Nearly one in nine high school seniors have gotten high in the past year on synthetic drugs, such as “K2” or “Spice,” second only to the number of teens who have used marijuana, a new survey shows.

“Monitoring the Future,” the nation’s most comprehensive survey of teenage drug use, found 11.4% of the high school seniors had used the synthetic substances, often packed as potpourri or herbal incense and sold in convenience stores, which mimic the effects of marijuana.

“It is astounding,” said Rep. Tom Latham, R-Iowa. “I don’t think they have any idea how dangerous these synthetic drugs are.”

Read it all.

“We knew that when states pass good laws, lives are saved and a lot of money is saved. We’d just never done the analysis,” says John Ulczycki of the National Safety Council, which researched the issue for the Allstate Foundation.

The report comes as Congress prepares to consider a multiyear highway and transit-spending bill. Advocates of graduated driver licensing (GDL) laws are pushing to include funding for about $25 million a year in incentives for states to strengthen GDL programs.

Read it all.

We are pleased that the Presiding Bishop and Bishop Dan Edwards of Nevada have issued further statements on Bede Parry. In light of these statements, however, two further clarifications are needed.

Read it all.

But when a Christian tattoos a Bible verse or a faith-phrase upon her body, she makes her body into a text. She reverses the incarnation of Christ; in her de-incarnation she is making the body, what is prone to messiness and effluvia and decay, into a true and eternal Word. They are turning themselves into the Bible, or a part thereof.

There’s something laudable in this: stating that these truths are the ultimate and unchanging truths of who I am. Yet I also wonder if they represent a running away from our carnality, a running away from the things that Christ affirmed in the incarnation. I wonder too whether tattoos like these ”” and all tattoos ”” might sometimes work like frosting upon a store window ”” presenting a surface that seeks not to externalize but to conceal what lies within. Does the person who stamps “God’s Son” upon his skin really believe it?

Read it all.

The Roman Catholic Church should give up control of schools if it wants to ensure that pupils will be protected from paedophile priests, an investigation into one of Britain’s worst clerical abuse scandals has concluded.

A report into decades of child abuse at Ealing Abbey made clear that there were nationwide consequences for the Church, Catholic education and, in particular, two of the country’s most famous independent schools, Downside and Ampleforth.

The inquiry, prompted by revelations in The Times, said the fact that St Benedict’s school in West London was under the total control of the Benedictine monks at Ealing was a major cause of the failure to detect, investigate and stop the sexual and physical abuse of pupils.

Read it all (requires subscription).

A major child sex abuse cover-up case ”“ that does not involve the Catholic Church.

When the case unfolding at Penn State blew up last week, I have to admit the first people I thought I would hear from those in the Catholic Church who believe their faith gets unfairly tarred on this subject. As so many high-level cases around the world have unfolded in the past decade, these Catholics often ask, rightly: What is the rate of sex abuse in other institutions?

Read it all.

Some Boston parents might be in for a rude awakening: 13 percent of area high school students say they’ve received “sext” messages and one in 10 has either forwarded, sent or posted sexually suggestive, explicit or nude photos or videos of people they know by cellphone or online.

So found a study of more than 23,000 students, with the results scheduled to be presented Wednesday at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Sexting can include overtones of bullying and coercion, and teens who are involved were more likely to report being psychologically distressed, depressed or even suicidal, according to the 2010 survey of 24 (of 26) high schools in Boston’s metro-west region.

Read it all.

Watch it all–tremendous stuff.

A Muslim organization is working to counter radicalization by providing the work of progressive Islam scholars online in simple, youth-friendly language.

Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV), a nonprofit group that has established liberal Muslim communities in the U.S. and Canada, created the “Literary Zikr” website to provide an alternative to the fundamentalist versions of Islam that pervade the Internet.

“We take the scholarship and present it to the people,” said Yarehk Hernandez, a board member of MPV.

Read it all.

Here’s a pop quiz: What foods are best to eat before a high-stakes test? When is the best time to review the toughest material? A growing body of research on the best study techniques offers some answers.

Chiefly, testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory. The method is more effective than re-reading a textbook, says Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. If you are facing a test on the digestive system, he says, practice explaining how it works from start to finish, rather than studying a list of its parts….

Read it all.

