Jackson Whitlow made headlines in 1937 by fasting for 52 days. He did it because he said God had told him to. He broke his fast with elderberry wine and squirrel broth.
About a year later God told Whitlow to live in a cave. His condition rapidly deteriorated and by the start of 1939 he was dead. According to Whitlow, this was also "the Lord's will".
I'm assuming this is satire because the site doesn't actually share any AI-generated spiritual guidance. If you click the "Get Started" button it shows a pop-up that says "coming soon."
On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if AI could provide online spiritual help on a par with flesh-and-blood pastors.
May 1972: Rev W.L. Jenkins of Mississippi advertised that he was going to walk across the surface of the Ross Barnett Reservoir. But he had to cancel the event when he was shot in the leg while driving to the reservoir. He said he still planned to walk across the reservoir sometime in the future, but wouldn't publicize the event beforehand.
Controversy recently struck the General Theologial Seminary in New York after it invited an artist to perform in the college chapel. Details from Church Times:
The Episcopalian seminary had invited the artist Lia Chavez to perform Water the Earth, in which she intended to sit in the college chapel and weep for five hours, as part of an expression of "tears as a sacred act", the press release for the event stated. Ms Chavez said that her performance would be "harnessing and ritualizing the mysteriously regenerative power of releasing emotional tears as an offering to the earth", and watchers would be invited to weep with her.
I know some people can cry on command, but for five hours?
The Episcopalian community thought the event sounded way too weird, forcing the seminary to cancel the performance before it happened.
The UK's Shops Act made it illegal to operate a shop on Sunday... unless one was Jewish (since the Jewish observed the sabbath on Saturday). So business owner Mike Robertson figured that to open his stores on Sunday he simply had to make his staff convert to Judaism.
The Shops Act had other oddities. According to the London Telegraph, a shop could stay open if it was "in an officially designated 'holiday resort area'" or if it restricted sales to "certain kinds of perishable goods, like fruit, flowers and vegetables; medical and surgical appliances, newspapers, cigarettes and refreshments."
A fragrance recently released by Thomson & Craighead is described as "a complex fragrance based on olfactory materials detailed in The Book of Revelation as it appears in the King James Bible first published in 1611."
Some of those materials:
Thunder, blood, hail and fire, the creatures of the sea that have died, wormwood, a rod of iron, the opened earth, a grievous sore, the blood of a dead man, every living soul [who has] died in the sea, plagues, wine of her fornication, animal horns, filthiness of her fornication, blood of the martyrs of Jesus, flesh burned with fire, [and] a lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.
Damon Doherty invented the "Recording Rosary" so that people could pray the Rosary while driving. As a traveling jewelry salesman he found that "Rosary beads sometimes became tangled in the gear shift as he prayed his way from city to city." So he invented a solution (Design Patent 167,827).
I'm not Catholic, and know very little about praying the Rosary, but I've got a few questions about his invention.
First, is it considered okay to multitask while praying the Rosary? So it's okay to pray the Rosary while driving a car?
Second, the second article below notes that his Recording Rosary was "an actual Rosary of legitimate material." What are the 'legitimate' materials that Rosary beads can be made out of?
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.