St Mellitus College, founded in 2007, offers on-the-job experience as well as theology.

The numbers attending church on Sundays may be falling, but an innovative new college to train Anglican clergy has already attracted 500 students, making it the newest and one of the largest in the country.St Mellitus College, which started in 2007, opened the doors of a new building in November. It is the first training college for clergy to focus especially on leadership, and to combine theology with on-the-job experience in churches, youth centres, homeless shelters and Christian work in the inner cities.

“It’s the same pattern as business schools or the way doctors are trained now,” says Graham Tomlin, the college dean. “Previously those training for the ministry went to a full-time residential college. Now they can spend time in parishes as lay workers while coming here part of the week and on several residential periods a year. Or they continue in their jobs as doctors or bus drivers while training part-time for the ministry.”

As a result, St Mellitus, a joint project by the dioceses of London and Chelmsford, has seen a surge of applications from the start, with 110 full-time ordinands and around 400 lay students. A survey showed that three quarters of the ordinands would not have considered going into the church, or would have done so much later, had this work/study pattern not been available.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Ministry of the Ordained • * Culture-Watch • Education • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Theology • Seminary / Theological Education

At Boston College's commencement ceremony on Monday, Cardinal Sean O'Malley won't be in attendance. The leader of the Boston archdiocese announced on May 10 that he would not deliver his traditional graduation benediction at the Catholic school because the college had invited Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny—a supporter of abortion rights in Ireland—to deliver the graduation address and receive an honorary degree.

The cardinal said the invitation has caused "confusion, disappointment and harm" by ignoring the U.S. bishops "who have asked that Catholic institutions not honor government officials or politicians who promote abortion with their laws and policies."

In April, Mr. Kenny's coalition government introduced legislation with the curious title "The Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill 2013." It will allow access to direct abortion for pregnant women if they claim to be so distraught about the pregnancy that they are in danger of committing suicide. Mr. Kenny has said that he "would like to see the legislation enacted before the Dail [parliament] rises for the summer."

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Filed under: * By Kendall • Harmon Family • * Culture-Watch • Education • Health & Medicine

For five years I was a student under Dallas’s direction at USC. Having been so deeply impacted by his written work, I was pleasantly surprised to find that he, himself, was far more compelling than anything he had written. To be with him was to draw near to the Kingdom of God. He seemed effortlessly to communicate the peace, security, love and acceptance of God by his mere presence. I found it nearly impossible to remain anxious about anything while with him. And it was my repeated experience to witness the disarming of anger, contempt, fear, and countless other inner ailments with a simple look, a gentle word, a touch.

Dallas is the best teacher I’ve ever met. His work in philosophy always penetrates to the perennial problem – that issue of central importance to the human condition – in whatever discussion he’s a part of. During his time with us, he loved to think, write, and talk about a philosopher by the name of Edmund Husserl. He saw in Husserl a few crucial insights required to make sense of our ability to have knowledge of the world. But he didn’t allow the world of Husserl scholarship (and it is a real world unto itself) to define his research agenda. Rather, he brought the insights of Husserl to bear upon urgent questions about life, meaning, and the Kingdom of God.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Evangelicals

Key figures within North-East Church of England schools have welcomed a report which places their work at the heart of education.

Senior Anglican figures make the comments in a YouTube video based on a conference staged by the Durham and Newcastle Diocesan Education Boards.

The event, attended by everyone from headteachers to governors, was in response to publication of the Church of England's Chadwick Report, entitled The Church School of the Future, which said they are at the heart of the nation and should robustly assert their Christian ethos.

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...today's prom is serious business. And I do mean business: The credit-card company Visa reports that prom spending will reach an average of $1,139 per family this year, up 5 percent since 2012. Most of that spending is still done by girls, who post their dresses on Facebook in the hopes that no one else will purchase the same one.

Meanwhile, boys now compete to devise the most elaborate ways to ask girls to prom. Two years ago, a student who serenaded his intended date in class -- backed up by a cappella singers -- ended up on "Good Morning America." So-called "promposals" have since become ubiquitous on the Internet, generating millions of Youtube hits.
What's going on here?

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Radical and intolerant Islamist leaders preached to crowds of students at almost 200 official events in the past year, according to a study of external speakers at universities including Cambridge, Birmingham and University College London.

Segregated seating for male and female students is understood to have been implemented for at least a quarter of those public meetings held by the Islamic societies at 21 universities.

Two institutions have announced investigations into segregated meetings. But research by Student Rights, which was set up to tackle extremism on campus, indicates that the practice is prevalent across Britain, despite university equality rules forbidding it.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Religion & Culture • Violence • Young Adults • * Economics, Politics • Terrorism • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Islam • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

One September day in eighth grade, when he was walking home from school, Mike saw his maternal grandfather, Charlie Wesson, pull up beside him in a car. Wesson had always been there for Mike, attending his games, winking when he faked a fever in grade school so they could spend the day together. This time, the news was bad. He needed to go home, immediately.

Young Mike saw a crowded house and knew something was wrong. His father had died of a heart attack after hip surgery. A short and difficult life was over, at 43, but the son thought largely about his mother. His parents were not married anymore, but he knew her life would change, too.

“I just felt like I had to pick myself up and my mom up,” he said. “It was a very tough time for her. I felt like I was trying to take control of my life and not rely on other people to do things for me.”

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First, we need to recognize that some doctrines are more important than other doctrines. All Christians recognize this to some extent. For example, the doctrine of the return of Jesus Christ, the second coming, is much more important than the question of whether Christ will return before or after the tribulation. If you deny the second coming of Christ, it calls into question whether you are a Christian. But Christians have always disagreed about the exact timing of Christ’s return. So which doctrines are more important and which are less important?

One way to think about this issue is to distinguish between three levels of doctrines. First level doctrines include those a person has to believe in order to be a Christian. These include things like the inspiration of Scripture, the divinity of Jesus Christ, the humanity of Christ, the sacrificial death of Christ for our sins, and his bodily resurrection. Now I am not saying that every Christian understands these doctrines fully. But if a person rejects these doctrines, can they really be a Christian in any historic sense?

Second level doctrines include those which are important because they promote the health of the church.

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Filed under: * By Kendall • Harmon Family • * Culture-Watch • Education • Young Adults

A former top level church boss has appeared in court charged with lying about his degree to win his £45,000 a year job.

Maximilian Manin, 54, was the most senior official in the Lincoln Diocese, which is responsible for all Church of England parishes in the county.

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I don't mean to suggest that we had romance "right" in the days of chastity belts and arranged marriages. But I feel as though we all sort of know how romance ought to play out. Hookup culture is an unnavigable mush of vague intentions and desires, and that's true even on nights when people don't go home with novel odors and difficulty urinating.

We can try to dress it up as being freeing or equalizing the genders, but I fear it only leaves us equally impoverished.

C.S. Lewis said that "friendship is born at the moment one person says to another: "What? You too? I thought I was the only one." Maybe I'm naive and idealistic, but I prefer the narrative in which emotional and physical love come as a package, one experienced with a very small subset of the population. I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm not the only one.

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The way some schools in Nevada teach sex education could be changing.

A bill moving its way through the Nevada Legislature would require all districts to provide uniform, medically accurate and age-appropriate sex education lessons. Topics would include abstinence, abortion, contraceptives, domestic violence and sex trafficking. Students would be automatically enrolled in sex education classes under the proposed law, and parents would need to sign a document for their children to opt out of the instruction.

Currently, sex education instruction varies by county, although all counties have sex education advisory boards by law.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Sexuality • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • State Government

In fall 2011, Sebastian Thrun, a research professor at Stanford, and Peter Norvig, the top scientist at Google, teamed up to develop and teach a free, online course on artificial intelligence. Their aim, as Norvig said in , was to develop a course at least as good as, if not better than, the course they teach together at Stanford. They'd put the result online and make it available to everyone, for free.

Over a 160,000 students signed up. About half that many, he explains, participated in some way through to the end. And 20,000 finished the course.