We are witnessing the emergence of something profound: Humans, historically divided by geography, culture and creed, are beginning to connect and collaborate on a scale never seen before. The driving force behind this creative wave are digital tools and networks that allow new forms of collaboration and knowledge creation.

What starts out as social networking is evolving into social production. We’ve witnessed how self-organizing groups, leveraging social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia, have launched revolutions throughout the Arab world and created the most important reference work in the English language in less than 10 years.

In spite of all the potential to innovate surrounding blogs, forums, wikis and social networks, there are legions of detractors. And no institution is more skeptical about the benefits of social media than education. But there are also few institutions that have more to gain from social media.

Read it all.

Kevin Schombert, a student with Down Syndrome, was crowned homecoming king this weekend at Urbana High School in Frederick County.

Schombert is a manager for the school’s basketball team and a huge sports fan.

Read it all.

Why do young Christians leave the church?

New research by the Barna Group finds they view churches as judgmental, overprotective, exclusive and unfriendly towards doubters. They also consider congregations antagonistic to science and say their Christian experience has been shallow.

The findings, the result of a five-year study, are featured in You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church and Rethinking Faith, a new book by Barna president David Kinnaman. The project included a study of 1,296 young adults who were current or former churchgoers.

Read it all.

L’Osservatore Romano (English, September 21) reprinted an essay, “God in Madrid,” by the Peruvian novelist and Nobel Prize winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, from the Spanish paper El País about the meaning of the papal visit….

[In the essay Llosa says that] contemporary culture is rather vapid, a kind of “light entertainment.” Within it is a “cabal of incomprehensible and arrogant experts, who have taken refuge in unintelligible jargon, light years from common mortals.” Culture has not replaced religion, particularly that religion originating in revelation….

Most human beings suspect that the answers need a “higher order” of existence to locate the center of their lives. Atheism’s self-satisfied defenders no longer stand on the solid ground they once assumed. Science itself is looking like it has to admit that the origin of the universe lies in some transcendent, extra-cosmic, intelligent source even to explain science….

Read it all.

Understanding the need for the continued support of young people in the Anglican Communion, and aligning with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s statement that a good educational system in a healthy society is one that builds character and virtue, the IAYN seeks to urge provinces to commit themselves to the further development of youth ministries through:

a) Developing opportunities and programs for youth leadership
b) Continuing to educate young people on what it means to be a Christian in the Anglican tradition
c) Appointing a committed and engaged youth officer to participate in the International Anglican Youth Network, and
d) Contributing financially to the work of the International Anglican Youth Network

Read it all.

Author Bret Lott says his book “The Hunt Club” is a story about a 15-year-old figuring out who he is in the most specific and universal sense.

Wando High School parent James Pasley says the book uses foul language, degrades women and people of color, and isn’t appropriate to be on a recommended reading list for high school students….

“I don’t know what motivates this kind of reaction except a kind of Victorian sensibility, and I say that as a believing Christian and Sunday school teacher,” Lott said. “How do you shield children from racism? Virtue is not virtue unless it is made vulnerable and put to the test in confronting these things.”

Read it all.

Christina Gustavsson says she loves school. But her teachers have had a tough time educating her.

In her freshman year at Kennett High School, 15-year-old Christina racked up five months’ worth of absences and never completed a full day of school. Sometimes, she had difficulty remembering assignments, completing homework or even waking up in time for school. Other times, she didn’t.

Christina has chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition whose symptoms have long confounded many medical professionals and now pose peculiar challenges for educators as more adolescents are diagnosed with it. In a time of tight budgets, public schools must consider how far to go to accommodate students with CFS and a range of so-called hidden disabilities that are difficult to observe, evaluate or understand.

Read it all.

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

Read it all.

On Friday, about 2,000 students, school staff members and dignitaries assembled on the football field of Todd Beamer’s namesake school.

“They’re never going to forget all the people who died,” said senior Nathan Ceney, who attended Lakeland Elementary School on Sept. 11, 2001. “I thought it was a movie or something on TV. Who in their right minds would crash into two magnificent towers?”

Federal Way Mayor Skip Priest encouraged the students to not live their lives in fear. He quoted President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “”˜The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ The power to resist fear, however, is in each one of you.”

Read it all.

While many pastors and parents have heard horror stories about children straying into dark corners online, few are aware of just how common these problems have become ”” even in their sanctuaries and homes.

