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Forget hamburgers and hot dogs—the U.S. Department of Agriculture is pushing people to grill up pineapple slices, peaches, nectarines and other fruit for their big July 4th feast. “Throw some grilled pineapple on the grill & get ready to enjoy nature’s candy,” USDA’s “MyPlate” website tweeted out this week. […] If you must grill meat, USDA is suggesting things like a “low-sodium & tasty recipe for grilled steak with Criolla sauce.” But there’s not much information on how to make a good burger. When a search for the word “hamburger” is run on the MyPlate site, the first three items...

The Vatican has just revealed in today's Bollettino the line-up of speakers for the official presentation of the "Environment Encyclical", Laudato Si, on June 18 at the New Synod Hall. - Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace; - His Eminence Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, representing the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Orthodox Church; - Prof. John Schellnhuber, Founding Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Metropolitan John, 84 years old, is the Patriarchate of Constantinople's leading figure in ecumenical discussions and has long been close to the Catholic ecumenical establishment....

Christianity killed paganism in antiquity; what will kill the new paganism? Western civilization may be swiftly defaulting to functional paganism, and by default paganism I do not mean we shall see the gods and goddesses again dressed out in temples, hungry for sacrifice. Pan, Zeus, or Athena may find niche markets in contemporary neo-paganism, but I don’t think even they will fit into the unfocused spirituality trending today. No, what I mean by default paganism are habits of thought and living that commonly governed life for ordinary Romans, the people. Until roughly the mid-twentieth century, there were three widespread...

(LiveActionNews) — A common narrative in our society is that, by opposing abortion and infanticide, Christians are conducting a “war on women.” However, in a fascinating study entitled “The Rise of Christianity,” published by Princeton University Press, sociologist Rodney Stark argues that the phenomenal growth of “the obscure, marginal Jesus movement” was due in large part to women. Stark argues that early Christianity was “especially attractive to women” because “within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.”Furthermore, Stark argues that the Christian opposition to abortion and infanticide was one of...

The unsung heroes of your community’s police force are its capable K-9 unit. These talented pooches can serve alongside a police force for upwards of a decade. As any pet owner knows, one of the hardest things in life is saying goodbye to your best friend. Police in West Deptford, New Jersey had to do just that late last week. Noted police dog Judge, who retired from active service in 2013, was given a hero’s farewell as he was walked into the vet’s office to be put down:

Icelanders will soon be able to publicly worship at a shrine to Thor, Odin and Frigg with construction starting this month on the island’s first major temple to the Norse gods since the Viking age. Worship of the gods in Scandinavia gave way to Christianity around 1,000 years ago but a modern version of Norse paganism has been gaining popularity in Iceland.

A week ago most people had never come across rapper Azealia Banks. She flew onto everyone’s radar on Saturday with just one tweet. It was as follows- And time to put death spells on cops who kill innocent civilians and think they can get away with it….. OKURRRRRR?!Immediately people began to respond on twitter with calls to the ancient magicks and the ancestors. People called Azealia a racist, and some Wiccans even chimed in with the three fold law. If there were any Pagans out there that thought they didn’t have “a nickel in this quarter,” they must admit they...

When Catholic colleges and universities embrace diversity, Catholics should worry. “Loyola University Chicago recently christened a new pagan student club, with its student organizer saying the group aims to help pupils at the private Catholic college find the God they seek, not just the one featured in the Bible,” Dominic Lynch, a student there, wrote on The College Fix on October 23, 2014. I’ll bet they didn’t have a hard time finding a faculty adviser. “The Loyola Student Pagan Alliance was granted official recognition by the university earlier this month by its Student Activities and Greek Affairs board,” Lynch reported....

LONDON, June 12, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Catholic Church is living through a “great crisis” of belief and practice, facing a “new paganism” comparable to the first centuries of the Church, and in which many priests and bishops are actively collaborating, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Astana in Kazakhstan, said in an interview during a trip to the UK. The bishop said the crisis has particularly manifested itself in the erosion of belief in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, which he says has a “causal connection” to the denial of the Church’s teachings on...

ITHACA, N.Y.,Researchers at Cornell University conducted a study about biting versus chewing habits in children and found that kids who eat chicken on the bone are more likely to disobey adults and be aggressive. The study, which was published in Eating Behaviors, found that children were “twice as likely to disobey adults and twice as aggressive toward other kids” when eating food they had to hold and bite. Researches found that children were more docile when eating cut-up pieces of food, results which would seem to indicate that there is a connection between having to use teeth to eat and...

