and the audience wasn’t buying his claim to be on their side on abortion and gay marriage. In contrast, Huckabee knew how to play the big-bad government card, claiming that the crisis we face is not “fiscal,” but “moral” — in other words, if everyone was just good and “Judeo-Christian” we wouldn’t need financial regulation. (Good luck with that!) See, for Huc…

Rick Santorum Figures Out the Feminist Plot to Create “Phony” Abortion Exceptions

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…iet Coke and petit-fours shaped like Kotex, simply out of spite.) Then the business meeting started, after which we planned to enjoy a light lunch. Anyway, that’s when someone — I forget who — brought a motion to the floor. And it was a thing of beauty in its sheer simplicity, I have to say. I still get chills when I think of it. She said, “Hey, sisters! How about we pretend as though pregnancy can, sometimes, become a fatal condition that causes…

The Problem with Ayn Rand Isn’t Atheism

By Sarah Posner

…s itself as “a full-service consulting firm helping political, non-profit, business and government entities better understand America’s rich and complex faith landscape and build relationships with people of faith from across the ideological spectrum on the local and national level.” It is boasting on its website of its attendance at the upcoming Netroots Nation conference where principals Burns Strider and Eric Sapp will be on a panel, “Moving Fo…

Ralph Reed At the Helm of the Religious Right, Again

By Sarah Posner

…sproportionately on issues such as abortion and homosexuality.” Now—as his business partner Tim Phillips heads up tea party astroturf group Americans for Prosperity—he’s burrowing for an opening to convince activists that social and economic issues are linked. He recently described an overlap between tea party activists and his organization on the Christian Broadcasting Network. When I wrote that piece in March 2010, Barry Lynn of Americans United…

Maybe Romney Could Win the GOP Nomination With a “Danger” Mitt Rebrand

By Joanna Brooks

…e kind of thing you’d expect your average big-fundraising poll-leading pro-business nice-guy Republican frontrunner to say. But is anyone paying attention? Nope. Because Sarah Palin is out in the parking lot doing doughnuts in her tour bus. Even CNN abandoned covering the announcement a few minutes early. With fantasy candidates and Fox news celebrities turning their heads, Republicans are showing about as much discipline and focus as US Weekly re…