The traditions of a church wedding with bells, choristers and relatives packed into pews are fading in Italy where civil ceremonies have overtaken religious marriages for the first time. Most Italians claim to be Roman Catholics, but last year 50.1 per cent of weddings were in register offices, according to the national institute for statistics (Istat). (Kington, The Times)
Read MoreToday the world has the uncanny shimmer of future weirdness, its every week stuffed with new events that seem to open up strange new realities only to be forgotten as the next wave of strangeness hits. But as the decade pulls to a close, we’re unpacking the last year of it in a timeline of crucial 2019 dates that played like premonitions of where we’ll be ten years from now. (New York Magazine)
Read MoreThe story… includes interviews with the vice presidents of two different porn sites, an embedded tweet about the supposed health benefits of chronic masturbation, and—to wrap it up—a “comforting message” from an “adult performer and director.” They all want you to know that porn won’t hurt you or anyone else. After all, everyone is watching it. (Quay, The American Conservative)
Read MoreNashville-based LifeWay Research asked 1,000 Protestant pastors about their personal connections to the opioid epidemic and how their churches are looking to address the issue. Two-thirds of pastors (66 percent) say a family member of someone in their congregation has been personally affected by opioid abuse. More than half (55 percent) say they or someone in their congregation knows a local neighbor suffering through opioid abuse. (Earls, Baptist Press)
Read MoreIn an unprecedented 100-page report, the church confesses that “Christians have been guilty of promoting and fostering negative stereotypes of Jewish people that have contributed to grave suffering and injustice”, dating to when early Christians blamed Jews for the death of Jesus. (Burgess, The Times)
Read MoreProminent professional journalists derided the apology and weighed in to note, often incredulously, that the Northwestern journalists had been doing some of the most basic, standard work that reporters have always done — watching public events, interviewing people and describing what they saw. (Bosman, Smith & Taylor, The New York Times)
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