Why Tolerance is Not Enough: Myths about Pluralism from Veritas [1] on Vimeo.
The speakers are: Vinoth Ramachandra, Secretary for Dialogue & Social Engagement, IFES, and Diana Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, Harvard Divinity School.
For more about the Veritas Forum please see here.
Christianity might have stayed just a fascination [for Amy-Jill Levine], but for an unfortunate episode in second grade: “When I was 7 years old, one girl said to me on the school bus, ”˜You killed our Lord.’ I couldn’t fathom how this religion that was so beautiful was saying such a dreadful thing.”
That encounter with the dark side of her friends’ religion sent Dr. Levine on a quest, one that took her to graduate school in New Testament studies and eventually to Vanderbilt University, where she has taught since 1994. Dr. Levine is still a committed Jew ”” she attends an Orthodox synagogue in Nashville ”” but she is a leading New Testament scholar.
And she is not alone. The book she has just edited with a Brandeis University professor, Marc Zvi Brettler, “The Jewish Annotated New Testament” (Oxford University Press), is an unusual scholarly experiment: an edition of the Christian holy book edited entirely by Jews. The volume includes notes and explanatory essays by 50 leading Jewish scholars, including Susannah Heschel, a historian and the daughter of the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel; the Talmudist Daniel Boyarin; and Shaye J. D. Cohen, who teaches ancient Judaism at Harvard.
There were moments in the first half when it seemed it was going to be a closer game than it was.
Watch it all–caught it by accident early this morning and it made me cry–KSH.
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
It’s official: Kayla Helferich of Summerville has the prettiest eyes in the land.
Kayla, 8, won the designation during a Prevent Blindness America banquet in Chicago last week.
She won a $25,000 college scholarship and a spot as the face of the organization’s Star Pupils campaign, which promotes children’s eye health.
In recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.
How do we know? Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., conducts exams as part of the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests 15-year-olds in the world’s leading industrialized nations on their reading comprehension and ability to use what they’ve learned in math and science to solve real problems ”” the most important skills for succeeding in college and life. America’s 15-year-olds have not been distinguishing themselves in the PISA exams compared with students in Singapore, Finland and Shanghai.
In a radical rethinking of what it means to go to school, states and districts nationwide are launching online public schools that let students from kindergarten to 12th grade take some””or all””of their classes from their bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens. Other states and districts are bringing students into brick-and-mortar schools for instruction that is largely computer-based and self-directed.
Journal Community
In just the past few months, Virginia has authorized 13 new online schools. Florida began requiring all public-high-school students to take at least one class online, partly to prepare them for college cybercourses. Idaho soon will require two. In Georgia, a new app lets high-school students take full course loads on their iPhones and BlackBerrys. Thirty states now let students take all of their courses online.
Nationwide, an estimated 250,000 students are enrolled in full-time virtual schools, up 40% in the last three years, according to Evergreen Education Group, a consulting firm that works with online schools.
Hundreds of Anglican schools face being ordered to rewrite their admissions rules amid claims they select middle-class pupils “by the back door”, it was claimed today.
Schools could fall foul of the admissions watchdog after it emerged they are employing contentious entry policies that prioritise families who volunteer for church activities.
The claims come just 24 hours after a leading Roman Catholic school was criticised for using the policy to mark out the most devout children.
The fall term at King’s University in Halifax began on a sour note for students and faculty who worship at the college chapel. The Bishop of Nova Scotia sent a letter to the president of the university stating that the diocese could no longer fund a full-time chaplaincy.
And Bishop Sue Moxley went further: “There have been suggestions that this model of chaplaincy is no longer appropriate, that the style of worship is antiquated and the chapel maintains a male-dominated clergy.”
Students, staff and faculty as well as the chaplain himself have all expressed grave concerns about the bishop’s letter.
When it was all over, Mike Krzyzewski pushed through the crowd of photographers surrounding him to find Bob Knight, his former coach and the man whose record he had just broken. The two embraced courtside, laughing, before Krzyzewski disappeared back into the throng.
“I just told him”¦ ”˜Coach, I’m not sure people tell you this, but I love you, and I love what you’ve done for me, and thank you,’” Krzyzewski said. “And he says, ”˜Boy, you’ve done pretty good for a kid who couldn’t shoot.’ I think that meant he loves me too.”
Under… [an income-contigent program]proposal, loans would be offered at a single interest rate for all borrowers; payments would be automatically withheld from the borrowers’ paychecks by their employers and would be managed by the IRS, just as income taxes are collected. As in the president’s proposal, 10% of a borrower’s earnings would go toward their student loans. The more they earn, the faster they would repay their debt. Such a system would not only help graduates manage their student loans, it would save the government money because it would drastically reduce delinquencies and be far easier and less expensive to administer….
income-contingent loans would be universal and automatic. Everyone who took out a student loan would be put into the program and, because their loans would be tied to their Social Security numbers, the repayments would come out of their paychecks, just as their income, Social Security and Medicaid taxes are withheld.
Australia and Britain have had great success with their income-contingent loan programs. In Britain, more than 98% of loans are repaid.