This is an astonishing example of the way MOOCs — massively open online courses — may be able to transform education as we know it, changing it from the privilege of an elite into a shared commons that is open and free to everyone.

There are grounds for concern, though....

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There are still relatively few women in tech. Maria Klawe wants to change that. As president of Harvey Mudd College, a science and engineering school in Southern California, she's had stunning success getting more women involved in computing.

Klawe isn't concerned about filling quotas or being nice to women. Rather, she's deeply troubled that half the population is grossly underrepresented in this all-important field. Women aren't setting the agenda and designing products and services that are shaping our lives. They're getting only about 18 percent of the bachelor's degrees in computer science, and in the workplace their numbers aren't much higher.

Seated in her modest office on the Claremont, Calif., campus, Klawe, 61, reflects on the stereotype of computer scientists as anti-social nerds, saying it's out of date. But she is quick to add that women often face barriers spoken and unspoken that discourage them from entering the field.

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The community of Roxbury had high hopes for its newest public school back in 2003. There were art studios, a dance room, even a theater equipped with cushy seating.

A pilot school for grades K-8, Orchard Gardens was built on grand expectations.

But the dream of a school founded in the arts, a school that would give back to the community as it bettered its children, never materialized.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Art • Children • Education • Music • Urban/City Life and Issues

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Theology • Anthropology • Christology • Soteriology • Theology: Scripture

Yale University is organizing a conference on “Personhood Beyond the Human” for December 6-8, 2013. It will feature, among other proponents of personhood rights for animals, notorious infanticide and bestiality-promoting ethicist Peter Singer.

The conference is co-sponsored by the animal rights group Nonhuman Rights Project and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, in collaboration with the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and the Yale Animal Ethics Group.

"The event will focus on personhood for nonhuman animals, including great apes, cetaceans, and elephants, and will explore the evolving notions of personhood by analyzing them through the frameworks of neuroscience, behavioral science, philosophy, ethics, and law,” reads a description of the conference on its website.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Life Ethics • Young Adults • * General Interest • Animals • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

[Archbishop Vincent] Nichols is hardly alone – and not wrong – in worrying that some businesses have ethical problems. The concern explains why business ethics has become a standard part of the curriculum in MBA programmes, and the existence of numerous initiatives to promote corporate social responsibility and other virtues. The main problem with these worthy efforts is blandness: it’s not clear what business ethics classes are supposed to teach or what, for example, should be the aim of the Westminster archdiocese’s programme “A Blueprint for Better Business”.

One possibility is that ethical instruction should induce qualms. Moral training might have restrained the captains of finance from excessive bets and pay demands before and after the 2009 crisis, but I doubt it.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Law & Legal Issues • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

At first, Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn., could see itself as exempt from the economic forces shaking seminaries and theological schools nationwide. Luther is the biggest seminary for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the largest Lutheran denomination in the United States. Among its peers, it had a reputation for being innovative. Individual donors continued to give, and its local area -- in one of the country’s most Lutheran states -- was supportive.

Last fall, though, it all came crashing down. Enrollments were dropping. The seminary found it was running multimillion-dollar deficits, spending down its endowment and relying on loans. In December, its president, the Rev. Dr. Richard Bliese, resigned, as the seminary’s board began to look at options to trim at least $4 million from the seminary’s $27 million annual budget.

The results were announced...[not long ago]: layoffs for 18 of its 125 staff members, many effective within a few weeks; the voluntary departure of 8 of 44 faculty members at the end of the academic year, who will not be replaced; the termination of a master’s program in sacred music; and the decision to no longer admit Ph.D students for at least three years.

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Ministry of the Ordained • Stewardship • * Culture-Watch • Education • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Lutheran • Methodist • Presbyterian • United Church of Christ • * Theology • Seminary / Theological Education

“Leading the conversation” is how you end up with the major Sunday shows somehow neglecting to invite a single anti-amnesty politician on a weekend dominated by the immigration debate. It’s how you end up with officially nonideological anchors and journalists lecturing social conservatives for being out of step with modern values. And it’s how you end up with a press corps that went all-in for the supposed “war on women” having to be shamed and harassed — by two writers in particular, Kirsten Powers in USA Today and Mollie Ziegler Hemingway of GetReligion — into paying attention to the grisly case of a Philadelphia doctor whose methods of late-term abortion included snipping the spines of neonates after they were delivered.

As the last example suggests, the problem here isn’t that American journalists are too quick to go on crusades. Rather, it’s that the press’s ideological blinders limit the kinds of crusades mainstream outlets are willing to entertain, and the formal commitment to neutrality encourages self-deception about what counts as crusading.

The core weakness of the mainstream media, in this sense, is less liberalism than parochialism....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Media • Psychology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Politics in General

Among the statistics cited are theses:

One in every four young people will experience a mental disorder in any 12 month period (most commonly substance abuse or dependency, depression or anxiety, or a combination of these).

Depression and anxiety are the most prevalent mental health issues experienced by young people, with around 30% of
adolescents experiencing a diagnosable depressive episode by the age of 18 years.

Mental disorders were the leading contributor to the burden of disease and injury (49%) among young Australians aged
15–24 years in 2003, with anxiety and depression being the leading specific cause for both males and females

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Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Anglican Church of Australia • * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • Psychology • Religion & Culture • Teens / Youth • * International News & Commentary • Australia / NZ

Late in 2011, Michiko Kakutani opened her New York Times review of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens with “a remarkable account” she had found in its pages. In London for a few days in 1862, Fyodor Dostoevsky had dropped in on Dickens’s editorial offices and found the writer in an expansive mood....

I have been teaching courses on Dostoevsky for over two decades, but I had never come across any mention of this encounter. Although Dostoevsky is known to have visited London for a week in 1862, neither his published letters nor any of the numerous biographies contain any hint of such a meeting. Dostoevsky would have been a virtual unknown to Dickens. It isn’t clear why Dickens would have opened up to his Russian colleague in this manner, and even if he had wanted to, in what language would the two men have conversed? (It could only have been French, which should lead one to wonder about the eloquence of a remembered remark filtered through two foreign tongues.) Moreover, Dostoevsky was a prickly, often rude interlocutor. He and Turgenev hated each other. He never even met Tolstoy. Would he have sought Dickens out? Would he then have been silent about the encounter for so many years, when it would have provided such wonderful fodder for his polemical journalism?

Several American professors of Russian literature wrote to the New York Times in protest, and eventually a half-hearted online retraction was made, informing readers that the authenticity of the encounter had been called into question, but in the meantime a second review of Tomalin’s biography had appeared in the Times, citing the same passage....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Books • Education • History • Media • Poetry & Literature • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • Europe • Russia • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

If all the hopes and hype are warranted, a nondescript third-floor loft in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan offers a glimpse of the future, for New York City and for Cornell University. In truth, it doesn’t look like much — just cubicles and meeting rooms in space donated by Google. But looks deceive; here, with little fanfare, Cornell’s new graduate school of applied sciences is being rolled out.

The sparkling, sprawling new campus on Roosevelt Island filled with gee-whiz technology — still just ink on paper. The thousands of students and staff, the transformative effect on the city’s economy, the integration with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology — those all remain in the future, too.

But just 13 months after being awarded the prize in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s contest to create a new science school, Cornell NYC Tech got up and running. Eight students enrolled in January in what is being called the beta class, a one-year master’s program in computer science. And Cornell has made it clear that, in many ways, this is not the usual university program.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Science & Technology • Urban/City Life and Issues

I remain an enthusiastic advocate of homeschooling, but recent years have found me occupied with reforming “real” school. Two much-heralded but very different books, Joseph Murphy’s new survey of the professional literature on homeschooling, Homeschooling in America, and Quinn Cummings’ story of homeschooling her daughter Alice, The Year of Learning Dangerously, rekindled my interest in the movement that once so engaged my family.

