Religion

When we reported yesterday, in our daily novelty humor post about the relentless flipflopping of "world-renowned" commodity guru...

... and CNBC Fast Money staple Dennis Gartman, that the newsletter seller said he was "quietly, but steadily, in our own account… our retirement funds here at TGL and the only money we manage but money that is really rather important to us, obviously!... we are turning bearish of equities", we warned "beware the squeeze."

The market proceeded to explode higher.

At Aleteia, John Burger wrote a really good piece about the Benedict Option and why it appeals to many Christians these days. He has examples: a Catholic one, an Evangelical one, and an individual one. The piece begins like this:

For the most part, Christians have had a happy — some would even say “privileged” — time of it in America, where Christianity and Christian churches were essentially left alone as they freely exercised their religion within society both privately and, up until recently, in partnership with the government.

Some news and views from the world of US Catholicism:

1. Students at Seattle’s Matteo Ricci College are occupying the dean’s office, demanding, among other things, her resignation.:

Fiza Mohammad, a 22-year-old senior majoring in humanities, said the tensions have been mounting for months for a couple of reasons.

First, racism and sexism are especially acute at Matteo Ricci because the humanities curriculum is based heavily on Western canon and European classic literature, i.e. stuff that old racist and sexist white guys wrote down, Mohammad said.

Anne Graham Lotz, the daughter of famed evangelist Billy Graham, appeared on right wing radio show this week to tell listeners that God has forsaken the U.S. because of transgender rights She said God has abandoned Americans because of their attitude towards transgender rights, evolution and the separation of church and state and further claimed that the 9/11 terrorist attacks and bad weather were both “evidence that God has backed away,” as a result of policies in the US.

Amnesty International have said that Syrian rebels may have committed war crimes in a Kurdish-controlled area of Aleppo, killing dozens of innocent civilians. They say they collected evidence which suggest that at least 83 civilians, including 30 children, were killed between February and April by indiscriminate shellfire on the Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood in Syria’s former commercial hub.