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New York Times
25-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The Church Could Use an American Pope
To convey how all-encompassing the Roman Catholic Church was during the Middle Ages, the historian R.W. Southern once offered a striking analogy: The medieval church, he wrote in 1970, was 'a compulsory society in precisely the same way as the modern state is a compulsory society.' Like a modern nation, whose citizens typically belong to it by the accident of birth within its territory and whose obligations to obey its laws and pay taxes are typically not undertaken by choice, the medieval church could expect obedience, allegiance and what we now call 'participation' from those who, by another seeming accident — baptism — found themselves within its ranks. This idea of the Catholic Church not as a voluntary association of individuals but as a total social organism — from which one could escape only by means of excommunication, with its threat of 'eternal fire' — is now hard for most of us to imagine. In the post-industrialized West, religious practice has become a choice, even for those who are baptized as infants. Catholicism, like other religions, is essentially subject to the consumer logic of the marketplace, forced to compete with other possible ways of pursuing self-actualization among a like-minded community of believers. In the United States, of course, the Catholic Church has always operated like this: without state power, amid a variety of other religious options, often fighting for its survival. Though many of us are still reeling from the sheer improbability of Leo XIV's election as the first American pope, the significance of his Americanness transcends the bare fact of his election. What would once have been considered his uniquely American experience of the faith — as something voluntary, improvised, provisional — has now become the default condition of Catholic life worldwide. In this respect, his origins could prove to be among his greatest assets in leading the church. Leo XIV was born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago in 1955. The jokes write themselves — about 'da pope,' about imposing deep dish pizza on the Italian peninsula by papal edict, about Leo's election having been prophesied in 2006 by Dennis Green, the coach of the Arizona Cardinals, who in a memorable rant invited the news media to 'crown' the Chicago Bears. But when Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, was asked this month by NBC News about the elevation of an American pontiff, he wept. 'The culture of Chicago and the Midwest produced a pope,' he said. 'That's terrific.' It is terrific. And if anything, Cardinal Cupich's regional pride (which, as a Michigander, I share) undersells the distinctively American character of Leo's experience. The descendant of Creoles — his mother's family's race was listed as Black in the census of 1900 — Leo was raised in a parish in Chicago where the church he attended is now deconsecrated, its walls streaked with graffiti. He has two brothers who are almost archetypes of their generation: John, a Wordle-playing retired school principal and lifelong Chicago-area resident; and Louis, a Florida transplant and vociferous MAGA supporter who has described himself as 'not the most religious person.' The brothers' rise from modest brick houses to the professional classes, their dispersion across political and geographical lines — this is the post-Vatican II American Catholic story in miniature. It is a story of fracture, mobility, volition. When Leo was elected to the papacy, the three brothers still spoke weekly by phone. That Leo, despite spending most of his mature ecclesial career abroad in Peru and Rome, has managed to navigate the shifting terrain of the past half century without losing hold of his brothers — without, one might say, ceasing to be their brother — is no small thing. It suggests a talent not only for mediation but also for holding together what history has pulled apart. This unifying instinct is also evident in Leo's earlier remarks as a priest. Speaking at a synod in 2012 on the challenge of evangelization in the modern world, Father Prevost remarked that the Catholic Church often finds itself speaking a different language than the culture around it. Would-be listeners, he observed, are conditioned to find the Gospel message not merely wrong but 'ideological and emotionally cruel.' In this environment, he suggested, speaking the truth is not enough; evangelization must understand the unwelcoming context in which it operates. To present the truth in love, he argued, is a matter not only of what the church teaches but also how, when and to whom. This is a far cry from the academic perspective of the theology department or the bureaucratic outlook of the chancery office. Leo appears to see the Catholic Church not as a theory to be tested or a program to be implemented but as a thing to be lived — haphazardly, inconsistently, often with more fervor than clarity. It is worth noting that Leo's predecessor and namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was the first pope to reflect at length on the United States. In 'Longinqua oceani,' an encyclical from 1895, Leo XIII regarded the United States favorably, with a mixture of admiration and guarded optimism. Nonetheless, he continued to view America as something of an ecclesiastical periphery, a promising outpost, perhaps, but one that depended upon the spiritual and intellectual reinforcement of Europe. He did not imagine a world in which the American church would one day be in a position to represent Catholicism more broadly. Americans are often parochial, and not in a good sense. But it is possible that our strange and uneven relationship with the Catholic faith has given us insight. Catholicism in this country arrived late — at the twilight of Christendom. It survived not by imperial privilege but by adaptation. It endured as an ethnic identity and the source of a moral vocabulary for politicians that gave us both the New Deal and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Today it is being revitalized by hundreds of thousands of Hispanic immigrants and a countercultural youth movement of urban parishes filled with Latin, incense and crying babies. Anyone who can speak to this cacophony — who can describe it without resorting to caricature, without reducing the American Catholic Church to MAGA hats or rainbow flags — might just possess the imagination necessary to comprehend the whole of the faith. For the universality of the Catholic Church is not abstract; it is as richly textured as Dante's 'Divine Comedy,' cosmopolitan but disorderly. It includes traditionalist devotees of the Latin Mass, those accustomed to modern acculturated Masses in Latin America and Africa and hundreds of millions of churchgoers who have never given a thought to the liturgy. It includes the lapsed, the divorced and the remarried. It includes the persecuted remnant of the faithful in Burma, the slum children of Manila, Polish grandmothers, Japanese adherents of Our Lady of Akita and, yes, the sort of sports-mad Chicagoans memorably evoked by the character Bill Swerski and his fellow superfans on 'Saturday Night Live' ('Da Bears'). If Leo manages to encompass all of this, his American origins will surely be part of the reason. His election is not evidence of the Vatican's final capitulation to modernity but a reminder that, whatever its challenges, the church persists — not as a fortress or an intellectual proposition but as a people.
