Holy Weekend Olio: Miraculous Imprints Of The Inside Of Your Own Eyeballs Edition

• If there was a God She'd be way too embarrassed to allow this Shroud of Turin horseshit to come up year after year after fucking year. Q.E.D.

By the way, for extra laughs, there's the usually authoritative Wikipedia slog, which spends its entire "Science" section referring to people who don't believe this is the single, gosh-darned, authentic proof of something no one's ever found a scrap of other evidence for, in a couple thousand years of a billion people trying, as "skeptics". 

• Shorter Michael Gerson,  Fred Hiatt's Petting Zoo Sennightly:  All the gravestones at the American Normandy cemetery are either crosses or Stars of David. Things were much better then.

Those cheering the trend of religious disaffiliation should consider some broader social consequences. The rise of the nones is symptomatic of the decline of many forms of belonging. According to Pew, all of the recent growth in the nones has come among those who are not married. This indicates a group of people distrustful of institutions, with marriage being the most basic of institutions. The unaffiliated donate less to charity than do the affiliated. They participate in fewer volunteer organizations. Individualism can easily become atomization. Whatever else you may think of the communitarian creeds, they help create community.

Really, th' fuck happened to you people? How did religious observance turn into an infomercial? Yeah, there are a few crackpots out there like me, who like to poke you for praying on the hustings, and demanding Special Recognition for your own particular peccadilloes, but most people would be content to leave you alone to believe whatever it is you believe. Just turn the volume down, huh? It's for your own good

And, for the record, that's "the affiliated self-report donating more to charity. They also report attending church twice as often as they, uh, actually do. 

• Dear Lord, is it not simply enough to report that the title of this thing is "Time to stop hooking up. (You know you want to.)" ?

If not, then this is:

When I was an undergraduate at Georgetown University in the early 1990s, my roommate and I dressed up like prostitutes for Halloween. We bought fishnets, wore our tightest, sexiest clothes and sauntered out like we were the hottest girls alive.

I remember that night fondly, even though my feminist sensibilities cringe a little now. For me, that costume was a form of sexual experimentation. I chose to dress sexier than I ever had and to stretch the boundaries of what I considered acceptable. And back then, I didn’t know anyone else who had done it.

Yeah, back in the 90s, when everyone was prudish.

Half the damned research, you should pardon the expression, involves the rather obviously Catholic Freitas interviewing Catholic students at Catholic schools, and finding a distinction between what they do and what they say they believe, or "feel." Stop the Presses! Alert the Curia! Then blaming The Culture. One forgets, sometimes, just how valuable Commies were in their day. 

Dating is Dead! We might call this the Lawrence Welk Conundrum; the Welk Show's still playing on PBS, despite the fact that anyone who volunteered to watch that blend of de-sensualized music and blinding polyester hues the first time around is long since dead. That it still exists, and that the "Welk Stars" continue to pack 'em in in Branson, is to cultural studies what claims of mysterious scat piles are to Bigfoot. 

Why don't you fucking worry about guns? Or the economy? And not whether young adults like the sex, or have the sex, or might regret having the sex? Take it from someone who's had it more than once: it doesn't need the evil cachet of trendiness to recommend it.

• Pope washes female feet; crowd goes wild. Both fer and agin'. Wasn't this guy infallible as little as a week ago?