San Diego County parks have set four Easter egg hunts, but are keeping the affairs secular by renaming the featured hopper the “Spring Bunny.” Events over the next two weeks will feature different activities at each location. Some feature face painting and others pancake breakfasts. Eggs hunts are set at four county parks. Image courtesy of County News Center“But the constants at all of them will be a chance to meet the Spring Bunny and lots of eggs – thousands of them!” says the county, whose news release doesn’t use the word Easter. Last year’s release also avoided any religious...

Pope Benedict XV . . . Poor Preaching Responsible For Fall Back Into Paganism February 12, 2014 Frontpage No Comments By PAUL LIKOUDISThe horror of World War I, preoccupied with massive humanitarian projects on behalf of widows, orphans, and prisoners of war, engaged in intense diplomatic initiatives to defend the rights of the Church in Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, Pope Benedict XV issued an encyclical Humani Generis Redemptionem on June 15, 1917, which blamed ineffective preaching by priests for the decline in morals and civilization’s backsliding into paganism. Pope Benedict reminded bishops that their foremost duty is...

“When also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers; and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which He had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals. They forsook the Lord, the God of their ancestors, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them. They aroused the Lord’s anger...they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths." Judges 2:10-13 In his book “New Evangelicalism: the New World Order,” Paul Smith,...

I've shown in the first and second articles of this series - concluding with the present article - that Hitler was neopagan and anti-Christian and that the new pagan religions that developed in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s gave Nazism part of its ideological foundations. It is only to be expected, then, that the Hitler regime tried to tear German society away from Christianity and return it to pagan beliefs. While Hitler made public proclamations that he would protect Christianity in order to be acceptable to the German people who were in their majority Christian, his recorded private...

Conservatives like to extol so-called small-town virtues, of the sort immortalized in song by John Cougar Mellencamp. Small towns are supposedly the home of “real Americans” and bastions of virtue. Small towns, we are told, are the home of God-fearing family values Christians. Mellencamp sang about being “taught to feel Jesus in a small town” but there is feeling and then there is feeling. Televangelists use Jesus like a weapon to not only fire up their congregations but to be armed and fired at their foes. Liberals do not always understand, because they have not seen it for themselves, the...

MOSCOW, November 4 (RIA Novosti) – The head of the Russian Orthodox Church and senior Russian officials attended the opening of a resurrected Tsarist-era obelisk outside the Kremlin walls Monday. The monument was originally unveiled 99 years ago to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Russia’s Romanov dynasty, but its Tsarist iconography was removed in 1918 on the orders of Vladimir Lenin and the names of Romanov emperors replaced by famous international revolutionaries. In the renovated version unveiled Monday, criticized by some architectural preservation groups for poor quality work, the communist-era changes have been reversed. “Today, an unjust historical action has...

SHAKEN, if not humbled by the destruction of old Catholic churches in the provinces of Cebu and Bohol after a powerful 7.2 quake hit Central Visayas last Tuesday, Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle on Friday apologized for the sins of the Church against non-Catholics and even the poor. Tagle made his apology on the last day of the Philippine Conference on New Evangelization (PCNE) at the University of Santo Tomas, a 3-day event that sought to rekindle the Catholic faith. “In memory of Blessed Pope John Paul II and his collaborators before the year 2000, including Pope Emeritus Benedict...

More than 10,000 prisoners in Hong Kong will receive mooncakes on China’s Moon Festival, which this year falls on September 19, thanks also to the interest of Pope Francis in them. He not only endorsed this year’s Catholic initiative to provide mooncakes to the prisoners, he also gave a symbolic sum of money and, importantly too, encouraged the Catholic faithful in Hong Kong diocese to donate to the initiative. The Pope came to know about the project thanks to Cardinal Joseph Zen, the emeritus bishop of Hong Kong. He told me that he wrote to Pope Francis after the World...

A lesbian couple became the first same-sex couple to get a marriage license in Bernalillo County. The clerk’s office issued more than 100 marriage licenses before the day was over.

As part of its drive to retain congregation numbers, the Church of England is training its clergy to create a "pagan church" where Christianity will be "very much in the center," a British newspaper reports. The mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion is seeking to create new forms of Anglicanism with which people of alternative beliefs should feel comfortable, according to The Telegraph. "I would be looking to formulate an exploration of the Christian faith that would be at home in their culture," the daily quotes the Rev. Steve Hollinghurst, who is advising the denomination in its new endeavor,...