A professor of education at Vanderbilt, Murphy is a social scientist, not an advocate, which makes his generally positive evaluation of homeschooling all the more significant. His survey of the social science literature on the topic usefully, if sometimes turgidly, compiles the growing evidence that homeschooled children learn more than their counterparts, at least to the extent that standardized tests measure learning, and are emotionally healthier as well, at least to the extent that psychologists’ “self-esteem and self-concept” scales truly capture emotional health. They volunteer many more hours in their communities and even spend more time participating in extracurricular activities.

While these findings have been widely reported, some of the other studies he describes deserve more attention. For example, low-income children who are homeschooled often reach or exceed national academic averages, whereas the average low-income children in public schools score “considerably below” the national norm.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Books • Children • Education • Marriage & Family

An Arizona bill that could leave many employees of religious schools and daycares ineligible for unemployment benefits is on the verge of becoming law.

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No one knows if Atlanta's school superintendent or any of the people accused of falsifying test results will go to jail, but they wouldn't be the first if they do.

Lorenzo Garcia, the former superintendent of schools in El Paso, Texas, has been sitting in a federal prison since last year. He's the nation's first superintendent convicted of fraud and reporting bogus test scores for financial gain.

Now, the school district is in turmoil and everybody is blaming everybody else for the scandal.

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Rick Pitino has had teams during his 12 seasons at the University of Louisville loaded with more talent.

And better shooters. And more heralded out of high school.

But he’s never had a team like this.

One that picked each other up when they struggled. One that got better in areas of weakness. One that was prone to unexpected performances when they absolutely needed it....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Men • Sports • Young Adults • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • History • Philosophy • Poetry & Literature • Religion & Culture • Young Adults • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.

Lin, the first Chinese-American to be play in NBA, and NBA commissioner David Stern said that Lin’s failure to get a major college basketball scholarship or a roster spot through the NBA draft had to do with his Asian ethnicity.

CBS’s 60 Minutes will do a report on Lin’s story Sunday, April 7 at 7:00 p.m. ET/PT, where the Houston Rocket’s point guard sits down and discusses his rags to riches story and his stellar performance that caused the “Linsanity” phenomenon, and the racial obstacles he’s had to overcome.

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For students now sprinting toward the end of their college days, the finish line may not be much of a relief. More than ever, their gait is slowed by the weight of impending debt.

Thirty-seven million Americans share about $1 trillion in student loans, . It's the besides mortgages, eclipsing both auto loans and credit cards. And on it grows, an appetite undiminished by the recession.

There are signs that students are catching on to the dangers, however. Dawit Lemma learned his own lessons about loans and is now passing them on to others. He's the associate director of operations at the University of Maryland's Office of Student Financial Aid.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Young Adults • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Personal Finance • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program.

And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade.

EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks....

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The proprietor of this page, Paul Solman, posed a few specific questions to me. The first: How does the quality of online discourse compare to in-class discussion at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke, where I've taught?

My answer is that so far (and as I note, the class has just begun, so it may be too soon to say), the only way to answer this question is to start by differentiating between the average discussion quality and the discussion quality of the outliers, because you get a very different picture when you examine them separately.

In terms of average quality, we have to consider the environment of a typical four-year university student, which leads to a very different approach to academics. These students often live on campus, show up to class and have their meals on campus...[as] a result, they have more resources, time, and attention to devote to their studies, as well as friend groups who share the same collective experience. Taking this unique kind of atmosphere into account, the average quality is higher in regular classes.

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[Elementary School Teacher] Ms. Parks admitted to {Georgia state investigator] Mr. Hyde that she was one of seven teachers — nicknamed “the chosen” — who sat in a locked windowless room every afternoon during the week of state testing, raising students’ scores by erasing wrong answers and making them right. She then agreed to wear a hidden electronic wire to school, and for weeks she secretly recorded the conversations of her fellow teachers for Mr. Hyde.

In the two and a half years since, the state’s investigation reached from Ms. Parks’s third-grade classroom all the way to the district superintendent at the time, Beverly L. Hall, who was one of 35 Atlanta educators indicted Friday by a Fulton County grand jury.

Dr. Hall, who retired in 2011, was charged with racketeering, theft, influencing witnesses, conspiracy and making false statements. Prosecutors recommended a $7.5 million bond for her; she could face up to 45 years in prison....

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Take interstate highways between South Carolina's largest metropolitan areas and the scene remains similar — thick forests, meandering rivers and lush farms punctuated with thriving suburbs and vibrant downtowns.

Get off those interstates and something else emerges — towns where poverty rules, illiteracy passes to children like an inherited disease, and diabetes strikes 9-year-olds because of bad diets and obesity.

This is the other South Carolina. It runs along the “Interstate-95 Corridor” through the mostly majority black counties made infamous by the “Corridor of Shame” documentary about inequities in public schools. It also includes the “Mill Crescent,” the swath of rural, largely white, old textile mill counties between the I-85 economic powerhouse and greater Columbia.

If you took this other South Carolina away, the state would no longer rank at the bottom of nearly every list you want it to be at the top of. Instead, it would basically mirror the nation as a whole in income, education and health.

Many crippling disparities linger in these metropolitan counties, but the areas have been pushed into the national mainstream by four decades of economic growth, desegregation and an influx of people from other states and countries with new ideas and high expectations.

The other South Carolina remains shrouded in despair by the legacies of slavery, dependence on a marginally educated workforce, and political and economic domination by an elite few.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • History • Marriage & Family • Poverty • * Economics, Politics • Economy • * South Carolina • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

If Steve Boedefeld graduates from Appalachian State University without any student loan debt, it will be because of the money he earned fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and the money he now saves by eating what he grows or kills.

Zack Tolmie managed to escape New York University with no debt — and a degree — by landing a job at Bubby’s, the brunch institution in TriBeCa, where he made $1,000 a week. And he had entered N.Y.U. with sophomore standing, thanks to Advanced Placement credits. All that hard work also yielded a $25,000 annual merit scholarship.

The two are part of a rare species on college campuses these days, as the nation’s collective student loan balance hits $1 trillion and continues to rise. While many students are trying to defray some of the costs, few can actually work their way through college in a normal amount of time without debt and little or no need-based financial aid unless they have an unusual combination of bravery, luck and discipline.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • Young Adults • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Personal Finance • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.

Our news media suffer from a terrible supply-side problem. The number of people paid to offer opinions greatly outstrips the number of things worth having an opinion about. Even now, several weeks after the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, I don’t think the slaughter was the kind of event toward which one can profitably form an interesting point of view. Leaving church one morning, so the story goes, the great Coolidge was asked the subject of his pastor’s sermon. “Sin,” Coolidge replied. And what did the pastor say about sin? “He said he was ag’in it.” Some things don’t require much elaboration.

In an important sense—in the literal sense—what happened at Sandy Hook was unspeakable, which is why, I suppose, the public disputations that followed it were a towering jumble of non sequitur and irrelevance, a rodeo of hobby horses ridden by straw men. The disputations began even before the authorities had released a final count of victims. Indeed, at the time, good information was hard to come by. For as much as 10 hours after the first reporters arrived on the scene, print and TV journalists were misreporting the killer’s name, his place of residence, his relationship to the elementary school, his mother’s line of work, the types and source of the guns he used, the reaction of school officials in the immediate aftermath of the crime—the long string of mistakes we have come to expect when the compulsion to get it first overwhelms the need to get it right.

The slaughter at Sandy Hook wasn't merely a rebuke to politics or law enforcement or government regulation--it was a rebuke to our desperate hope that evil can be destroyed, or at least quarantined.

--From the February 2013 issue of Commentary, pages 63-64

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Media • Psychology • Religion & Culture • Violence • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology • Theodicy

Many psychological tests have the so-called “lie-scale.” A small but sufficient number of questions that admit only one true answer, such as: “Do you always reply to letters immediately after reading them?” are
inserted among others that are central to the particular test. A wrong reply for such a question adds a point on the lie-scale, and when the lie-score is high, the over-all test results are discarded as unreliable. Perhaps, for a scientist the best candidate for such a lie-scale is the question: “Do you read all of the papers that you cite?”

