Nathaniel Philbrick, in Mayflower, his acclaimed history of the Pilgrims, recounts how William Bradford, the intrepid leader of that courageous band of Puritans, years later described “that first morning in America.” Recalling with wonder their landing on the salty, windswept shores of Cape Cod Bay on November 15, 1620, Bradford wrote: “But here I cannot stay and make a pause and stand half amazed at this poor people’s present condition. . . .

Can you believe some individuals are actually paid to take pictures of angels? In fact there are five photographers who have been granted three-year stints to take as many pictures of angels in the air as they possibly can! I’m not kidding.

On Tuesday the Pew Research Center released its 2014 Religious Landscape Study, a survey of over 35,000 Americans. Coming seven years after Pew’s previous such study, the new survey offers some intriguing comparisons.

Talking about adding insult to injury—figures released this week indicate that the top 100 CEO retirement packages here in the United States now equal the retirement account savings of 41% of all American households with the lowest retirement wealth. Go figure! So let’s do. The accumulated wealth in the retirement packages of these top 100 American executives is $4.9 billion.

Let’s see—at the time of this writing the Cubs are down 0-3, Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama have flying aces bumping into each other over Syria, down on the ground Palestinians and Israelis are at it once again, half a world away North and South Korean families are reunited after being separated for 65 years since the Korean War, Wall Street is keeping its fingers crossed about any significant upsurge in the stock market before the end of the year, the latest rumor for the Vatican to squash is about the Pope having a small brain tumor, though the press has tired of reporting the immigratio

Since we’re a generation huge on sound-bite success formulas, here’s one more—a short, punchy guarantee for success. Its genius is its simplicity—you can memorize it in twenty seconds.

After a week of headline heartaches from the mass shooting in Roseburg to the biblical proportion flooding in South Carolina, here’s a headline hardly as ponderous. According to USA TODAY the grammar-checking app Grammarly has run some numbers on the presidential candidates from both parties and their supporters who comment on the candidate’s Facebook page. In short Grammarly set out to find out which candidate’s supporters were the most grammatically correct. I.e., how many spelling and/or grammatical errors appear in the online postings of the various candidates’ supporters.

Talking about cramming two hot button topics into a single headline! It was announced this week (with later Vatican confirmation) that Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to sign marriage licenses for same sex applicants and was subsequently jailed for six days, met privately with Pope Francis this past Thursday when he was in Washington. According to the Washington Post: “The pair reportedly chatted about bravery, then hugged and exchanged promises of prayer.

Young filmmaker Christopher Hudson has pulled off a headline-grabbing feat. Armed with only a $20,000 budget raised through crowd-funding and gifted with remarkable talent for cutting edge camera work and music/script editing, Hudson directs and stars in this 1:26:00 length docudrama, “Leopard Vision.” Since its September 7 release on YouTube, the movie has gone viral (194,000 YouTube views in less than three weeks). Critics are weighing in, including Hyperfresh, an independent pop culture magazine, which gave “Leopard Vision” a five-star movie review.

How do you steel yourself against the heart-rending refugee photographs that now wall-paper cyberspace? The lifeless body of 3 year old Alan Kurdi, lying face down in the wet sand, drowned along with his mother and brother in a desperate effort to cross the sea in a dinghy in order to flee the bloody Syrian mayhem. The emaciated Middle-eastern and North African men, women and children walking for miles and miles only to cling to a razor-edged chain-link fence hastily erected by Hungary to stem the massive overflow of fleeing refugees into their country.