Artwork via JEREMYBINNS.COM

BY WARREN LIPKA As you may have heard, the pope met in secret with Kim Davis some time before he came to Philly.  Jesus H. Christ! That’s like the pope meeting with the bus driver that told Rosa Parks to stand up or get off the bus. What’s next, the pope met with George Zimmerman? We are not but three days out from all the peace, love and understanding of #popeadelphia and now I’m picturing Kim Davis, red-faced, crying her eyes out, mouth open fish-like, holding hands with the pope. Jesus Chysler! I just threw up in my soul a little bit.

Remember Popeadelphia? It was a beautiful thing. Nearly a million people together in one place and almost nobody was an asshole for a change. The cops didn’t kill any unarmed black guys. Nobody blew themselves up in a crowd. There was no angry loner with a rifle on the fifth floor of the school book depository, or if there was he held his fire. There were no car bombs or truck bombs or any kind of bombs. The media ignored Donald Trump. Local favorites like WaWa provided enough pallets of bottled water to keep everyone pissing clear while waiting at Jefferson Station.  There were huge viewing screens throughout the city for all of those who did not have a ticket to see the pope say things like, “We remember the great struggles which led to the abolition of slavery, the extension of voting rights, the growth of the labor movement, and the gradual effort to eliminate every kind of racism and prejudice directed at successive waves of new Americans.”

Then Pope Francis had to go and make it weird. Turns out the whole time he was here the pope had a terrible secret he kept from everyone, because like the Lord, popes work in mysterious ways. Her lawyer said that the pope thinks what Kim Davis did was courageous. He says the pope held her hand and told her that.  This is confusing.  What exactly did he consider courageous? That she stood up to two men who love each other and want to commit to each other for life, in sickness and in health, until death do they part and said, in so many words ‘Not on my watch, faggots!’  This is what the pope is applauding? A woman who confuses ‘religious freedom’ with the right of a public official, and elected judge no less, to discriminate against people whose religious beliefs, or lack thereof, she doesn’t like? If Jesus came back today and saw this he would never stop vomiting.

The pope is savvy man, a political creature who knows how to use the media to his advantage, when to let the cameras in (when he’s kissing babies or washing the feet of the poor) and when to keep them out (when he’s giving Archbishop Chaput a wink and a nod and a pat on the back for fighting any change in PA law that would allow victims of priest rape more time to sue their abusers).  He knows that a meeting with Kim Davis will be a big deal and deliver a powerful message.  What is his message?  It was a reminder. People forget that he is the head of the largest anti-gay organization in the world, a vast and gilded empire of homophobia.  Now they will remember.

NEW YORKER: Belief remains a bounce, faith a leap. Still, the appetite for historical study of the New Testament remains a publishing constant and a popular craze. Book after book—this year, ten in one month alone—appears, seeking the Truth. Paul Johnson has a sound believer’s life, “Jesus: A Biography from a Believer,” while Paul Verhoeven, the director of “Basic Instinct,” has a new skeptical-scholar’s book, “Jesus of Nazareth” (Seven Stories; $23.95). Verhoeven turns out to be a member of the Jesus Seminar, a collection mostly of scholars devoted to reconstructing the historical Jesus, and much of what he has to say is shrewd and learned. (An odd pull persists between box-office and Biblical study. A few years ago, another big action-film director and producer, James Cameron, put himself at the center of a documentary called “The Lost Tomb of Jesus.”) What the amateur reader wants, given the thickets of uncertainty that surround the garden, is not what the passionate polemicists want—not so much a verdict on whether Jesus was nasty or nice as a sense of what, if anything, was new in his preaching. Was the cult that changed the world a product of Paul’s evangelism and imperial circumstance and the military embrace of one miracle-mystery cult among many such around? Or was there really something new, something unheard of, that can help explain the scale of what happened later? Did the rise of Christendom take place because historical plates were moving, with a poor martyred prophet caught between, or did one small pebble of parable and preaching start the avalanche that ended the antique world’ MORE

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TIMES-TRIBUNE: When Mary Louise Salerno saw Jesus Christ in a bucket of pizza sauce, her instinct was not to alert the media or even to tell many friends. She did not want people descending on her family’s West Scranton pizzeria, and she did not want to invite critics or doubters of what she felt was a clear sign. “To us, it was something special,” Ms. Salerno, 65, of Old Forge said. “God smiled on us that day.” The image of Jesus has a history of unexpected appearances, from rocks and windows to medical X-rays and a tortilla. Add to that a sauce bucket at Brownie’s Famous Pizzeria, a long-standing eatery on Luzerne Street. It happened on the first Friday of Lent. Ms. Salerno was at Brownie’s and talking with her granddaughter, 23-year-old Jackie Krouchick, while she made a pizza. Her granddaughter is a single mother who she said is struggling through tough times. Ms. Krouchick told her grandmother she worried she was losing her faith. As Ms. Salerno poured tomato sauce from a white plastic bucket, she urged her granddaughter to keep believing. That is when she saw it, the image of a man with long hair and a beard in the leftover sauce. MORE

PHAWKER: Sad that in the 21st Century some people are no farther along than the cavemen looking up at the stars and creating imaginary pictures by connecting the dots. Jesus would be so proud.