Comparative studies of the popularity of scientific papers has been a subject of much recent interest [1–8], but the scope has been limited to citation distribution analysis. We have discovered a method of estimating
what percentage of people who cited the paper had actually read it.

The title of the paper is "Read Before You Cite!" No fair clicking the link until you have guessed, then check out their argument--KSH.

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The Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Revd John Pritchard, has briefed the Bishops that, despite the Government's insistence that RE remains a legal requirement, its policies are sending the subject into "a spiral of decline".

The letter was written last month, shortly after a meeting of Bishop Pritchard, who chairs the C of E's Board of Education, with the Minister of State for Education, David Laws.

Bishop Pritchard writes: "It's clear that the Government has no real interest in RE because they see it as a scary nuisance, and its protected status as a guarantee that all is well. It isn't." The Bishop writes of the effect of excluding RE from the EBacc core syllabus, and halving the training places for specialist teachers.

Read it all.

Update: Also, please see Statement from Church of England’s Board of Education on today’s expected announcement of dropping plans for Ebacc.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • CoE Bishops • * Culture-Watch • Education • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • England / UK

We're about to comment on yet another interminable sex-related piece from The Atlantic, so let's start with some comic relief. The article's co-authors, Lisa Arnold and Christina Campbell, run a website called Onely.com. Its slogan is "Single and Happy...."

[The authors]...[are] aggrieved enough to resort to neology, denouncing what they term "institutionalized singlism, the discrimination of [sic] individuals based on marital status." What they mean is discrimination against individuals based on lack of marital status.

"More than 1,000 laws provide overt legal or financial benefits to married couples," they complain. "Marital privileging marginalizes the 50 percent of Americans who are single. . . . Marital privilege pervades nearly every facet of our lives." Income-tax liability is generally (though not always) higher for unmarried earners; married workers more or less automatically have access to spouses' health insurance; couples can share individual retirement accounts, and so forth.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Marriage & Family • Psychology • Teens / Youth • Young Adults • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Why is it so hard to determine what makes a good teacher? The answer is both complicated and polarizing. In recent education reform history, judging teacher evaluations has become as much an issue as how to evaluate student achievement.

The NewsHour's American Graduate team recently traveled to Bridgeport, Conn., to document how one charter school's system of constant instructor feedback is incentivizing good performance and encouraging teachers to stay in the classroom.

Nationally, charters have experienced higher rates of teacher turnover than traditional public schools.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education

It was billed as the moral equivalent of an Ali v Foreman title fight. The world’s best known atheist arguing with the man who until a few weeks ago was the Archbishop of Canterbury. Last night, Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, took on Rowan Williams, the new master of Magdalene College, in a debate on religion at the Cambridge Union. And Williams emerged triumphant.

The motion for debate was big enough to attract the very best speakers to the Cambridge Union: Religion has no place in the 21st century.

But the key factor in persuading Professor Richard Dawkins to agree to take part in last night’s setpiece was something else – an admiration for his principal opponent.

“I normally turn down formal debates,” he said. “But the charming Rowan Williams was too good to miss.”

Read it all.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • --Rowan Williams • * Culture-Watch • Education • Philosophy • Religion & Culture • Young Adults • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Atheism • * Theology • Apologetics

As [Arif] Ahmed recited figures on Anglicanism’s decline Rowan Williams grew restless, causing Ahmed to ask the master of Magdalene pointedly: “Do you want a point of information?” The room broke out in laughter as Williams responded by motioning for Ahmed to ‘bring it on’.

The Spectator columnist Douglas Murray, arguing for the relevance of religion in the 21st century despite the “awkward position” of being an atheist, finished the debate by declaring that “no rational person could agree with this motion". Religion, alongside humanism and secularism, has “a contribution to make”, Murray argued, telling students that without religion you may end up “with something like a perpetual version of The Only Way is Essex”.

Priyanka Kulkarni, Pembroke first year, said: “Tonight's debate was highly anticipated, the queue spanning for what seemed to be miles was an indicator that this was going to be a highlight of the union this term.”

Read it all.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • --Rowan Williams • * Culture-Watch • Education • Religion & Culture • Young Adults • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Atheism • * Theology • Apologetics

You may find the preliminary video here (it lasts a little over 1 1/2 hours).

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury • --Rowan Williams • * Culture-Watch • Education • Philosophy • Religion & Culture • Science & Technology • Young Adults • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Atheism • * Theology

I have heard from many leaders in business and finance that when a graduate from Catholic elementary and secondary schools applies for an entry-level position in their companies, the employer can be confident that the applicant will have the necessary skills to do the job. Joseph Viteritti, a professor of public policy at Hunter College in New York who specializes in education policy, recently said, "If you're serious about education reform, you have to pay attention to what Catholic schools are doing. The fact of the matter is that they've been educating urban kids better than they're being educated elsewhere."

The evidence is not just anecdotal. Researchers like Helen Marks (in her 2009 essay "Perspectives on Catholic Schools" in Mark Berends's "Handbook of Research on School Choice") have found that students learning in a Catholic school, in an environment replete with moral values and the practice of faith, produce test scores and achievements that reliably outstrip their public-school counterparts.

This is why, to the consternation of our critics, we won't back away from insisting that faith formation be part of our curriculum, even for non-Catholic students.

Read it all.

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Research by FICO Labs into the growing student lending crisis in the U.S. has found that, as a group, individuals taking out student loans today pose a significantly greater risk of default than those who took out student loans just a few years ago. The situation is compounded by significant growth in the amount of debt that new graduates are carrying.

The delinquency rate between 2005-2007 on student loans that were originated in the three months after October 2005 is 12.4 percent. The comparable figure between 2010-2012 for student loans that were originated in the three months after October 2010 is 15.1 percent, representing an increase in the delinquency rate by nearly 22 percent.

While the delinquency rate is climbing, the average amount of student loan debt is increasing even faster. In 2005, the average U.S. student loan debt was $17,233. By 2012, it had ballooned to more than $27,253 – an increase of 58 percent in seven years. By contrast, the average credit card balance and the average balance on car loans owed by U.S. consumers actually decreased during the same period.

Read it all.

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Rowan Williams and Richard Dawkins are to go head to head again in debate. Last year the two debated religion and science in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre, now they are to debate the place of reli- gion in the modern world at the Cambridge Union.

About 1,000 students are expect- ed to attend a debate in which Tariq Ramadan, Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association, and Douglas Murray, founder of the Centre for Social Cohesion, will also take part.

The debate will be filmed and be available on the Union website soon after it has taken place.

Read it all (may require subscription).

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One scholar says it's impossible to understand American history without an understanding of the nation's Christian history. Another suggests that it can lead to church renewal. A third says it helps us interpret Scripture, shape our mission, and appreciate God's grace. People of Faith serves most of these needs well.

The series—produced by the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College (Illinois), with support from the Lilly Endowment—shows Christians engaged in public life during the European settlement, the founding of the nation, the Civil War, the 19th-century social reform movements, and the civil rights movement. Christian activity is portrayed as predominantly positive, though not entirely so. For example, the series points out that Christians made arguments both for and against slavery, and that Prohibition began as a public health crusade against a devastating social problem but quickly turned punitive and counterproductive. Subjects that Christians got mostly wrong, notably the treatment of Native Americans, are touched on lightly, if at all.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church History • Parish Ministry • Adult Education • * Culture-Watch • Education • History • Media • Movies & Television • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Evangelicals • * Theology

The Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a teacher of mathematics at Oxford and a deacon of the Anglican Church. Some colleagues knew him as a somewhat reclusive stammerer, but he was generally seen as a devout scholar; one dean said he was “pure in heart.” To readers all over the world, he became renowned as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Alice was popular almost from the moment it was published, in 1865, and it has remained in print ever since, influencing such disparate artists as Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, just released in movie theaters nationwide, is only the latest of at least 20 films and TV shows to be made from the book. But if Alice has endured unscathed, its author has taken a pummeling....

