This is different:  A church that used to be a spiritual center for the working class in northern Spainhas been repurposed for a completely different kind of community. After sitting abandoned for decades, a church in the Spanish town of Llanera has been converted into a skating park, complete with a fresh coat of brightly colored paint. Madrid artist Okuda San Miguel, who covered the church’s walls and ceilings with his work, said in a video interview that he believes this piece... Read more

From Reuters:  Somali Islamist militants sprayed a Kenyan bus with bullets on Monday, killing two people, but a passenger said he and fellow Muslims defied demands from the attackers to help identify Christians traveling with them. The attack took place in Mandera, in northeast Kenya. A year ago, al Shabaab gunmen stormed a Nairobi-bound bus in the same area and killed 28 non-Muslim passengers execution-style. Abdi Mohamud Abdi, a Muslim who was among the passengers in Monday’s incident, told Reuters... Read more

Someone is going to get rich off this idea: Pros: Inexpensive, doesn’t need a battery. Cons: It’s a rectangular slab of plastic that does absolutely nothing. I’m talking about the NoPhone, which — as the name implies — has no camera, no screen, no music and, you guessed it, no phone. (It is, however, toilet bowl-resistant.) The product of a successful Kickstarter campaign, the NoPhone comes in three models. There’s the completely featureless $5 NoPhone Zero (aka “the least advanced... Read more

From the pages of Crisis, Rachel Lu offers her opinion on female altar servers, and the feminine role in liturgy: When men are in charge of liturgy, they generally favor austerity, solemnity and reverence. They are far more likely to have “high” liturgical sensibilities. When women claim a more central role, we frequently see a slide into lower and more culturally idiosyncratic practices. It generally starts with campy banners and popular-style hymnody, but may end with synthesizers and scantily-clad liturgical... Read more

More young people see Christmas as a secular rather than religious holiday, according to a 2013 survey by Pew: Millennials are less religious than older Americans andless likely to identify with a religious group, and those traits are reflected in the way they celebrate Christmas. Nine-in-ten Millennials say they take part in Christmas, but only four-in-ten say they do so mainly as a religious holiday, according to a survey we conducted in 2013. That stands in contrast to those in older generations, who... Read more

John Allen speculates:  In moves that clearly seem to afford English-speaking communications officials in the Vatican greater influence and visibility, Pope Francis has named two key aides to new roles, including putting the first American in line eventually to serve as his personal spokesman. On Monday, the Vatican announced that Greg Burke, a former Time magazine and Fox News correspondent in Rome who has served as senior communications adviser to the Secretariat of State since 2012, has been named the... Read more