Terry Firma, though born and Journalism-school-educated in Europe, has lived in the U.S. for the past 20-odd years. Stateside, his feature articles have been published in the New York Times, Reason, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Wired. Terry was the founder and Main Mischief Maker of Moral Compass, a now-dormant site that pokes fun at the delusional claim by people of faith that a belief in God equips them with superior moral standards. He was the Editor-in-Chief of two Manhattan-based magazines until he decided to give up commercial publishing for professional photography... with a lot of blogging on the side. These days, he lives in an old seaside farmhouse in Maine with his wife, three kids, and two big dogs.
What do you call your brother if he’s a priest? Father? I suppose that mystery was amplified in the Belczak family. Many years ago, Michigan brothers Edward Belczak (below, left) and Thomas Belczak decided that they loved the Catholic Church so much, they wanted to become its professional holy message-spreaders. After a while, they figured that they were entitled to quite a bit more than what the Lord, in His wisdom, had been giving them — and they took it. Read more
From the You Can’t Make This Shit Up department, via the Wall Street Journal: The latest winner of Spain’s Gold Medal of Police Merit never walked a beat or made an arrest. True, she never flinched in the face of danger. But that is because she can’t move. Reaching far outside its uniformed ranks, the Interior Ministry awarded this year’s medal to a life-size statue, Our Most Holy Mary of Love, “for sharing police values such as dedication, caring, solidarity and sacrifice.” Read more
The then-15-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for promoting education for women has been awarded the Nobel Prize. Malala Yousafzai, now 17, survived the attack and subsequently moved to Birmingham, England, where she has continued to be an outspoken proponent of peace and human rights. Given her emphasis on the importance of education, I like this sentence from the New York Times story: Ms. Yousafzai was at school … when the prize was announced and was taken out of her chemistry class to be informed of the award. No previous Nobel Prize Winner was ever in high school; Malala is the youngest recipient of the award in Nobel history. Read more
You gotta love the opening line of this article from Catholic Say: The former Church of England’s bishop of Rochester has spoken of the overriding importance of the Catholic Church’s global voice for the future of Christianity in a world threatened by Islamic militancy and secularism. He’s right to casually mention those two threats in the same breath, all equivalent-like. Surely you’ve heard of the insurgent atheist movements all over the world whose members have been beheading people of faith, detonating bombs in trains and subway cars, and flying passenger jets into cathedrals. Read more
