From the same people who brought you adultfriendfinder.com (for swingers) and bondage.com (for kinky swingers), we now have bigchurch.com, which would presumably be for kinky swinging churchgoers but which, no, is simply a “Christian dating site” that is one of the biggest around because the company behind it, Penthouse Media Group Inc. (yes, that Penthouse), is one of the largest social-networking conglomerates in the business. What’s truly ironic about this story is that bigchurch.com tries to disguise the fact that its owners are pornographers, whereas eharmony.com tries to disguise the fact that its owners are fundamentalist Christian disciples of James Dobson. It’s so confusing. Where’s Heather Veitch? Heather, you’re a stripper and a Christian, where can we find a date?

150 Chinese Serenade Pope, But He’s Unimpressed

First we sent the New York Philharmonic to play for the dictator in North Korea. Now the Chinese have sent the China Philharmonic to play for the Pope at the Vatican. I’m not sure why. Maybe as an answer to that confusing encyclical on Chinese Catholics that Benedict wrote last fall? This Pope could out-talk the entire Politburo if he had to, but that wasn’t even his toughest assignment the day of the concert. Also visiting the Vatican was Catholicos Karekin II, patriarch of the Armenian Orthodox Church, who’s still mad about something that happened in the 11th century.

Killing Nuns Is Not Cool

There’s already a guy serving a 28-year prison term for the 2005 killing of Sister Dorothy Stang, the American nun who was trying to preserve a piece of the Amazon rainforest when she was gunned down while visiting an encampment near the Trans-Amazon Highway in Para, Brazil. But the reason everyone was outraged by the acquittal of Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura last week is that it’s assumed the guy in prison is just a stooge and that the true culprits–loggers and cattle ranchers–have evaded prosecution. Moura, who was accused of providing the murder weapon, would have been the first step working up the chain, but now he’s free and the code of silence is intact. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as Massive Environmentally-Conscious Nun Retaliation.

Who Would Jesus Endorse?

The sideshow in the Jeremiah Wright drama is the mumbledymouth whining of the United Church of Christ leadership in Cleveland, notably denomination president John H. Thomas, who first posted a series of “Why is the media persecuting our largest church?” articles, then did a 180 after Barack Obama threw Wright overboard. “While there is high regard for Reverend Wright’s ministry and leadership at Trinity U.C.C. in Chicago during the past 36 years,” wrote Thomas, “many of us today are troubled by some of his controversial comments and the substance and manner in which they have been communicated, both by him and as characterized by the media.” Because, as we all know, Jesus was temperate and non-controversial. Why didn’t you just go ahead and follow the lead of Bob Herbert, the New York Times columnist, who said of “the histrionics of a loony preacher from the South Side of Chicago” that they are both “tragic and absurd”? Further evidence that the media got the story all wrong: white voters turned out to be indifferent to the Wright Affair, while black voters were even more motivated to vote for Obama after it happened, leading to the landslide in North Carolina. In other words, Jeremiah Wright helped Obama, the opposite of the effect predicted by pundits.