Sator arepo tenet opera rotas

From the blog, For Keat’s Sake :

SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS. Forget that “Arepo” is a made-up word, and marvel at this sentence that goes into a grid and reads the same from four directions. The guy who came up with this would have loved sudoku… Wikipedia seems to know all about it, as usual. You can also rearrange the letters to form “PATERNOSTER” twice, with a double alpha and omega left over. This all goes nicely into a sort of crusader cross. All very interesting, but reciting it to guard your cattle from witchcraft is a bit much!

Losing and gaining our religion

More thoughts on American religiosity

(Somehow, I think that I have written this post before, so maybe this is a throw-away. Feel free to not read it and go about your business. There is not much new here.)

Those who had one of the more clever statistics professors in college will no doubt know the quip: “There are lies, damn lies… and then there are statistics.” This can no doubt be our reaction when we read the latest Pew Forum survey on the numbers of Americans leaving the confessions of their childhood. The long and the short of it is that while Americans in general tend to be a shifty bunch, American Catholics have the most wanderlust when it comes to what they believe. Ten percent of the American population consists of ex-Catholics, and this can no doubt be proven both from quantitative and anecdotal evidence that no doubt many of my readers can provide. According to many sources, the only thing holding up the Catholic Church in this country demographically is immigration, but even that is a shaky source since immigrants tend to also migrate from their religious roots once they get to this country.