Safoorah Khan had taught middle school math for only nine months in this tiny Chicago suburb when she made an unusual request. She wanted three weeks off for a pilgrimage to Mecca.

The school district, faced with losing its only math lab instructor during the critical end-of-semester marking period, said no. Khan, a devout Muslim, resigned and made the trip anyway.

Justice Department lawyers examined the same set of facts and reached a different conclusion: that the school district’s decision amounted to outright discrimination against Khan. They filed an unusual lawsuit, accusing the district of violating her civil rights by forcing her to choose between her job and her faith.

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Over the next year, [Yasir] Qadhi was thrust into the center of a crucial struggle ”” for the minds of his young students, the trust of his government and his own future as America was waking to a new threat. Since 2008, more than two dozen Muslim-Americans have joined or sought training with militant groups abroad. They are among the roughly 50 American citizens charged with terrorism-related offenses during that time. These suspects are a mixed lot. Some converted to Islam; others were raised in the faith. They come from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and have migrated to different fronts in their global war, from Somalia to Pakistan. Their motivations differ, but the vast majority share two key attributes: a deep disdain for American foreign policy and an ideology rooted in Salafiya.

In the spectrum of the global Salafi movement, Qadhi, who is 36, speaks for the nonmilitant majority. Yet even as he has denounced Islamist violence ”” too late, some say ”” a handful of AlMaghrib’s former students have heeded the call. In addition to the underwear-bomb suspect, the 36,000 current and former students of Qadhi’s institute include Daniel Maldonado, a New Hampshire convert who was convicted in 2007 of training with an Al Qaeda-linked militia in Somalia; Tarek Mehanna, a 28-year-old pharmacist arrested for conspiring to attack Americans; and two young Virginia men held in Pakistan in 2009 for seeking to train with militants.

Qadhi said that none of those former students had approached him for counsel. But in recent years, countless others have come to him with questions about the legitimacy of waging jihad. “We’re finding ourselves on the front line,” Qadhi said. “We don’t want to be there.”

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The White House is hoping to recruit America’s college and seminary students in a nationwide interfaith service campaign that was launched Thursday (March 17).

In the next month, the Obama administration will solicit plans submitted by colleges, universities, seminaries and rabbinical schools for year-long community service projects such as food drives, house building or mentoring.

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To improve its public schools, the United States should raise the status of the teaching profession by recruiting more qualified candidates, training them better and paying them more, according to a new report on comparative educational systems.

Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the international achievement test known by its acronym Pisa, says in his report that top-scoring countries like Korea, Singapore and Finland recruit only high-performing college graduates for teaching positions, support them with mentoring and other help in the classroom, and take steps to raise respect for the profession.

“Teaching in the U.S. is unfortunately no longer a high-status occupation,” Mr. Schleicher says in the report, prepared in advance of an educational conference that opens in New York on Wednesday. “Despite the characterization of some that teaching is an easy job, with short hours and summers off, the fact is that successful, dedicated teachers in the U.S. work long hours for little pay and, in many cases, insufficient support from their leadership.”

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While Americans have been obsessing lately about Charlie Sheen and his live-in porn film stars, Germany has been consumed by improprieties over a doctoral thesis.

All the German talk shows, the front pages of the country’s newspapers and magazines, its political pundits and comedians, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets or to the pages of Facebook, have had a field day indulging in very German-style hand-wringing and paroxysms of self-loathing over the moral, political and social ramifications of the case.

A German author, Peter Schneider, even gravely linked the whole mess to Bill Clinton’s impeachment drama, since they both entailed what he called “the same question of honesty.” Leave it to a German intellectual to discern a deep connection between an American president dissembling about oral sex with an intern in the Oval Office and a doctoral student at Bayreuth University cribbing passages in a 475-page dissertation about contrasting constitutional developments.

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That’s the task of ministry: using words, frail things really, to make sense of the incarnate God who’s beyond our sense.

