The Times’ Paul Vitello had an interesting piece yesterday on how churches are seeing a surge in attendance as the economy tanks. But it is mainly the “enthusiastic” denominations of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism that are doing well. Even Jehovah’s Witnesses are doing more door-knocking because out-of-work folks are at home: A recent spot check of…

The Discovery Channel opens up what many–including the Vatican–had taken to be a settled question, namely whether the famous Shroud of Turin is truly the burial cloth of Jesus. “Unwrapping the Shroud: New Evidence,” airs Sunday (today), Dec. 14, at 10pm Eastern time. The show’s promo material says this: “The Shroud of Turin was believed…

Word has come down that Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, one of the great figures of the Catholic Church, certainly in the United States, died this morning at the Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University in The Bronx. He was 90 and had until the past year or so had been very active, but the effects of…

1968 was a true annus horribilis, as the Queen (upending Dryden) might have said, with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the social upheavals surrounding the Vietnam War ramping up. Then, on Dec. 10, 1968, came the bizarre death of Thomas Merton, the Catholic convert, Trappist monk and enormously influential spiritual…

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