In 1999, Karoline Leach published yet another Dodgson biography, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, in which she quoted the summary of the missing diary information and argued that her predecessors, misunderstanding the society in which Dodgson lived, had created a “Carroll myth” around his sexuality. She concluded that he was attracted to adult women (including Mrs. Liddell) after all.

The reaction among Dodgson scholars was seismic. “Improbable, feebly documented...tendentious,” thundered Donald Rackin in Victorian Studies. Geoffrey Heptonstall, in Contemporary Review, responded that the book provided “the whole truth.”

Which is where Dodgson’s image currently stands—in contention—among scholars if not yet in popular culture. His image as a man of suspect sexuality “says more about our society and its hang-ups than it does about Dodgson himself,” Will Brooker says.

Read it all (in honor of his birthday this past weekend, and, yes, the emphasis is mine).

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On a dark and cold morning last month, 19-year-old Aaron Liberman woke at his apartment and walked a block and a half to a two-story, redbrick synagogue in West Rogers Park, a predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in northwest Chicago. Inside, he was met by the hum of worship and a smattering of older men — some in black hats, some wrapped in prayer shawls — seated at long tables, surrounded by shelves packed with books, Hebrew letters on their spines.

Liberman removed his jacket and unpacked his worn prayer book. He unfurled his tefillin, small boxes holding prayers printed on parchment, and bound them to his left arm and his forehead with black leather straps. Then he prayed.

During the service, a man walked over, politely interrupting Liberman’s meditation, asked how he was, and then, rather proudly, said: “We’re going to get tickets for one of your games. My kids, they are very excited.”

Read it all.

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..fidelity to Thomas also demands that a Catholic university teach theology as a divine science, and not religious studies, a human one dependent on rational inquiry alone. Even though the core beliefs of Christianity are revealed and held by faith, students have to be informed of what they are. Aquinas never suggests that explaining the content of the articles of faith will bring about a response of faith, but he does think that we need to be told them. Theology courses at a Catholic university propose sacra doctrina. They set out what Christ taught in the Gospels, since he "is the first and chief teacher of spiritual doctrine and faith". Consequently, a Catholic university should be a place in where special attention is given to ensuring that students learn from theologians who propose the teaching of Christ as historical and authoritative.

Authentic Christian faith does not fear reason "but seeks it out and has trust in it". Faith presupposes reason and perfects it. Nor does human reason lose anything by opening itself to the content of faith. When reason is illumined by faith, it "is set free from the fragility and limitations deriving from the disobedience of sin and finds the strength required to rise to the knowledge of the Triune God". The Holy Father observes that St Thomas thinks that human reason, as it were, "breathes" by moving within a vast horizon open to transcendence. If, instead, "a person reduces himself to thinking only of material objects or those that can be proven, he closes himself to the great questions about life, himself and God and is impoverished". Such a person has far too summarily divorced reason from faith, rendering asunder the very dynamic of the intellect.

What does this mean for Catholic universities today? Pope Benedict answers in this way: "The Catholic university is [therefore] a vast laboratory where, in accordance with the different disciplines, ever new areas of research are developed in a stimulating confrontation between faith and reason that aims to recover the harmonious synthesis achieved by Thomas Aquinas and other great Christian thinkers". When firmly grounded in St Thomas' understanding of faith and reason, Catholic institutions of higher learning can confidently face every new challenge on the horizon, since the truths discovered by any genuine science can never contradict the one Truth, who is God himself.

Read it all from 2010.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • * Theology • Anthropology

[Roman] Catholic school enrolments in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese are predicted to exceed 18,000 this year for the first time, as families choose Catholic schools over state schools.

There are no kindergarten vacancies in at least nine primary schools across the region, and very limited vacancies at many others.

The director of Catholic schools for the Maitland-Newcastle diocese, Ray Collins, said growth for the past four to five years was steady, with the greatest demand in the Maitland area.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Anglican Church of Australia • * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Australia / NZ

A Tanzanian bishop has said African churches have a duty to complement state education to help improve the local lives and the local community.

Bishop of the Diocese of the Rift Valley the Rt Revd John Lupaa was speaking after the Tanzanian government announced it would re-register Kalimatinde School of Nursing, which is owned and run by his Diocese.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Anglican Church of Tanzania • * Culture-Watch • Education

Backed by two conservative groups, Stanford Law School has opened the nation’s only clinic devoted to religious liberty, an indication both of where the church-state debate has moved and of the growth in hands-on legal education.

Begun with $1.6 million from the John Templeton Foundation, funneled through the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the school’s new Religious Liberty Clinic partly reflects a feeling that clinical education, historically dominated by the left’s concerns about poverty and housing, needs to expand.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Law & Legal Issues • Religion & Culture

Enjoy it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Music • Young Adults

Even if her dream is only dorm-room reverie, China has tens of millions of Ms. Zhang [Xiaoping]s — bright young people whose aspirations and sheer numbers could become potent economic competition for the West in decades to come.

China is making a $250 billion-a-year investment in what economists call human capital. Just as the United States helped build a white-collar middle class in the late 1940s and early 1950s by using the G.I. Bill to help educate millions of World War II veterans, the Chinese government is using large subsidies to educate tens of millions of young people as they move from farms to cities.

The aim is to change the current system, in which a tiny, highly educated elite oversees vast armies of semi-trained factory workers and rural laborers. China wants to move up the development curve by fostering a much more broadly educated public, one that more closely resembles the multifaceted labor forces of the United States and Europe.

Read it all.

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From 1870 to 1996, 130 different residential schools, most run by Anglican and other churches, including Anglican, were built on military models, he said. Indigenous children were taken from their families at about age 5 and returned when they were 16 or 17.

“The purpose was to destroy the family bond, the connection to culture and language, and to make it impossible for indigenous life to continue into the future,” he said. “It was for indigenous people to die out....”

The church’s reaction is “a case study in when evil so swamps and floods a group of people they will deny it,” he said. “The church doesn’t have the capacity to describe or accept within itself what happened. There’s a tremendous amount of denial.”

Read it all.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Anglican Church of Canada • * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • History • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Canada • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology • Pastoral Theology • Theodicy

Our Vision

Our vision is for the gospel to be recognized as public truth again. We want to see Christians owning the gospel in all aspects of their lives, and demonstrating its positive impact at all levels of society—individuals, communities, sectors, and the entire marketplace of ideas.

Our Mission

Our mission is to take the gospel public. Through our research and our grounding in the calibre of theological education found at Regent College, we aim to provide and embody fresh, reliable, and well-informed expressions of the gospel that reveal its truth, necessity, and relevance to all spheres of public life....

Check it out thoroughly.

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From here:

The ivy-covered walls have insulated John I. Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, from understanding the fact that the majority of Americans are unable to engage in the "deep and candid dialogue" he is promoting ("Persuasion as the Cure for Incivility," op-ed, Jan. 9).

They cannot frame a decent, reasoned argument because they have neither the verbal skills nor a daily educational stimulus to do so.

I would suggest that he watch one hour of "Buckwild" followed by an hour of "The Real Housewives of Atlanta" then conclude his seminar with a perusal of highlights from "Moonshiners."

Father Jenkins will then see that bluntness and coarseness have permeated all levels of American society. These elements have forever supplanted the civility he is seeking.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Military / Armed Forces • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.

So it was that a few weeks later, two first-year nursing students, Cindy Santiago, 26, and Michelle Elliot, 52, arrived at Ms. Keochareon’s tiny house, a few miles from the college. She was bedbound, cared for by a loyal band of relatives, hospice nurses and aides. Both students were anxious.

“Sit on my bed and talk to me,” Ms. Keochareon said. The students hesitated, saying they had been taught not to do that, to prevent transmission of germs. What they knew of nursing in hospitals — “I’m here to take your vitals, give you your medicine, O.K., bye,” as Ms. Santiago put it — was different, after all....

For Ms. Keochareon, this was a chance to teach something about the profession she had found late and embraced — she became a nurse at 40, after raising her daughter and working for years on a factory floor.

Read it all.

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About nine million young people have filled out the American Freshman Survey, since it began in 1966.