Seminaries, at their best, are strong ecologies of reading and writing. They’re about setting students on a course for a ministry of abundant life for the sake of the church’s flourishing. They’re about helping students and their future flocks inch slightly higher in love of God and neighbor. Saint Basil the Great in the fourth century situated this mission in the context of reading and writing, and he put it really well. In Basil’s day, people were arguing over how exactly to describe the relationship between Jesus and the One who sent him, between the Father and the Son””are they the same, different, or sort of both? And there were of course the naysayers, the people who said it didn’t matter, who argued that we should be out there helping the poor instead of poring over this esoteric academic nonsense. Basil had an answer:

Those who are idle in the pursuit of righteousness count theological terminology as secondary, together with attempts to search out the hidden meaning in this phrase or that syllable, but those conscious of the goal of our calling realize that we are to become like God, as far as this is possible for human nature. But we cannot become like God unless we have knowledge of God, and without lessons there will be no knowledge. Instruction begins with the proper use of speech, and syllables and words are the elements of speech. Therefore to scrutinize syllables is not a superfluous task.

Sure, Basil says, those who don’t care about holiness don’t care about language. But those who want to love God know that our only way to do that is to love language””as theologians, future pastors, and educators, as writers, all we have is words from God to give out to other people. And words are enough.

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In a variety of books and articles, Jean M. Twenge of San Diego State University and W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia have collected data suggesting that American self-confidence has risen of late. College students today are much more likely to agree with statements such as “I am easy to like” than college students 30 years ago. In the 1950s, 12 percent of high school seniors said they were a “very important person.” By the ’90s, 80 percent said they believed that they were.

In short, there’s abundant evidence to suggest that we have shifted a bit from a culture that emphasized self-effacement ”” I’m no better than anybody else, but nobody is better than me ”” to a culture that emphasizes self-expansion.

Writers like Twenge point out that young people are bathed in messages telling them how special they are. Often these messages are untethered to evidence of actual merit. Over the past few decades, for example, the number of hours college students spend studying has steadily declined. Meanwhile, the average G.P.A. has steadily risen.

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We are in the midst of a fundamental sea change in Western culture: the battle lines have been drawn, and the outcome remains unclear.

The traditional strategy of liberal democracies has been to seek to regulate religious debate by treating faith as a private activity carried out by consenting adults behind closed doors.

Recent terrorist attacks carried out in the name of religion have forced politicians to recognise that for the vast majority of religious believers ”“ not just the religious extremists ”“ authentic faith must impact on every aspect of their lives and cannot be consigned to the private sphere.

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In 2008, teacher assistant Johanna Munoz helped her Orlando-area fourth-graders on the state achievement test.

According to investigative documents obtained by USA TODAY, Munoz erased wrong answers and whispered corrections while she was helping non-native English speakers with difficult words. She snapped her fingers in a code students understood to mean they should correct an answer.

While the teacher was out of the room, Munoz warned the students “not to tell anyone, not even your parents, what I did.” If they told, she warned, they “would fail fourth grade.”

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An Anglican priest in British Columbia has earned a PhD for his research into the spirituality of snowboarding.

Rev. Neil Elliot of St. Andrews Anglican Church in Trail began his studies 10 years ago in England, pulling together a love of snowboarding, an interest in spirituality and a desire to understand the relationship between spirituality and religion.

It was the word “soulriding” that first captured his attention more than a dozen years ago, while he was living in England and snowboarding in the Alps in Europe. The term made him wonder if there was a spiritual dimension to carving a path down a mountain.

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[STEFAN FATSIS]…Columnists and commentators love to defend righteous acts. But I think there’s more to this conversation.

[MICHELE] NORRIS: More like what?

[STEFAN] FATSIS: Well, these rules, for one thing. We haven’t heard much about whether these rules are applied uniformly across the student body. And it’s also worth noting that Brandon Davies is African-American, and the last two athletes who left their BYU teams for the same reason are of Pacific Island descent. And this is a campus that is overwhelmingly white.

Then you’ve got the stickier subject of whether these rules should maybe be questioned by people outside of the Mormon Church. And finally, I think it bears asking, you know, does BYU’s willingness to shame a 19-year-old in such a public way, is that the best approach, honor code or not?

Read or listen to it all. I happened to catch this yesterday in the car running an errand and what struck me was this phrase: BYU’s willingness to shame a 19-year-old in such a public way. Ah, so this is the university’s fault. Except, hang on now. First, the young man in question signed up for this school knowing the honor code on the front end of his whole undergraduate undertaking. So the possibility of bad consequences is something he already agreed to. Second, the young man is the one who has shamed himself, no?