Joe Paterno, who has the most victories of any coach in major college football history, was fired by Penn State on Wednesday night in the wake of a sexual abuse scandal involving a prominent former assistant coach and the university’s failure to act to halt further harm.
Graham B. Spanier, one of the longest-serving and highest-paid university presidents in the nation, who has helped raise the academic profile of Penn State during his tenure, was also removed by the Board of Trustees. When the announcement was made at a news conference that the 84-year-old Mr. Paterno would not coach another game, a gasp went up from the crowd of several hundred reporters, students and camera people who were present.
“We thought that because of the difficulties that engulfed our university, and they are grave, that it is necessary to make a change in the leadership to set a course for a new direction,” said John Surma Jr., the vice chairman of the board.
Update: “After Joe Paterno is fired, Penn State and State College still coming to grips with his dismissal” in the Washington Post is of interest as well.
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).
The Pentagon’s use of retired generals and admirals as paid advisers has virtually ceased, plummeting from 355 “senior mentors” in 2010 to four today, according to a report released by the Defense Department’s inspector general.
Requirements to disclose their business ties, a cap on pay of $179,700 per year and limits on working for private firms were the reasons the generals and admirals gave for quitting the program, the report said.
Retired officers from several services told investigators they quit because they did not want to disclose their finances publicly. Others pointed to the pay of $86.10 per hour, with a maximum of $179,900, as too low.
“A religious campus can be a lonely place for someone who doesn’t subscribe to faith,” said King, now 23 and a graduate student in biology. “We want to reach out to these people.”
The [University of] Dayton students are not alone. The Secular Student Alliance, a national organization of nontheistic students with 320 campus chapters, reports at least two other religious universities””Notre Dame and Baylor””have rejected clubs for atheist, agnostic, humanist and other nontheistic students. Students at Duquesne, a Catholic school, say they have little hope of approval on their first application this year.
Mr. Sandusky, a former defensive coordinator under Mr. Paterno, has been charged with sexually abusing eight boys across a 15-year period, and Mr. Paterno has been widely criticized for failing to involve the police when he learned of the allegation of the assault of the young boy in 2002.
Additionally, two top university officials ”” Gary Schultz, the senior vice president for finance and business, and Tim Curley, the athletic director ”” were charged with perjury and failure to report to authorities what they knew of the allegations, as required by state law.
Since Mr. Sandusky’s arrest Saturday, officials at Penn State ”” notably its president, Graham B. Spanier, and Mr. Paterno ”” have come under withering criticism for a failure to act adequately after learning, at different points over the years, that Mr. Sandusky might have been abusing children. Newspapers have called for their resignations; prosecutors have suggested their inaction led to more children being harmed by Mr. Sandusky; and students and faculty at the university have expressed a mix of disgust and confusion, and a hope that much of what prosecutors have charged is not true.
Ben White asked his sixth-grade students if his hair looked OK.
As he prepared to be on camera, his Webb School of Knoxville students opened video apps on their iPads to record White giving them their homework assignment.
At home, students could watch their teacher explaining exactly how to diagram nouns and verbs. The assignment was also loaded on iCalendar.
White said the iPad takes away excuses for not doing homework.
As student-loan default rates climb and college graduates fail to land jobs, an increasing number of students are betting they can get just as far with a degree from a less-expensive school as they can with a diploma from an elite school””without having to take on debt.
More students are choosing lower-cost public colleges or commuting to schools from home to save on housing expenses. Twenty-two percent of students from families with annual household incomes above $100,000 attended public, two-year schools in the 2010-2011 academic year, up from 12% the previous year, according to a report from student-loan company Sallie Mae.
Such choices meant families across all income brackets spent 9% less””an average of $21,889 in cash, loans, scholarships and other methods””on college in 2010-11 than in the previous year, according to the report. High-income families cut their college spending by 18%, to $25,760. The report, which is released annually, was based on a survey of about 1,600 students and parents.
it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.
Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.
For educators, the big question is how to keep the momentum being built in the lower grades from dissipating once the students get to college.
This was a problem when I was an undergraduate from 1978-1982 (and, yes, I am a science major [chemistry]). Read it all–KSH.
The four gospels stand magisterially at the head of the canon and the centre of early Christianity. They are remarkable documents. If they had been lost for centuries, and then dug up last year in the sands of Egypt, they would be hailed as among the most extraordinary writings from antiquity. Despite the occasional efforts to push them out of their central position and substitute other documents, whether actually existing (such as the wrongly named Gospel of Thomas) or reconstructed (such as the hypothetical document ”˜Q’), the majority of scholars still believe, rightly in my view, that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John deserve their place. The fact that they are well known should not blind us to their remarkable blend of page-turning narrative, vivid portraiture (especially of their central figure), historical verisimilitude and sophisticated theology.