This is the kind of danger and sin that religious leaders often fear discussing, precisely because these realities have not remained bottled up in the secular world. Thus, Heil urged his listeners to ponder the following statistics in his presentation, drawn from mainstream research in the past year:

Ӣ Two-thirds of Americans under the age of 18 have reported some kind of negative experience while online. Only 45 percent of their parents are aware of this.

Ӣ Forty-one percent of children say they have been approached online by some kind of stranger, possibly an older predator.

Read it all, another from the long line of should-have-already-been-posted material.

“Evangelical Catholicism” is a term being used to capture the Catholic version of a 21st century politics of identity, reflecting the long-term historical transition in the West from Christianity as a culture-shaping majority to Christianity as a subculture, albeit a large and influential one. I define Evangelical Catholicism in terms of three pillars:

–A strong defense of traditional Catholic identity, meaning attachment to classic markers of Catholic thought (doctrinal orthodoxy) and Catholic practice (liturgical tradition, devotional life, and authority).
–Robust public proclamation of Catholic teaching, with the accent on Catholicism’s mission ad extra, transforming the culture in light of the Gospel, rather than ad intra, on internal church reform.
–Faith seen as a matter of personal choice rather than cultural inheritance, which among other things implies that in a highly secular culture, Catholic identity can never be taken for granted. It always has to be proven, defended, and made manifest.

Read it all.

Binge drinking among teenage girls has become a serious public health problem for the UK and a source of public disorder, a report compiled by the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University has concluded. It warned that Britain’s alcohol culture was spawning a violent and promiscuous generation with 30 per cent of teenagers bingeing at least weekly.

The study of over 11,000 15 and 16-year-old teenagers in the North West found that 88 per cent of teen girls had consumed alcohol, as compared to 80 per cent of boys. “Compared to European neighbours, 15 and 16-year-olds [British teens] are far more likely to drink alcohol and do so more frequently,” the report found.

Read it all.

His first words to them after a welcoming address by the Archbishop of Madrid, Cardinal Ruoco Varela, were “I hope you were able to sleep a little last night”, to the young people’s applause. Then with the procession of bishops and priests to the sweeping white stage, upon which a simple altar was shaded by the outstretched branches of an artificial golden tree, the closing ceremony of this week of prayer, song, meditation and encounter begun.

“We cannot encounter Christ and not want to make him known to others.” Pope Benedict told them in his homily. “So do not keep Christ to yourselves!”. The entire homily was drawn from the Sunday Gospel, Mathew 16, from Christ’s question to the apostles: “But who do you say that I am?”.

“Faith is more than just empirical or historical facts; it is an ability to grasp the mystery of Christ’s person in all its depth”, he said. And then looking out on the horizon of young men and women, religious and lay, that extended before his gaze, the Pope said to them , “today Christ is asking you the same question”. “Respond to him with generosity and courage, as befits young hearts like your own”.

Read it all.

Too much of contemporary society has been a vacation from responsibility. Children have been the victims of our self-serving beliefs that you can have partnerships without the responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality, and self-esteem without the responsibility of hard work and achievement.

I have seen, in our schools and youth groups, what happens to children when you challenge them to greatness by service to others. They exceed all our expectations. Children grow to fit the space we create for them. If it is big they grow tall. If it is small, they rebel.

We need a new culture of responsibility. Societies can be re-moralised. The 1820s showed us how. This week’s riots showed us why. We need to challenge young people to exercise moral leadership, and the only way of doing so is by starting with ourselves.

Read it all.

“The riots were caused by two enemies: left libertarianism, which destroyed social and family ties, and right libertarianism, which squeezed most workers out of prosperity”, Phillip Blond, political thinker and Anglican theologian, advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron, explains after the protests that left a 26 year old Englishman dead. According to Blond, “the protests have nothing to do with politics. They are organized gangs of thieves who grew up in the mentality that every desire is a right, the government is the only thing that can guarantee well-being, and multiculturalism is a dogma”.

Read it all.

Test results released in June showed that fewer than _____ of all students are “proficient” in American history.

Many of the fourth grade students asked about Lincoln on the tests could identify him, but few could say why he was an important president.

You need to guess the percentage to be placed in the blank first; then read it all.[/i]