Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.

A coalition of Evangelical, Roman Catholic, and mainline Protestant leaders unite to repeal the death penalty in Nebraska.

“I think the faith community has been very influential. All three Roman Catholic bishops supported repeal,” Emerson told CT via email. “A host of Protestant traditions worked for abolition as well. I think when you see broad ecumenical agreement, people pay attention.”

How long has the United States been at war? The Washington Post crunches the percentages. 

The speaker was ABC journalist Martha Raddatz, and the point is the key one in the intro: The graduates have spent half their lives with America at war.

It’s a startling idea, but an incorrect one. The percentage is almost certainly much higher than that.

Using somewhat subjective definitions of “at war” — Korea counts but Kosovo doesn’t in our analysis, for example — we endeavored to figure out how much of each person’s life has been spent with America at war. We used whole years for both the age and the war, so the brief Gulf War is given a full year, and World War II includes 1941. These are estimates.

A book by Craig Bernthal explores the unbreakable links between Tolkien’s Catholicism and his fiction.

Tolkien’s view of language was grounded in his aesthetic anthropology. To him, humans are subcreators, who make afresh out of what God created ex nihilo. Adapting a notion of fellow Inkling Owen Barfield, Tolkien held that one facet of this human sharing in divine fashioning is that language participates in the synergy of sign and signified present in the Logos, the Word through whom all things were made. Language so being sacramental, he deduced, the myths it voices are as well, as they represent transcendent verities in original idioms. Such tales are “translucent to reality,” for “the mythopoetic world is a fully sacramental world, in which matter and spirit have not been divorced.”

“Dad Bod” fever has spread across the internet like wildfire, but what does a Dad Bod really look like?

If you’re like us, you’ve said: “Are we even sure exactly what kind of bods dads have? Seth Rogen keeps being cited as a ‘dad bod’ archetype, and he doesn’t even have children. I’m really enjoying this national conversation about bods, but I wish it had more quantitative rigor.”

Well, your wish has come true. We have figured out exactly how much softer a man’s body gets, on average, when he becomes a father. To do this, we zeroed in on men 18 to 45, and compared those who had children who were under 18 and at home with those who did not.

Mad Men wove the drama of the workplace, the home, and the individual together adeptly, if not always elegantly.

I’ve struggled all week to come up with something fitting to say as a send-off to “Mad Men,” a show that I’ve watched faithfully – if eventually more out of duty than pleasure – for last seven years. In the end, I think the struggle reflects the fact that I experienced the show as three distinct dramas, and I had very different perspectives on each one.

The finale of Mad Men wasn’t nearly as cynical as some make it out to be.

I couldn’t disagree more strongly. I think the optimism is sincere, bordering on maudlin. The whole episode fits that description. The Coke ad — a Madison Avenue incantation insisting that the momentary happiness of soda is the Real Thing — undercuts this a bit, because it’s ironic and funny, and consistent with the rest of Mad Men. The co-opting of the counterculture has been a theme throughout the show’s run, starting with the beatniks and continuing through the hippies and beyond.

But still, even though “Person to Person” has many wrenching scenes, and much of the action takes place in New York in October, it’s as sunny as the Northern California coast.