Ancient texts depict all kinds of people, not just straight and cis ones – this college course looks at LGBTQ sexuality and gender in Egypt, Greece and Rome

The course also explores the lives of some Byzantine saints who were seen as women before they entered a monastery or became ascetics. Yet their self-punishing practices, such as extreme fasting, transformed their bodies, and the surrounding communities started to see them as men. These stories, which aimed to uplift their audiences, serve as a reminder that cross-dressing and gender variance were not always seen as objectionable…

https://theconversation.com/ancient-texts-depict-all-kinds-of-people-not-just-straight-and-cis-ones-this-college-course-looks-at-lgbtq-sexuality-and-gender-in-egypt-greece-and-rome-210182

Rome vs. China: What Made the Difference? • Richard Carrier

…Understood as such, it is not surprising that China didn't develop it. Because "it" here means something fundamentally different from what China did do, which was merely excel above all at what all civilizations do, which is merely accumulate philosophical and craft knowledge that nevertheless remains scattered within a sea of errors, fantasies, and bad ideas all given the same weight. That only happens when you have no conception of how to tell the difference between those two things. And so really, the "secret sauce" is simply the remarkable, indeed clearly extraordinarily rare, discovery of how to tell the difference…

https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/19104

The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey

...History, she believes, has given the Church an undeservedly easy ride. Pre-Christian Rome tends to be imagined as cruel, arbitrary and punitive; it is thought to be, in her fine phrase, “a chilly, nihilistic world”. Christianity, conversely, is painted as brave, principled, kind, inclusive and optimistic. The task she sets herself – her own melancholy duty – is to rip away this veneer and expose the error and corruption of the early Church...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/28/the-darkening-age-the-christian-destruction-of-the-classical-world-by-catherine-nixey

Steve Bannon and the Pope’s Sex-Abuse Circus Are Coming to Rome - The Daily Beast

Sideshows abound at the pontiff's unprecedented crisis summit on clerical sex abuse as victims, children of priests, angry nuns, Bannon, and Cardinal Burke seek the spotlight. ....
https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-bannon-and-the-popes-sex-abuse-circus-are-coming-to-rome

Pope Francis Makes Everything That Donald Trump and Steve Bannon Say Sound Stupid -- The Daily Beast

In a few short weeks, if the U.S. Senate confirms her appointment as ambassador to the Holy See, which is expected, Callista Gingrich should be unpacking her bags alongside husband Newt and settling into the lavish Villa Richardson atop one of Rome's famous hills. The Washington couple will be the talk of the town, no doubt trailed by paparazzi and sought after by local media as they acquaint themselves with the Eternal City. But Mrs. Gingrich's job will be no Roman holiday. ...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/pope-francis-makes-everything-that-donald-trump-and-steve-bannon-say-sound-stupid