And yet. Reversing what St Paul says about himself, the gospels, though well known at one level, are unknown at another. An oversimplification, of course; but I refer to the overall drift of gospel studies, and to the perception of the gospels in the church community to which biblical studies remains tangentially, and sometimes uncomfortably, related. Huge strides have been made, not least by my predecessor but one, Professor Richard Bauckham, both in his work on the wide intended readership of the gospels and in his award-winning book on the gospels and the eyewitnesses. If he is even half right ”“ and I think he is at least that ”“ then all kinds of assumptions, including some of those blessed things they used to call ”˜the assured results of criticism’, will need to be torn up. But we need to go further still. Despite generations now of redaction criticism and narrative criticism, I am not convinced that the main message of the gospels has been grasped, let alone reflected in the methods employed for further study. And since I shall contend in this lecture that the four gospels stand at the centre of the missionary and hence theological life of the early church, a failure to understand their central thrust is most likely an index of a failure to grasp several other things as well about the life and work of the first Christians.
I am not being alarmist. Fine work in many directions has been done on the gospels, a generation ago by another predecessor, Matthew Black of blessed memory. And of course Robin Wilson, of more recent memory, contributed much to our understanding of the early Christian hinterland within which the gospels and their early reception must be understood. But there comes a time in every discipline to take a deep breath, stand back, and say, ”˜Well and good; but perhaps we’re still missing something.’ That’s when we need, not simply more attention to detail, vital and central though that remains, but precisely imagination: a willingness to think beyond the fence, to ask questions hitherto screened out. And, to complete the list of recent predecessors, Markus Bockmuehl in his short stay here published a remarkable book, Seeing the Word, offering an eloquent and wide-ranging plea for just such an imaginative leap, a reassessment of the tasks and methods of the whole discipline. That is the kind of exercise which I want to share with you this afternoon, with due gratitude both for the invitation to occupy this chair and for the warm welcome I have received in St Mary’s College and in the wider University community.
What? You thought the Game of the Century would feature 100 points?
Admittedly, most of us assumed there would at least be a few touchdowns. Just one would have been nice. But for anyone who found No. 1 LSU’s 9-6 overtime victory over No. 2 Alabama on Saturday to be ugly, unsatisfying or somehow unimpressive, Tigers defensive end Sam Montgomery has a message for you.
“This is the way football is supposed to be played,” said the man whose third-down sack of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron in the first overtime possession typified a night of defensive dominance. “It’s not about running up the score. This is how two great teams in a great atmosphere are supposed to play.”
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.
Some New York City children take after-school classes in dance, pottery or softball. Once a week, Gillian and Hunter Randall add an unusual activity to the list: lessons on how to shake hands.
It’s a class taught by SocialSklz:-), a company founded in 2009 to address deteriorating social skills in the age of iPhones, Twitter and Facebook friends.
“It’s hard to have a real conversation anymore. And you know what? I’m guilty of it too,” said the Randalls’ mother, Lisa LaBarbera, noting that her 10-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son both have iPod touches and handheld videogame devices. “You get carpal tunnel, but you’re not building those communication skills.”
South Carolina’s teachers and state employees are willing to pay more to fix the retirement system ”” but only if they get a raise first.
That’s the plan endorsed by the S.C. State Employees Association and the S.C. Education Association, which together represent 30,000 of the state’s 141,000 teachers and state employees.
The plan, which the groups submitted in writing to House and Senate subcommittees studying the retirement system, says teachers and state employees are willing to increase their contribution to the retirement system by 0.5 percent, but only if they receive at least a 2 percent raise ”” a “cost-of-living adjustment” for state employees and a “step increase” for teachers.
More Oregon public schools are opening up their buildings for church services to bring in extra income.
Eight of the state’s 10 biggest districts rent out buildings for services.
While some believe that school-based churches violate the Constitutional separation between church and state, courts generally have found the practice to be legal. The U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that as long as districts are renting out spaces to outside organizations, it would be discriminatory to ban religious groups.
The bell rings, and 19 middle school girls shuffle into Room 405 at the Solomon Schechter School of Westchester, slinging backpacks over chairs and sliding behind desks.
After quickly taking attendance, the teacher gets down to business.
“What’s the first step in a manicure?” she asks. Hands fly up; answers are blurted out.
It’s the Midrash Manicures club at Schechter, a Jewish day school here, where the weekly club offerings include math club, glee club, sports writing club and this one, in which Rabbi Yael Buechler teaches girls in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades how to do their nails with designs inspired by the weekly Torah portion.
A famously litigious lawyer has filed charges against the Catholic University of America (CUA) for not providing Muslim students with prayer rooms that are free of Catholic iconography.
John F. Banzhaf III, a law professor at George Washington University who had earlier filed charges over CUA’s switch to same-sex dorms this summer, filed the new 60-page complaint with the Washington, D.C. Office of Human Rights.
“It shouldn’t be too difficult somewhere on the campus for the university to set aside a small room where Muslims can pray without having to stare up and be looked down upon by a cross of Jesus,” Banzhaf told Fox News.
Archbishop Valentino Mokiwa has urged a leading candidate for president to promise to return to the church mission schools nationalized by the government.
Speaking at a school fundraising event on 24 Oct 2011 in Dar es Salaam, Dr. Mokiwa asked Edward Lowassa MP to return the schools if he wins the presidency. Elections are scheduled in the east African nation in 2015 to succeed President Jakaya Kikwete. While Mr. Lowassa has not formally announced his candidacy, he is considered a front runner for the post.