Forbes
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
5 Great Strategy Games You Can Play Now On Game Pass
Crusader Kings III is a power battle like no other Paradox Interactive Microsoft's Game Pass library is expanding all the time, and if you're a fan of strategy games there are plenty to pick from. Whether you're playing on PC or the Xbox console, there is a decent selection of strategy games available – some you'll probably end up sinking hundreds of hours into, others that are are more casual pick-up-and-play titles. Here's my pick of five of the best strategy games available on Microsoft's gaming service. Of the games on this list, Crusader Kings III is the one I've burned the most time playing. It took me at least three attempts to get to grips with its brutally complex mechanics (do not skip the tutorial, invest time in YouTube videos), but it's amazingly rewarding once you've cracked it. You adopt the role of a Middle Ages ruler, trying to expand your dynasty through all manner of devious tactics. You can marry your way into power, conquer neighboring territories, plot to execute enemies, bend the knee to powerful emperors, torture the offspring of your rivals… the options are countless. When your ruler dies, you jump straight into the shoes of their rightful heir, meaning you've got to think about succession and nurturing your children to take over, in case you're struck down by a plague or lose a vital organ on the battlefield. You might even slip a poison into the rightful heir's breakfast if they're shaping up to be a feckless waster who's going to undo your hard work. There's a host of great DLC to add to the core game, although that does mean spending extra. By far my favorite roguelike deckbuilder, Slay The Spire sees you try and guide one of four different characters all the way to the top of the spire, eliminating scores of enemies along the way. Each of the four different heroes has a different set of cards and abilities, meaning you need to devise fresh strategies for each. To make it more challenging, the spire changes every time you climb it, meaning you need to plan a route carefully, working out when to take on tougher enemies to earn better cards/valuable relics, and when to stop for a breather. The key to success in Slay The Spire is putting together combos of cards that work well with the relics (special powers) that you gain along the way. Don't be tempted to grab every card you're offered, and focus on cards that complement one another. Slay The Spire 2 is due out later this year, so it's a good time to get into this one. Manor Lords is a beautiful medieval city builder, with an element of strategic battling for those who want it. Personally, I prefer the more chilled combat-free mode, where you just concentrate on building out your settlement and trying to keep everyone alive by harvesting enough crops and berries in the fertile summer months, before the snow settles on the rooftops and you've only got a limited supply of meat to hunt through winter. Don't be put off by the 'preview' tag – there's more than enough here to keep you playing, even if the game isn't technically complete. It's one of those games where you look up and discover it's 3am and you've got work in the morning. Confession time: much like Crusader Kings III was for me in the beginning, Stellaris is one of those games I'm dying to get into, but haven't spent enough time studying to make a successful go of it yet. This is a grand strategy game at universe scale, where you have to build your galactic empire by sending out exploration fleets, forming alliances and developing defenses to fend off enemy invasions. Like Crusader Kings III, there's a barrage of extra DLC that adds to the base game, and unusually for grand strategy games, the console version is very well received, with a redesigned UI that's well adapted for Xbox controllers. If I do nothing else in 2025, it will be to get into Stellaris… Hit the high-scoring combos in Balatro PlayStack FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Balatro is the most fun you can have playing Texas Hold'em poker without risking losing your bank balance. Don't be put off if you've never played poker or averse to gambling – you'll soon pick up the simple rules and the only thing you can lose is vast expanses of time to this moreishly addictive game. The key here is combining strong poker hands with jokers – a small selection of modifiers that give your cards special powers, such as giving you extra chips for played face cards or multiplying your score every time you play a king. Much like Slay The Spire, it's finding complementary jokers to match your cards that is the key to success here. Success means earning enough chips to beat the next blind, until you defeat the final boss blind. There's no better feeling than seeing your chip count tick into the millions with a boss-defeating combo. It's almost as good as a win at the casino.
