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Dennis Prager, a conservative author and talk radio host, is trending on social media for sharing what many see as an overly simplistic and undeniably problematic view of pornography. “Men want variety,” Prager said during a recent round-table discussion hosted by The Daily Wire’s Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and author. Pornography, he went on to say, is “not awful,” so long as it’s used as a “substitute for adultery.” The problems in that statement alone are plentiful — but he continued. Listen to the latest episode of CBN’s Quick Start podcast 👇 Prager, a practicing Jew, told Peterson and his fellow panelists that looking at a woman lustfully is “not a sin in Judaism” — a diversion from the Christian belief taught by Jesus, who said, “Anyone who even looks at a ...

Divine Mercy SundayBy Fr. Victor Feltes During the Exodus, before descending in fire and smoke upon a trembling Mount Sinai, God gave instructions to prepare the Hebrews for this encounter. The Lord said to Moses: “Go to the people and have them sanctify themselves today and tomorrow. Have them wash their garments and be ready for the third day; for on the third day the Lord will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. Set limits for the people all around, saying: ‘Take care not to go up the mountain, or even to touch its edge. All who touch the mountain must be put to death. No hand shall touch them, but they must be stoned to death or killed with arrows. Whether human being or beast, they must not be allowed to live.’ Only when the ram’s horn sounds may they go up on the...

Pietro Orlandi, the brother of Emanuela Orlandi, a 15-year-old girl and Vatican citizen who went missing 40 years ago, insinuated this week that John Paul II secretly left the Vatican at night to engage in immoral behavior. Orlandi made the statement April 11 on the Italian television program Di Martedi, on which he appeared with his family’s lawyer, Laura Sgrò. Neither would disclose the source of the rumor. Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, who was John Paul II’s personal secretary for over three decades, said this week the rumors were “vile insinuations” and “false from beginning to end.” Orlandi, who has been trying to get answers to his sister’s disappearance for 40 years, met with the Vatican’s chief prosecutor for eight hours on April 11. Alessandro Diddi, prosecutor for the Vatican City ...

For some, tiles are rarely thought of unless it’s time for home renovations, but for mathematicians, they present plenty of conundrums—and a clever team has just cracked a particularly tricky one. Researchers identified a shape that was previously only theoretical: a 13-sided configuration called “the hat” that can tile a surface without repeating. 2,807 Lego Pieces Later…We Have The Mighty Bowser™ | io9 Builds Off English The hat is what’s known as an aperiodic monotile, which means that a single shape can tile a surface without any translational symmetry, or without its pattern ever repeating. The famous Penrose tilings are an example of aperiodic tiling, where the pattern is aperiodic but uses two different shapes. Advertisement The hat tiling only uses one shape, an “einstein,” ...

A trip to the Holy See is about to get a lot more comfortable. Veteran luxury hotel group Four Seasons will be moving into a 15th-century palazzo bordering Vatican City—an independent, 109-acre city-state in Rome that’s the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church. It’s rare to find modern lodgings of this caliber so close to the Vatican. The hotel will be the first Four Seasons in the Eternal City, and another one is in the works by the same developer, Miami-based Fort Partners, at the 17th-century Palazzo Marini near the Spanish Steps (slated open in 2026). We’ll have to wait until 2025 to check into the new Four Seasons at the Vatican, but here’s what you need to know in the meantime. The official name will be Palazzo della Rovere, a Four Seasons Hotel The Renaissance-era building that...

[embedded content] Four years after a fire tore through Paris’ Cathedral of Notre Dame, reopening by the end of 2024 seems within reach. Bill Whitaker joined the construction team to see how far it’s come… Services Marketplace – Listings, Bookings & Reviews Entertainment blogs & Forums

For consumers, passwords are a relatively recent phenomenon. It wasn’t until the internet and the rise of online commerce and security that we’ve been tasked with remembering dozens of access codes to financial institutions, email accounts, streaming services, and retailers. For too many people, that arduous task is resolved by choosing an easy password. How easy? Cybersecurity firm NordPass recently examined data culled from online security incidents in 30 countries to determine how often certain easy-to-guess passwords are used. The top 50 found in the United States are below, all of which violate the cardinal rules of strong password protection like making them long, nonsensical, and alphanumeric. If any of these look familiar, change yours. (Which you should do often anyway.) guest 123...

We are now in the Easter Octave – Happy Easter! Let’s get out in front of this before the calendar clicks over to Friday Each year I get a question from readers about our obligation to do penance on Friday by abstinence from eating meat during the Octave of Easter. Here is canon 1251: Can. 1251 Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. The days of the Octave of Easter are celebrated as Solemnities (in the Novus Ordo calendar).    Therefore, there is no canonical obligation for Catholics for the Friday abstinence on this coming Friday. Note well that the other Fridays of Eastertide a...

ROME — Pope Francis liked the floor plan. “It’s a good space you have,” the pope, mapping out a square with his hands, said during a private audience last month to the Rev. Andrew Small, who manages the pope’s commission on combating sex abuse. “Have you moved yet?” Since Francis created his Commission for the Protection of Minors in 2014, the staff has occupied cramped offices in an old Vatican residence near the pope’s apartment. While the location at first suggested a proximity to power, the commission has over the last decade seen its influence eroded by entrenched Vatican interests and defections. Father Small said its staff was forced to borrow office space around the Holy See “like Bedouins” when bishops came to meet with them. Survivors of abuse, he said, struggled to find their ha...

Have you ever read a book that takes you in and captivates you, stirs your heart and mind and, for whatever reason, just won’t let you go? I just finished reading Matthew Perry’s new memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, and I honestly can’t stop thinking about it. Oh, I know, it’s not Chaucer. It’s not even the latest mass-market “Christian living” read. It’s not about a saint or the Pope. The story’s protagonist is a bit of an anti-hero for most of it. And the subject matter is admittedly dark — a lot of drugs, some references to unchaste sexual relationships, and a goodly dose of coarse language. So why did I read it? Well, truth be told, I was a bit of a Friends enthusiast back in the day. I remember watching the pilot as a young teenager when it first aired in 1994, and...

I made the mistake of catching the eye of a friend. We had listened to a fellow lecture for an hour, and then our host asked him, an Episcopal minister from that body’s Catholicish wing, to lead the final prayers. And he started speaking in a top of the mouth, stiff-jawed, pursed lips, fruity-sounding way a million miles from his regular voice. My friend found it as funny as I did, and despite our best efforts, we both only partly suppressed our laughter through the prayers. And the glares we got, oh boy. We deserved them, but I’m still a little surprised that no one else seemed to find the disjunction of voices as funny — let me be honest, as preposterous — as we did. For years before that, this idea of prayer as something to be done in a special voice had put me off praying. The evangeli...