This reminds me a bit of discussions in the house when I was growing up (with two parents who were teachers). One more than one occasion it was noted that when students do well a person will say “I got an A” but when things go wrong, what happens? The rhetoric changes to “the teacher failed me.” Oh what a tangled web we weave–KSH.

It is rare to find someone in public life who accepts responsibility for a mistake as frankly and cogently as Sir Howard Davies did in resigning as director of the London School of Economics over research money from the Gaddafi clan, and he deserves credit for that.

Here, at last, is someone who recognises where the buck stops and draws the appropriate conclusion.

Sir Howard’s departure, however, must not be used as a pretext for sweeping under the carpet awkward questions about foreign money in British academia….

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The college seems to have.. [let go this faculty member] in response to an e-mailed complaint from a local lawyer, who pointed out that “Having someone like Jim St. George teach theology at a Catholic college perpetrates a fraud on parents who send their daughters and sons to Chestnut Hill for a Catholic education.” He sent it to Cardinal Rigali as well as officials at the college and the Daily News’ columnist.

St. George says that he told the college about his church but not his sexual behavior when he was first interviewed, though he did not try to hide it. In an official statement, the college’s president says he didn’t tell them about his church and that they didn’t know about his homosexuality.

St. George’s group is one of those many little groups that splinter or flake off large bodies like the Catholic Church, keeping some of the substance and many of the trappings””its seminary is called “Immaculate Conception”””but making adjustments to the difficult parts, almost invariably the moral teachings. This one has just seven parishes, though it features one archbishop, two bishops, one monsignor, two “very reverends,” and two plain “reverend fathers,” some of whom in addition to St. George have “partners.”

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Now that [the Rev. Lee] Bines is stationed in Moncks Corner, he’s turned his energies toward the troubled youth in the rural schools of Berkeley County. Those are the schools with the highest dropout rates, poorest population and most black students, a special area of concern to a black pastor.

Bines was trying to motivate about 50 young people at a luncheon Thursday afternoon. It was part of what he called the fourth annual Young Brothers to Men Summit, which continues through Sunday at Wesley United Methodist Church at Highways 6 and 315.

The summit, which also was sponsored by the Delta Alpha chapter of the Phi Alpha Fraternity, brings together educators, counselors, lawmakers and representatives of the juvenile justice system to encourage each other to keep trying to reach troubled youth. For instance, one of today’s topics is “Breaking Strongholds: Confronting and Resolving Violence in the Youth Culture,” with Moncks Corner Police Chief Chad Caldwell and staff from Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.

Spy author John le Carre is to give his literary archive to the world famous library at Oxford University, his “spiritual home”, it was announced on Thursday.

The collection contains family papers, photographs, letters and manuscripts, including drafts of one of le Carre’s best known novels, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”.

The author said he wanted to give the material to the Bodleian Library at the prestigious university where he studied, rather than sending it to an American institution.

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It is lunchtime in the cafeteria of the Henry Viscardi School in Nassau County, and two eighth graders are doing what boys their age do best: batting insults back and forth.

“Get off my case,” Jalen says.

“If you had a case, I’d get off it,” a classmate replies.

“You’re weird,” Jalen retorts. “No, you’re weird.”

It is a scene that could unfold on any given taco Tuesday in any school cafeteria, save for one crucial difference: Jalen has cerebral palsy and is unable to speak; his testy remarks come not from his mouth but from a machine called a DynaVox, mounted on his joystick-controlled wheelchair.

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[Assistant Chief Hamilton County Juvenile Prosecutor Dotty] Smith is part of a group that makes presentations at schools to students and parents about the dangers in cyberspace and how to be aware and deal with them.

“The principals tell us to scare them to death,” Smith said of her audiences.

The biggest problem, Smith said, is many parents are ignorant of the access their children have – via cell phones, computers, Internet-connected gaming systems – to strangers.

Parents are “not aware of what some of these devices can do,” she said. “It’s about good choices with the huge (array) of technology choices we have out there.”