CBC
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
See what it's like to be a knight thanks to this Montreal exhibit
An exhibit at the Pointe-à-Callière Museum in Old Montreal aims to let people see and feel what it was like to be a knight during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The exhibit features a collection of about 250 objects loaned from the Stibbert Museum in Italy.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Opinion: We've lost out on so much more than just the shopping experience
May, the month when people in the Middle Ages had their annual bath. June, the most popular month for weddings in the Middle Ages because the bride and groom were still fresh from that yearly bath. They were, however, starting to get a bit whiffy, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to distract from the body odour. The custom of carrying a bouquet lives on today. Few brides getting wed this weekend will know that the reason they have ordered an expensive confection from the florist was to mask their personal pong. Anyway, no need for flowers now when there's all-body deodorant to reach the parts run-of-the-mill underarm deodorants miss. Adverts for this squirt-everywhere solution to embarrassing stink are everywhere. You can't get through a TV advert break without a naked gang running along a beach with rolls of undulating fat to illustrate how those folds and crevices could be shower-fresh all day with sprays of all-body deodorant. But the advert that really makes you look up from your knitting is the one when people are sniffing each other's bottoms, canine-greeting-like. Yes, someone actually puts their nose to another's bottom, and another to a stranger's crotch in TV advertising to sell a product to banish every kind of body odour. It's clear this new anti-smell weapon hasn't been invented because of any weird phenomena that's making us all smellier, but because we're bigger and the obese have more hiding places for bacteria to multiply and smelly stuff to grow. I'm all for openness and attacking bashfulness about bodily functions but every other TV advert is about leaky bladders, piles, disguising sweat in places previously unspoken about and, the latest, celebration and pride about going for a number two at school or at work. It might be something even royalty do, but do we really need it satellited into our sitting rooms every night? The background, apparently, is that a large percentage of children refuse to go to the loo at school because they are embarrassed. The same for grown-ups at work. This campaign is attacking that taboo, so anyone anywhere is comfortable with public loo pooing. A noble cause – constipation medication manufacturers are missing a trick not putting their own advertising after the Proud to Poo ads – but what's happened to cause this onslaught of in-your-face advertising about body topics once only whispered about? Are we becoming more self-conscious than ever, or more comfortable to talk about what goes on under our clothes? How far we've come since the trite advertising 20 years ago about how young women with periods could enjoy skiing, swimming and skating like anyone else. Probably a step – and a poo – too far. A woman posting on social media "set fire to [asylum] hotels for all I care" is guilty of inciting hate. Lucy Connolly can shout she made a mistake as loud as she likes but deciding that this was an appropriate contribution to the aftermath of the Southport murders in the context of a rising swell of hatred against a section of society deserved punishment. Yes, she may be being made an example of within that context but however hasty or knee-jerk to an inflamed situation doesn't lessen that statement. Her husband said this week after she lost her appeal against her 31-month prison sentence: "My wife has paid a very high price for making a mistake and today the court has shown her no mercy." Mercy is something she wasn't thinking about when she made that revolting post. No mercy to the human beings – individuals – living in those hotels. She argued she wasn't encouraging anyone to do it, merely saying she didn't care; didn't bother if what resulted was a pogrom? Being "really angry, really upset" when she wrote the post is not an excuse, and she should not be excused or spared punishment. My fear is though that she will become a martyr because there are hideous people who believe there was nothing wrong with her words and are filled with hatred towards people because of where they come from and want them gone, willing to employ their own vile solutions. My thoughts last week about offering more than shopping in town and city centres to draw people in sparked much comment and debate. After a coastal walk last weekend, I popped into Holt, admittedly a rarefied untypical town which sustains a busy shopping centre because its clientele is largely visiting or well-off well-heeled locals. What pulls me into the town every time I'm 'up north' is the high street greengrocers. The simple joy of wandering into a haven of freshness where fruit and vegetables smell and taste like they used to is heaven. It makes you realise how easy to please we have become with our vacuum-packed taste-of-nothing supermarket produce. Talk about taste the difference – there was no comparison. That little detour for a shopping experience that brought such pleasure to the senses and satisfaction yet felt so sad that it is such a rare experience that so many miss out on unless places like Norwich Market are within their reach. Again, we wanted the convenience of supermarkets, but we ended up losing out on so much more.
Daily Mail
18-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
My ultimate 3-step science-backed guide on how to eat, walk and sleep yourself young, by SANDRA PARSONS, whose lifestyle tweaks have given her a biological age of 20
Back in the Middle Ages, alchemists believed that if they could only find the mythical Philosopher's Stone they could use it to produce the elixir of life and live forever. Today, not much has changed. Billionaires like Amazon's Jeff Bezos hire the world's most brilliant scientists to find out how to live for as long as possible, while longevity clinics are opening up in the planet's richest capital cities to cater to the one per cent.
