Do devout Catholics have better sex? That’s what the Family Research Council is promoting, although it’s unclear to me how they singled out Catholics as opposed to, say, Methodists. You can watch the entire 53-minute lecture here.
Members of the Satanic Temple perform a “Pink Mass” at the grave of Fred Phelps’ mother to turn her into a lesbian in the afterlife.
This. Is. Awesome. A Satanist group (of course) held a “Pink Mass” in a Mississippi cemetery to turn Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps’ dead mother into a lesbian in the afterlife. The Satanists’ have their own website with all the details here.
And we won’t even tell you what the Satanist priest did to make it official.
A Jewish “ex-gay” group heads to court today in New Jersey to fend off a consumer fraud suit for advertising it can help you pray away the gay.
Surprise, surprise: A leading atheist group is objecting to a planned Holocaust memorial at the Ohio statehouse because it includes a six-pointed Star of David. The architect, World Trade Center guru Daniel Libeskind, is the son of Holocaust survivors.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
A nun who spends 30 hours a week knocking on doors, trying to prod Catholics to come back to church.
Hundreds of people lined up outside a Unitarian church in suburban Boston to hear the Rev. Helmut Schuller talk about church reform. The Austrian firebrand was banned from speaking on Catholic property by the Archdiocese of Boston.
The Bieb got a tattoo of his mother’s eye (yes, you read that right) on his arm. Pattie Mallette, you may recall, raised her son in an evangelical church.
A federal court has tossed out a suit filed by teachers in Dearborn, Mich., that said they faced discrimination because they were not Muslims. The court found an “absence of evidence.”
Americans are split (when aren’t we split?) on what defines a “religious” person: faith or actions, according to a new PRRI/Brookings poll.
Some 9,000 athletes kicked off the “Jewish Olympics” in Jerusalem last night, led by U.S. Olympic gymnast (but not competitor) Aly Reisman.
Fasting during Ramadan is hard enough. Try doing it while shopping and cooking.
If you’re still a little baffled about how you can shave time off in purgatory using social media and World Youth Day, I try to break it down into five tweets.
Speaking of, Uncle Frank is going to find a diminished church when he touches down in Rio; Catholics have slid from 92 to 65 percent of Brazil’s population in a generation.
NCR’s John Allen says His Holiness is going to Brazil at a time of unprecedented social unrest, and the question is whether Brazilians “see the government-subsidized Catholic event as part of the problem, or Francis as an icon of the solution.”
And finally this, because it’s Friday. And yes, I know it’s not religious, but bizarre stories out of Florida are a religion in their own right (I know, I used to live there). A lady near Tampa wants to swim in her mermaid suit, but the community pool won’t allow her.
I wonder what they do about her pet unicorn.
If you’re a mermaid or a leprechaun or whatever you want to be, you can always come swim in the RNS pool. Just make sure you give us your email address so we can send you the daily Religion News Roundup.
