With Rhode Island’s legalization of same-sex marriage yesterday, New England becomes the first region in the country to go all in for SSM. Rhode Island is the most Catholic state in the Union, and New England the most Catholic region. Given the Church’s staunch opposition to SSM, an explanation would seem to be in order.

The SSM tide is rolling in. What are the poor Catholic bishops to do?

The New York Times’ incomparable obituarist Margalit Fox did herself proud yesterday with a fine account of the life of McCandlish Phillips, the incomparable reporter who left the Times in 1973 to devote himself to the little Pentecostal congregation he helped found in upper Manhattan.

As the less hip among you may not know, there is an über-cool company in Berlin that specializes in neo-Bauhau footware with names like Kitten Testicle Grey, Ocean Fish, Höllenfeuer (Hellfire) Red, and Naughty Schnitzel Pilz. They come with either the Darwin Love Sole or the Ich Bin Atheist Sole.

Among the things I do is serve as academic adviser to the Trinity College men’s squash team, which yesterday in New Haven won the national men’s collegiate squash championship for the 14th time in the last 15 years.

More than anyone else, it’s Mainline Protestants, according to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute. Sixty percent of them, to be exact.

The apparent decision of Drew Barrymore to convert to her husband’s Jewish faith puts me in mind of the time, 85 years ago, when Drew’s grandfather John, the family’s most famous actor, provoked a fistfight with Myron Selznick, one of Hollywood’s leading Jewish producers.

In its January issue the Newsmax magazine (not available online) profiles David Brody, the chief political correspondent of the Christian Broadcasting Network who started out his religious life as a Reform Jew.

Hot off the press, the latest issue of the Greenberg Center’s biannual magazine Religion in the News is now online, and (if you’ll forgive an editor’s partiality) it’s one of our best.