The number of Jewish students who feel safe on U.S. campuses dropped substantially after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, a new poll released Wednesday (Nov. 29) by the Anti-Defamation League and Hillel International, the Jewish campus organization, finds. (Shimron, Religion News Service)
Read MorePope Francis’s relationship with the conservative wing of the American Catholic church was already on shaky ground when reports surfaced this week of his plan to evict one of his most prominent critics from a Vatican-subsidized apartment in Rome. (Graham, The New York Times)
Read MoreThe data showed that Taylor Swift was the most-streamed artist on Earth in 2023, with more than 26.1 billion streams on Spotify, the company said. She is the first female artist to claim the top spot since the platform started Spotify Wrapped in 2015. (Kircher, The New York Times)
Read MorePamela Rutledge, director of the independent Media Psychology Research Center, which advocates for media and technology with a positive influence, says holiday films are beloved, first and foremost, because they make us feel something. (Shewfelt, Yahoo!)
Read MoreIn April 2021, police discovered the mummified body of a woman named Amy Carlson wrapped in a sleeping bag and Christmas lights at a house near the tiny town of Crestone, Colo. Better known to her followers as “Mother God,” Carlson led a small, cult-like group called Love Has Won that is now the focus of a documentary series on HBO, “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God.” (Blake, Los Angeles Times)
Read MoreBy opening debate on a wide array of hot-button subjects without delivering explicit changes, he has encouraged the church’s progressives to push the envelope as far as possible, even toward real doctrinal rebellion, in the hopes of dragging him along. At the same time, by favoring the progressives in his personnel decisions and making institutional war on the legacy of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, he has pushed conservatives toward crisis, paranoia and revolt. (Douthat, The New York Times)
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