It asks students to rate how they measure up to their peers in a number of basic skills areas - and over the past four decades, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of students who describe themselves as being "above average" for academic ability, drive to achieve, mathematical ability and self-confidence.

This was revealed in a new analysis of the survey data, by US psychologist Jean Twenge and colleagues.

Read it all from the BBC Magazine.

Follow up: An interesting ZDnet article on this is there.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • Psychology • Young Adults • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.

One of the member schools in Colleges and Universities of the Anglican Communion (CUAC) in Africa has been affected by the fighting in Congo.

Despite being 250 miles north from the fighting in Goma, the Université Anglicane du Congo experienced its first attack since its opening two years ago. The Revd Canon Daniel Sabiti Tibafa, the university vice chancellor, has sent the following report:

"Yes, the morning night of 22 December 2013 at around 2:00 am, armed people broke the door of our house threatening to kill all of us if we did not have any money on us. They forced the door with heavy stones…and the guns to destroy the lock of the door. In the house we managed to get $200 and they forced me to take them into my office where we got another $250. They beat me on the back and on my right hand. The right hand pain is still being dealt with by our lovely nurse Miss Kiiza Kahwa.

Read it all

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Anglican Church in Congo/Province de L'Eglise Anglicane Du Congo • * Culture-Watch • Education • Religion & Culture • Violence • * International News & Commentary • Africa • Republic of Congo

Catholic parochial education is in crisis. More than a third of parochial schools in the United States closed between 1965 and 1990, and enrollment fell by more than half. After stabilizing in the 1990s, enrollment has plunged despite strong demand from students and families.

Closings of elementary and middle schools have become a yearly ritual in the Northeast and Midwest, home to two-thirds of the nation’s Catholic schools. Last year, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia closed one-fifth of its elementary schools. Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York, is expected to decide soon whether to shut 26 elementary schools and one high school, less than three years after the latest closings. Catholic high schools have held on, but their long-term future is in question.

This isn’t for want of students....

Read it all.

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BOB FAW, correspondent: This enrichment music class at St. Stephen Catholic School in New York City is part of a new experiment to help save Catholic schools.

In a Philadelphia suburb at Conwell-Egan Catholic High School, this too is part of the effort to keep Catholic schools open. Here students devise real solutions for real-world problems.

The new approaches are needed. For the last decade, 26 percent of Catholic schools have closed. Because of the recession, funding is down, the cost of running the schools is up, and enrollments have plummeted.

DR. JOHN CONVEY (Professor of Education, Catholic University): There has been a drop in enrollment, and over the last 30 or 40 years it’s over two million fewer students. From my point of view, it’s a crisis.

Read or watch it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic

Chandler Catanzaro kicked a 37-yard field goal as time expired to give No. 14 Clemson a wild 25-24 win against No. 9 Louisiana State in the Chick-fil-A Bowl on Monday night.

Trailing 24-22, Clemson (11-2) took possession on its 20 with 1:39 remaining. Tajh Boyd completed a pass for 26 yards to DeAndre Hopkins on a fourth-and-16 play during the decisive 10-play drive.

Catanzaro’s kick set off a wild celebration on the field and in the stands. Some players collapsed on the field in apparent disbelief while most of Clemson’s orange jerseys met in a midfield circle.

Read it all. I was unable to stay up for the end; congratulations to the Tigers--KSH.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Men • Sports • Young Adults • * South Carolina

This week, an ancient and largely inaccessible treasure was opened to everyone. Now, anyone with access to a computer can look at the oldest Bible known to humankind.

Thousands of high-resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls were posted online this week in a partnership between Google and the Israel Antiquities Authority. The online archive, dating back to the first century B.C., includes portions of the Ten Commandments and the Book of Genesis.

"Most of these fragments are not on display anywhere," says Risa Levitt Kohn, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Judaism at San Diego State University.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Blogging & the Internet • Education • History • Religion & Culture • Science & Technology • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • * Theology • Theology: Scripture

Watch and listen to it all.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church Year / Liturgical Seasons • Christmas • Liturgy, Music, Worship • * Culture-Watch • Education • Religion & Culture • Young Adults • * International News & Commentary • England / UK

A device made of materials like those used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing could have been a former student’s “dry run” to see how authorities would respond to a bomb threat at Trident Technical College, Sheriff Al Cannon said Friday.

Local investigators and federal terrorism experts wouldn’t say whether the device could have exploded and caused damage near the North Charleston campus’ Student Center, which was mostly abandoned Monday for the holiday break.

The device contained ammonium nitrate, the same, readily available fertilizer that Timothy McVeigh used in his attack on the Oklahoma City federal building that killed 168 people.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Law & Legal Issues • Police/Fire • * Economics, Politics • Terrorism • * South Carolina

Focusing Wednesday afternoon's service on the victims is a way for some to get through the tragedy, [the Rev. Stephen] McKee said.

"Lighting a candle, there's something tactile about that," he said. "After we leave, those candles will go on. Religion is supposed to bring people together."

He noted that one thing the service at Trinity - or any service or vigil - can't do is explain why it happened.

A important thing to remember is that death and violence didn't just happen on Friday in a small town in Connecticut. Acts of violence occur often, and he noted everyone should work together to prevent them.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Parishes • * Christian Life / Church Life • Liturgy, Music, Worship • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • Spirituality/Prayer • * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Violence • * Theology • Theodicy

"The decision is up to you, but we do recommend you ring them 28 times, which would include the killer and his mother in the count," says a release from diocesan communications director Ruth Meteer.

"We think praying for all souls best reflect Christ's message of forgiveness and love for all, and that we should especially pray for those souls who may need our prayers the most."<

Read it all.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • * Christian Life / Church Life • Liturgy, Music, Worship • Parish Ministry • * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • Violence

While the tragedy...[at Columbine High School] continues to grip the nation, real answers for the reason behind it have so far proved elusive.

You have heard the voices. Youth culture is the problem, Hollywood is to blame. Where were the parents? What about the school officials who could have, should have, known sooner? Maybe gun availability is the culprit.

Others point the finger at the devastating impact of peer pressure, and on and on it goes.

But amidst this din of stories, analysis and commentary, there is one thing which is not being said. Its silence has become deafening, yet it begs to be heard because it points the way to a more painful, yet more hopeful answer.

Can you think of what is not being said? What is nearly always blurted out in other situations but has not been articulated in this one?

Judge not. You remember this one, don't you? Jesus said it, right? What is fine for you is fine for you, but I have a different take on it. You say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to, you say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to.

But suddenly the cat is out of the bag, because the one thing everyone is doing is judging.

. To say Hollywood is showing too much violence implies there is a standard of decency which Hollywood has violated. If people are upset that the parents did not know, that implies an idea of an effective parent (involved) and a bad parent (uninvolved).

Strange word, that, BAD. Opposite of GOOD (not effective, as misused above - did you notice?)

We do not hear these words, good and bad, very much anymore, do we? What happened to the so-called "post-modern" world? I thought we were to speak of values and preferences. I thought we were not supposed to judge.

Our reaction to Littleton says volumes more than even the tragedy of Littleton itself, because it exposes our hypocrisy about judgment. We claim to live in a world of taste and lifestyle, but the moment anything of real import occurs the game shifts to be played on another field. On this field, words like God and goodness, the satanic and evil, beg to be used, because they are the only way in which to begin to wrestle with the magnitude of it all. "Anger management" classes just are not enough.

But then the guns went off, and not only our judgments poured forth, but God's did as well. If Littleton means anything, it means God's judgment upon an America which is losing its moral and spiritual vocabulary and imagination.

When Jesus said "judge not" in Matthew 7:1, he did not mean what he is often alleged to have meant, that we are not to judge. He calls for his followers to judge "with right judgment" (John 7:24) which is how we, like him, are able to distinguish between true and false prophets (Matt. 7:15-20).

What is at issue is what is being judged and how. The human heart and a person's ultimate spiritual condition is something God alone can judge, but we can judge people's behavior and words - "you will know them by their fruits" - and render partial verdicts when appropriate.

