Wednesday's News & Ideas - 9/11/2024

Religious groups ‘spending billions to counter gender-equality education’
The Guardian: Report reveals how US Christians, Catholic schools and Islamists fight sex education, LGBTQ+ and equal rights.

Pope Francis’ Mass in one of world’s most Catholic nations gathers almost half its population
CNN: Pope Francis received a rapturous welcome from the tiny Southeast Asian nation of East Timor, one of the world’s most Catholic countries, where almost half the population turned out for an open-air Mass on Tuesday.

‘Ferocious violence’ accompanied ‘shocking’ levels of abuse at Ireland’s religious-run schools, report finds
CNN: Nearly 2,400 allegations of sexual abuse across hundreds of Ireland’s religious-run schools have been documented in a new report, marking the latest grim revelations to emerge from the country’s historic Church-State entanglement.

Lutheran church gets creative with pastor shortage, bringing in United Methodist minister
Canton Repository: The Rev. Ashwin Welch is a retired United Methodist minister whose appointment was made possible because of a historic ministry sharing agreement forged by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and several other denominations, including the United Methodists.

National Catholic Reporter names Wall St. Journal’s James Grimaldi as executive editor
Religion News Service: The 60-year-old left-leaning outlet was without a top editor for more than a year.

The Spark

Confessions of a Hinge power user
JB’s story, in part, represents a decade of dating online* — the success, the losses, the ongoing agitations. Nearly all of his pursuits have been filtered through dating apps — and each app, in the end, ultimately like the others, billing itself as an answer to the riddle of human desire, Wired says.

*access is limited for nonsubscribers