Week in religion: Christian airline set to launch
An aviation ministry hoping to make traveling easier for missionaries has received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to become its own airline.
The Texas-based ministry, called Judah 1, said the approval will help eliminate the hassle of security checks and lost baggage at traditional airports. Currently, Judah 1 provides their services to Christians traveling domestically and internationally for mission trips and religious tours.
Judah 1 and CEO Everett Aaron said the airlines’ approval by the FAA will help even more people.
“This means Judah 1 will have the freedom to transport as many different churches and mission organizations as we can,” Aaron said on the ministry’s website. The FAA approval allows Judah 1 to operate as an airline as opposed to a private operator.
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CATHOLIC STUDY: According to a recent Pew Research Center study, 39 percent of the world’s Catholics live in Latin America, while 24 percent live in Europe, 16 percent live in sub-Saharan Africa and 12 percent live in the Asia-Pacific region.
Good book?
“The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers” by Jack Tannous
In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history.