The full verse, the second half of which is frequently left off, is, "judge not, that you be not judged," by which Jesus means we are to judge with the awareness that the standard we use on others is one which we will also be judged by.

So we are called by the judgments about Littleton [the community in Colorado where Columbine High School is located] to hear the judgment we are bringing on ourselves, and the far more important judgment God is making and will render upon us. We are indeed one nation under God.

As applicable today as when I first wrote it--KSH.

Filed under: * By Kendall • * Culture-Watch • Education • Violence • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • * Theology • Theodicy

Blame it on the guns. No, blame the judges who banned God talk in schools, along with most lessons about right and wrong. No, our lousy national mental health care system caused this hellish bloodbath.No, the problem is the decay of American families, with workaholic parents chained to their desks while their children grow up in suburban cocoons with too much time on their hands.

No, it’s Hollywood’s fault. How can children tell the difference between fantasy and reality when they’ve been baptized in violent movies, television and single-shooter videogames? Why not blame God?

These were the questions in 1999 when two teen gunmen at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killed 13 people and themselves in the massacre that set the standard for soul-searching media frenzies in postmodern America.All the questions asked about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are now being asked about Adam Lanza after he gunned down 20 first-graders and six employees at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., before taking his life....

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church Year / Liturgical Seasons • Advent • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Religion & Culture • Violence • * Theology • Theodicy

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s famous novel, Ivan is the Karamazov brother who collects stories of children tortured, beaten, killed — babes caught on the points of soldiers’ bayonets, a serf boy run down by his master’s hounds, a child of 5 locked in a freezing outhouse by her parents....

It’s telling that Dostoyevsky, himself a Christian, offered no direct theological rebuttal to his character’s speech. The counterpoint to Ivan in “The Brothers Karamazov” is supplied by other characters’ examples of Christian love transcending suffering, not by a rhetorical justification of God’s goodness.

In this, the Russian novelist was being true to the spirit of the New Testament, which likewise seeks to establish God’s goodness through a narrative rather than an argument, a revelation of his solidarity with human struggle rather than a philosophical proof of his benevolence....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Books • Children • Education • * Theology • Theodicy

As schools nationwide welcomed students back on the first day after Friday's deadly shooting in Newtown, Conn., teachers and parents began walking the fine line between grief and normalcy, openness and vigilance.

Uncertainty was in the air a week before Christmas holidays, and many parents asked themselves a basic question: Should I even send my kid to school?

"My feelings were actually not even bringing her at all," said Joanne Nichols, who dropped her granddaughter off at Skyland Elementary School in Greenville, S.C. Citywide, principals and administrators got instructions to be highly visible as students arrived, but Nichols said she thought schools should be on lockdown all week.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori • * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Violence

The shooting tragedy at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut wrenches the hearts of all people. The tragedy of innocent people dying through violence shatters the peace of all.

At this time, we pledge especially our prayerful support to the Diocese of Bridgeport and the community of Newtown as they cope with this almost unbearable sorrow. We pray that the peace that passes understanding be with them as they deal with the injuries they have sustained and with the deaths of their beautiful children.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Violence • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic

First, we must recognize that this tragedy is just as evil, horrible, and ugly as it appears. Christianity does not deny the reality and power of evil, but instead calls evil by its necessary names — murder, massacre, killing, homicide, slaughter. The closer we look at this tragedy, the more it will appear unfathomable and more grotesque than the human imagination can take in.

What else can we say about the murder of children and their teachers? How can we understand the evil of killing little children one by one, forcing them to watch their little friends die and realizing that they were to be next? How can we bear this?

Resisting our instinct toward a coping mechanism, we cannot accept the inevitable claims that this young murderer is to be understood as merely sick....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Violence • * Theology • Theodicy

A picture is worth 1000 words--check it out.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • Violence

Completely chilling--read it carefully and read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Rural/Town Life • Violence

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Sports • Young Adults

I join my fellow Americans in grieving the terrible tragedy that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary and in praying for the families involved. It is unthinkable that someone would have such anger and bitterness in his heart that he would attack innocent people in such a devastating way. Truly, it is difficult for any of us to grasp. When I think of the terrifying last moments of the children and staff members of the school, I am absolutely heartbroken for them, their families, their schoolmates, and everyone at Sandy Hook Elementary.

Certainly, there are many who are wondering why God would allow such a horrific tragedy. Where was He? Why did He allow this? Why didn’t He stop this young man from perpetrating this terrible crime? I confess I have many questions myself. But does it shake my faith in God? No. It actually makes me more grateful for Him. This is because in God, I always have hope, no matter what happens.

We may never discover the answer to our questions this side of heaven. The truth is, evil is dangerous and destructive, and it is no respecter of the innocent among us. But we also know that this tragedy grieves the heart of God very deeply....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • Religion & Culture • Violence • * Theology • Theodicy

Gehenna, a synonym for Hell, is a real place, or so the Bible tells us. You can see it today. It is a valley outside Jerusalem, the valley of the son of Hinnom, and it was where worshippers of the idol Moloch sacrificed children to sate their god’s hungers.

Gehenna was revived today in Newton, Connecticut, where as many as 20 children at last report were slaughtered in an elementary school this morning.

We learn in the book of Kings that in the seventh century BCE, the prophet Jeremiah demanded that King Josiah destroy the idolator’s temple in Gehenna to prevent more sacrifices to Moloch. We can presume from the newsworthiness of this act that child sacrifice was once a relatively common practice in the ancient Middle East, as we know it to have been in other pagan cultures.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • Religion & Culture • Violence • * Theology • Theology: Scripture

Not again. Here. In a school.

All over Connecticut Friday, people greeted each other with downcast eyes and a few mumbled words. Many cried, churches opened for prayer, events were canceled. Some veteran police officers and news reporters found it hard to keep their composure. Even the president fought back tears while speaking of the deaths.

The day felt, to those who remember it, like the somber, chilly day in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was shot.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • Rural/Town Life • Violence

A 20-year-old man wearing combat gear and armed with semiautomatic pistols and a semiautomatic rifle killed 26 people — 20 of them children — in an attack in an elementary school in central Connecticut on Friday. Witnesses and officials described a horrific scene as the gunman, with brutal efficiency, chose his victims in two classrooms while other students dove under desks and hid in closets.

Hundreds of terrified parents arrived as their sobbing children were led out of the Sandy Hook Elementary School in a wooded corner of Newtown, Conn. By then, all of the victims had been shot and most were dead, and the gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, had committed suicide. The children killed were said to be 5 to 10 years old.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • Violence

Dear Friends in Christ:

We are shocked and overwhelmed by the horrendous tragedy of the school shooting in Sandy Hook. We hold the victims, their families, and all who are affected by the shooting in our thoughts and prayers for healing and strength. We pray that those who have died will be held in the arms of our loving God whose heart aches for those affected by this tragedy.

We bishops have been in touch with the Rev. Mark Moore, the rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Sandy Hook which is adjacent to the school were the shooting took place. We have also communicated with the leadership of Trinity Church, Newtown, and we understand that the Rev. Kathie Adams-Shepherd, rector of Trinity Church is on the scene ministering to the bereaved.

We are departing immediately for Newtown/Sandy Hook to be of whatever assistance we can. We will be in contact when we have additional information.

We invite all clergy to open our churches for prayer.

Please keep all who have died, the one who has perpetrated the shooting, and all affected by this incident in your prayers. May the God who we await this Advent season bring us hope and new life in Jesus the Christ.

Faithfully, Ian, Laura and Jim

The Rt. Rev. Ian T. Douglas
The Rt. Rev. Laura J. Ahrens
The Rt. Rev. James E. Curry

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • TEC Bishops • * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Violence

Your thoughts, reactions and reflections please.

Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • Violence

"Evil visited this community today," Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy just told reporters in Newtown. "And it's too early to speak of recovery, but each parent, each sibling, each member of the family has to understand that Connecticut - we're all in this together.

"We'll do whatever we can to overcome this event. We will get through it. But this is a terrible time for this community and these families."

