Despite intense bombing and severe food shortages, several Carmelite nuns are refusing to abandon the embattled Syrian city of Aleppo and have appealed for urgent aid.
“The bombs are falling all around us, but we are not going to leave the people in their suffering,” said Sister Anne-Francoise, a French nun from a community of Discalced Carmelites in Aleppo. “The people here are suffering and dying.”
The 2018 Winter Olympic Games, the 17-day athletic love-fest kicking off to the beat of the Korean janggu drum in Pyeongchang on Feb. 9, are a secular endeavor featuring more fanfare than faith, more spectacle than spirit.
But it was not always so.
On the seventh day, Simone Biles rests.
That’s the day the world gymnastics champion, who has a clear shot at the medal podium in Rio, goes to church with her family.
Biles, a first-time Olympian, is a Catholic. She has said she routinely lights a candle to St. Sebastian, the patron saint of athletes and of Rio, before each meet.
1. President Obama: ‘This Is What a Feminist Looks Like ’
On his 55th birthday, the president penned a column in Glamour talking about his role as father to Sasha and Malia: “ …It’s important that their dad is a feminist, because now that’s what they expect of all men.”
2. Apple Adds More Gender-Diverse Emoji in iOS10
Female athletes and professionals, plus additional family representation options roll out in iOS10.
3. What’s a Class Revolution Without Black People?
“It’s black Americans, not would-be white revolutionaries, who’ve led a successful movement to claim power and rights in this country. And it’s black people who are going to be the beneficiaries. If they're missing — which they are — it suggests both that the movement is getting something wrong, and isn’t long for the political world.”
But the film’s most problematic character is also one of its biggest: Harley Quinn. Margot Robbie gives a memorable, lively performance in the role, and shows she can take care of herself. But the character has a highly abusive, dependent relationship with Leto’s Joker, and David Ayer makes the big mistake of presenting it as a selling point of the film
Your weakness is never more obvious than when you show it to strangers — and you can’t avoid showing it to strangers when you live with them.
This is how you really love other people, too. There is nothing like putting yourself in a place where you need other people and their forgiveness to develop on your own love and affection.
The Vatican this week unveiled Pope Francis’ picks for a 12-member panel of scholars who will study the question of whether women were ordained as deacons in the early church, and whether they could be ordained in the Catholic Church today — a historic step, if it were to happen.
What will the commission, which will operate under the supervision of an archbishop from the Vatican’s doctrinal office, do?
The Vatican has confirmed that “after intense prayer and mature reflection, Pope Francis has decided to institute the Commission for the Study of the Diaconate of Women.” A deacon is a minister of the Catholic Church who is ordained as a sacramental sign of Christ, who came “to serve and not to be served.”
If women are permitted to be deacons by the church, they can baptize as well as marry and bury. They can offer homilies. These are momentous steps.
The Rev. Cynthia Meyer has been placed on an involuntary leave of absence after coming out as a lesbian earlier this year to her rural Kansas congregation.
The leave allows Meyer, a United Methodist minister, to avoid a church trial and comes after she met for more than 12 hours on Aug. 1 with those involved in a complaint against her, according to the denomination’s Great Plains Annual Conference.