Is cage-fighting Christian?

Christianity Today goes there, with a forum featuring the various pros and cons on an ethical dilemma that had never occurred to me.

Kudos to CT for providing us with an Oscar-worthy hook: the evangelical magazine announces its annual Critics' Choice Awards.

The Most Redeeming Films of 2011 came out last week. (List-topper: “Of Gods and Men.” Update your Netflix queue. Now.)

The City of Brotherly Love? Not so much: The lawyer for a Philadelphia archdiocesan official, Msgr. William Lynn, who is under indictment for enabling abusive priests to molest kids, says Lynn was “thrown under the bus” by his successor.

Apropos, researchers say gossip is good – as long as it’s true. Though that kind of takes the fun out of it, no?

Other research shows that religion is good for religious people, as long as they are surrounded by other religious people.

Doomsday soothsayer Harold Camping has retired, but George Soros is filling that religion-shaped hole with secular prophecies, warning of global collapse and such.

“At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says. “I am not here to cheer you up.”

Mission accomplished. By the by, here’s a definitive guide to debunking numerology, a tool some prophets like to deploy.

“Coffee, tea, but not Thee?” Alaska Airlines is ending its 30-plus-year tradition of providing prayer cards on customers' meal trays.

Gordon Bowker, who co-founded Starbucks and Redhook Ale Brewery, was one of those complaining about the cards because he figured it meant something bad was in the offing. But since 2006, only first-class passengers like Bowker have been getting them, because the airline discontinued meal service to coach. So who should be complaining?

And finally, the “most exciting archival discovery in the post-Reformation era.”

Drumroll, please…

…Vatican archivists have found what they believe to be an unfinished encyclical on the Rosary penned by Pope Leo XIII!

Pope Leo, who died in 1903, had published 12 others on the Rosary, so what could this add?

The archivists say Leo wanted to show that “the only means by which to receive grace and indulgences from recitation is to pray the rosary in a counter-clockwise direction. According to the encyclical, praying the rosary in a clockwise direction would ‘bear no fruit and Heaven would be closed to the petitioner and his pleas.’ “

Now that’s tough guy Christianity.

— David Gibson