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Violence

The “Global Trends 2030” report is generally upbeat about the future. It foresees more individual empowerment, a growing middle class, better health care, and a world order in which the United States learns to better share power (assuming China plays along). It sees Islamic terrorism fading away.

Like many forecasts of global trends, it focuses strongly on material conditions more than the advance of ideas. It sees worrisome urbanization, with nearly 60 percent of the world’s population living in cities by 2030. Demand for “food, water, and energy will grow by approximately 35, 40, and 50 percent respectively,” the report states with presumed precision. “Many countries probably won’t have the wherewithal to avoid food and water shortages without massive help from outside.” At least 15 countries are “at high risk of state failure” by 2030.

These quadrennial reports are useful, up to a point, if they are constantly revised with new information. Most of all, they rely too heavily on experts without also tapping into the wider wisdom within society.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Globalization • History • Psychology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • Politics in General • * Theology • Anthropology

Several hundred of the most popular educational and gaming mobile apps for children fail to give parents basic explanations about what kinds of personal information the apps collect from children, who can see that data and what they use it for, a new federal report says.

The apps often transmit the phone number, precise location or unique serial code of a mobile device to app developers, advertising networks or other companies, according to the report by the Federal Trade Commission, released Monday. Regulators said such information could be used to find or contact children or track their activities across different apps without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Law & Legal Issues • Marriage & Family • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Students across the United States have made some gains but continue to lag behind many of their Asian counterparts in reading, math and science, according to the results of two international tests released Tuesday.

U.S. fourth-graders’ math and reading scores improved since the last time students took the tests several years ago, while eighth-graders remained stable in math and science. Americans outperformed the international average in all three subjects but remained far behind students in such places as Singapore and Hong Kong, especially in math and science.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Globalization • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • Asia • China

More than 200 school districts across California are taking a second look at the high price of the debt they've taken on using risky financial arrangements. Collectively, the districts have borrowed billions in loans that defer payments for years — leaving many districts owing far more than they borrowed.

In 2010, officials at the West Contra Costa School District, just east of San Francisco, were in a bind. The district needed $2.5 million to help secure a federally subsidized $25 million loan to build a badly needed elementary school.

Charles Ramsey, president of the school board, says he needed that $2.5 million upfront, but the district didn't have it.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Psychology • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Politics in General • City Government • State Government • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

“The Love and Fidelity Network opposes Harvard University's formal recognition and funding of a group that seeks to associate human sexuality with violence, oppression, and humiliation,” Director of Programs Caitlin Seery said. “Universities should foster an environment where the dignity and beauty of sexuality is honored and affirmed – and where reasoned debate is welcomed among those of goodwill who disagree over what constitutes the true dignity and beauty of human sexuality. Groups like Munch, however, do not seek to participate in that important debate. Rather, BDSM groups dishonor and degrade human sexuality precisely by associating it with violence and humiliation.”

“Our opposition isn’t about banning groups with whom we disagree or censoring private behavior. We support the recognition of many groups with whom we disagree precisely because we think an honest debate about how best to honor the dignity and beauty of sexuality is needed. It is about whether Harvard University should subsidize the promotion of violent and abusive behavior, which endangers all students, particularly women, both psychologically and physically.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Men • Sexuality • Violence • Women • Young Adults • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

The ongoing debate over homework focuses mostly on kids’ mounting workloads , and some schools’ efforts to curtail them.

A growing number of parents are struggling with another homework trend that threatens to sink their juggle – an increase in extremely complicated homework projects, from neighborhood field trips to do research, to expansive dioramas or multimedia presentations to report on what students have learned, according to parents I interviewed for last Wednesday’s “Work & Family” column on homework.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market

I’m applying to law school. I’m sure there are many schools that could provide me with a decent education; I’m less confident that a degree from some institutions will get me a job. In fact, some schools, while charging outrageously high tuition, place fewer than half of their recent graduates in long-term, full-time legal positions. Is it moral for schools like these to keep enrolling students and collecting tuition dollars knowing that their product is a risky (or outright bad) investment?

Read it all from "The Ethicist".

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Law & Legal Issues • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market • Personal Finance • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology

[Emmanuel] Davidenkoff says the Socialist government doesn't seem to understand the concerns of the working and middle class and in the name of equality, got it all wrong.

"Mostly, wealthy people don't want homework because when the kids are at home, they make sports or dance or music. They go to the museums, to the theater. So they have this access to culture, which is very important," he says. "In poor families, they don't have that, so the only link they have with culture and school is homework."

Elisabeth Zeboulon sits in her office over the playground. Today, she's the principal at a private, bilingual school in Paris, but she spent most of her career in French public schools. Zeboulon says the centralized French education system doesn't leave much room for trying different teaching methods....

Read or listen to it all (audio highly recommended).

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Education • Marriage & Family • Poverty • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Personal Finance • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology

Although blind, [Albano] Berberi has played a musical instrument longer than he can remember. When his family still lived in Albania, 6-month-old Berberi began playing the keyboard. It wasn't Mozart, but his father told him he played the notes sequentially. At 18 months, he reproduced the music demonstration tape that came with the keyboard.

When he was a year old, the family moved to Greece, where he continued playing keyboard until his kindergarten teacher decided to introduced him to another instrument. They first tried the recorder during a trip to a music conservatory. But he found it "rather boring," and the two continued their tour of the facility in search of an instrument to pique his interest. A musician taking a break from rehearsals handed the young boy his violin. The instrument, built for an adult not a 5-year-old, hardly nestled under his chin. But it proved a perfect fit.

"It can be the sweetest thing or angry," Berberi said. "It's just a very expressive instrument."

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Health & Medicine • Music • Young Adults • * Theology • Anthropology

The U.S. was ranked 17th in an assessment of the education systems of 50 countries, behind several Scandinavian and Asian nations, which claimed the top spots.

Finland and South Korea grabbed first and second places, respectively, in a global league table published by the education firm Pearson, while Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore ranked third, fourth and fifth, respectively.

The study, carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), combines international test results and data such as literacy rates and graduation rates between 2006 and 2010.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Globalization

1. MOST WINS
The 19 combined wins between USC (9-2) and Clemson (10-1) entering the game are the most in the rivalry’s history, topping the old mark of 18 set last season.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • Men • Sports • Young Adults • * South Carolina

Miss Thompson [a teacher I had when I was young] reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a piece of paper containing a quote attributed to Chicago architect Daniel Burnham. I listened intently as she read: "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us."

More than 30 years later, I gave a speech in which I said that Frances Thompson had given me a desperately needed belief in myself. A newspaper printed the story, and someone mailed the clipping to my beloved teacher. She wrote me: "You have no idea what that newspaper story meant to me. For years, I endured my brother's arguments that I had wasted my life. That I should have married and had a family. When I read that you gave me credit for helping to launch a marvelous career, I put the clipping in front of my brother. After he'd read it, I said, 'You see, I didn't really waste my life, did I?'"

--Carl Rowan, Breaking Barriers

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Education • * Theology • Pastoral Theology

Teaching Introduction to Sociology is almost second nature to Mitchell Duneier, a professor at Princeton: he has taught it 30 times, and a textbook he co-wrote is in its eighth edition. But last summer, as he transformed the class into a free online course, he had to grapple with some brand-new questions: Where should he focus his gaze while a camera recorded the lectures? How could the 40,000 students who enrolled online share their ideas? And how would he know what they were learning?

In many ways, the arc of Professor Duneier’s evolution, from professor in a lecture hall to online instructor of tens of thousands, reflects a larger movement, one with the potential to transform higher education. Already, a handful of companies are offering elite college-level instruction — once available to only a select few, on campus, at great cost — free, to anyone with an Internet connection.

Moreover, these massive open online courses, or MOOCs, harness the power of their huge enrollments to teach in new ways, applying crowd-sourcing technology to discussion forums and grading and enabling professors to use online lectures and reserve on-campus class time for interaction with students.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Blogging & the Internet • Education • Globalization • Science & Technology