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On the origins of the station church pilgrimage

The idea of a station church goes back to the very earliest days of Christianity in Rome, when Christians would gather to celebrate Mass at the tombs of their martyrs. And in the first millennium of Christianity, the pope would celebrate Mass each day during Lent at one of a series of designated station churches in Rome.

On one of the most striking churches on the historic pathway

Sts. Cosmas and Damian is a church near the Coliseum in Rome. It's right above the Roman Forum. It's dedicated to the memory of two brothers — doctors, traditionally thought to be from the East, perhaps from Persia. And what's particularly striking about it is the mosaic in the apse. When I first saw it some 20 years ago, I thought, "Wow, that looks like art deco." And I said to the person I was with, "Was that done in the 1920s? Because it looks like something that would be in the Chrysler building." And he said, "No, you're only off by about 1,300 years — it was done in the early sixth century."

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Kansas citizens are proud of their barbecue, their Chiefs football, their national champion soccer team and Boulevard Brewing, a Kansas City brewery that's built up quite a local following since its launch in the late 1980s.

"It's our thing. You know, like la cosa nostra, it's our thing," says Char O'Hara, a Kansan resident who, like thousands of other local 20-somethings, grew up with Boulevard.

But soon, it will be a Belgian thing, too. Any day now, Belgian beer maker Duvel is expected to finalize its purchase of the Kansas City brewery.

The deal to buy Boulevard Brewing says a lot about the transformation of the American craft beer industry — and just how much the world now values a product with a firm sense of place.

O'Hara is a little leery about Duvel taking over her brand. "These people came from the outside, and took something that's native to us, and it's kind of a bummer," she says. "It makes the future uncertain."

But John McDonald, Boulevard Brewing's founder, sees things differently. "I think a lot of people were kind of shocked at the news, and I kind of knew that would happen."

Ireland was one of the countries hardest hit by Europe's debt crisis. On Sunday, it passed a big milestone when the nation became the first country to formally exit the bailout program funded by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.

After three years of the bailout program, it isn't hard to find signs of improvement in Ireland and of an economy coming back from the dead.

"Don't get me wrong, it's been bad in a lot of ways, but there's a silver lining in every cloud," says Conor Mulhall, a 41-year-old father of three.

Mulhall used to be in construction management. After the collapse of the Irish economy, he moved to England. But recently, he moved back to Ireland to take a job managing another business.

"It brings you to new stages in your life," Mulhall says. "I'm now involved in the organic food business, so I never would have been if the construction thing had kept going, and there's a lot of people like me."

Mulhall is working at a food fair near Dublin's financial district.

These days, people like him are beginning to find work again. Ireland's unemployment rate has fallen from more than 15 percent to 12.5 percent. The economy is growing again, albeit slowly.

"We're still below where we were at the top of our inflated boom, so we need 10 years of solid growth, but we'll do it year by year," says Michael Noonan, Ireland's finance minister.

Noonan says that big foreign companies, including a lot of U.S. tech firms like Google, are once again investing in Ireland. The government can also borrow at a rate not much higher than countries like England and Belgium. Tourism and agriculture are rebounding as well.

Noonan says the exit from the European bailout program is one more step forward. The program forced the country to undergo steep budget cuts and tax increases in exchange for loans.

"Leaving the program means we control our own affairs," he says. "And an Irish government elected by the Irish people can make all future decisions concerning our country."

But there's little joy in Ireland over the exit, perhaps because the country still has a long way to go. The economic crisis was caused by a property bubble that popped in 2008, and the severe budget cuts that followed left the government with few resources to help.

"If you walk around the main streets of our cities, there are people sleeping in the streets because the homeless shelters are all crowded," says Robin Hanan, who directs the Irish branch of the European Anti-Poverty Network. "A lot of people lost their jobs and their houses."

Even though things are getting better, economist Colm McCarthy of University College Dublin says the recovery is tentative.

"It's very fragile and the economy is very dependent on external demand; it's a very small country," McCarthy says. "It exports a lot of what's produced here and a lot of what's consumed is imported."

McCarthy says Ireland's fate is very much up to its export markets — mainly England, the United States and continental Europe — and none of them are thriving. There are other problems as well.

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Bill Battle peers through the window of a pickup truck at his catfish farm, Pride of the Pond, near Tunica, Miss. The land is pancake-flat, broken up by massive ponds, some holding up to 100,000 pounds of catfish.

Cormorants fly low over the ponds, keeping an eye out for whiskered, smooth-skinned fish. Battle keeps a shotgun in the front seat; business is hard enough without the birds cutting into his profit.

Battle has been catfish farming for more than three decades. Catfish has always been popular in the South, but its popularity took off throughout the country in the 1980s. Battle says they could hardly build ponds fast enough to keep up with the demand.

But he's watched with alarm over the past decade as Vietnam has flooded the U.S. market with its own, cheaper catfish, forcing him to cut back on production. "At one time, I was 3,000 acres. Now I'm basically about 1,200 acres of water," he says.

Ben Pentecost, president of the Catfish Farmers of America, says Battle is not alone — the Vietnamese imports have affected the whole domestic market. "Our industry peaked at 660 million pounds live weight fish. And this last year I think we did 300 million pounds," he says.

Vietnamese imports now make up 60 percent of the U.S. catfish market, which has helped drive more than half of the American catfish farms out of business, says Pentecost.

And U.S. catfish farmers have serious food safety concerns about the Vietnamese fish, which they say are raised with antibiotics in polluted water, Pentecost says.

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