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A number of made-up words such as “koob” or “zort” are to be included in the government’s planned new reading test for six-year-olds in England.

The idea has drawn criticism from literary experts who say the approach will confuse those beginning to read.

The UK Literacy Association said the plan was “bonkers” as the purpose of reading was to understand meaning.

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In a move likely to reverberate among America’s top-tier private colleges, the University of the South said Wednesday it will slash tuition and fees for the coming school year by 10%, or about $4,600….

If not the first, Sewanee is the largest private school to institute such price cuts in recent years, said Tony Pals, director of communications for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

“It’s a bold move that will have the potential to put competitive pressure on Sewanee’s peer institutions,” said Mr. Pals.

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A new television series includes the research expertise of Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a biblical scholar at the University of Exeter.

Channel 4’s series The Bible: A History intends to show how the Bible has played a major role in shaping people’s ideas about the world.

In the second episode Dr Stavrakopoulou is interviewed by presenter Rageh Omaar about Abraham and his role in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). The interview focuses on the biblical claim that God promised Abraham the land of Canaan, the land now claimed by Israelis and Palestinians today. Dr Stavrakopoulou’s research focuses on the worship of the dead as divine ancestors, illustrating how the graves of ancestors marked the territorial claims of their living relatives. Her research suggests that the tomb in Hebron where Abraham is supposed to have been buried represents an ancient attempt to exploit this territoriality in favour of ancient land claims asserted by biblical writers. It goes onto to suggest that these claims continue to be asserted and contested by some Israelis and Palestinians today who claim direct descent from Abraham.

Read it all and you can find a lot more information about this over here.

In “Everyone’s a Winner,” sociologist Joel Best notes in passing that the inflation of military rank is still very much with us, but his survey of America’s self- congratulatory culture concentrates primarily on contemporary suburban life. Everywhere the author turns his gaze””from bumper stickers that boast about “my kid the honor-roll student” to boosterish “employee of the month” awards ”” Mr. Best sees a proliferation of prizes that seems to arise from a desperate desire to exclude fewer and fewer people from the winner’s podium.

This tendency is evident in the broader cultural realm. Literary prizes are now given for every kind of category, including 12 different kinds of detective fiction recognized by the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar awards. The nominees for the Best Picture Oscar (nominations themselves are awards) have recently doubled from five to 10, and the number of Grammy awards given out last Sunday night came to more than 100. Valedictorians were once unique; now some high schools have dozens. The label “hero,” Mr. Best observes, is ever more broadly applied””not just to soldiers but to firemen, cancer patients and even community volunteers.

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John Wright could make more money doing something else, but he’s found his calling as a custodial worker at James Simons Elementary….

Co-workers can’t imagine the school without his uplifting presence. Cafeteria manager Karen Brown has known him for 10 years, and she’s watched him develop relationships with students to help keep them out of trouble. Wright does the jobs that no one else wants to do, but he never complains.

“It’s the little things you don’t even think about,” she said. “It would be a struggle without him.”

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Education is about the whole person not just the economy and should be more than just learning facts, say the Archbishop of Canterbury and church leaders in the run up to Education Sunday – February 20 – which this year takes the theme of ‘Firm Foundations’.

“Education is not just a process of learning facts or even skills. It should be a joyful and rich passing-on of the treasures God has given. Education Sunday is a wonderful opportunity to give thanks for this responsibility to enrich lives, and to renew our commitment to it, “said Dr Rowan Williams.

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Wonderful stuff-watch/listen to it all.

Update: There is a great picture there also.

Recently, I was blessed to be a speaker at a couple of the regional gatherings of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students. As always, I was very impressed with what I saw ”“ 1200 young adults at one gathering and 1500 at another. These are serious seekers, looking for truth and faith. In the evening, a very long line stood patiently waiting for the Sacrament of Reconciliation or to be prayed with….

Many of them have shared with me their profound experiences of conversion ”“ growing up in families without much faith experience or being raised nominally Catholic, and only later discovering the richness of faith and truth.

One young man shared how he was raised going to Mass on Sunday but left the Church and God behind in college. Yet an encounter with an evangelical group recaptured his search for God, and he eventually became a Protestant pastor of a thriving community. Finally, through the friendship of a Catholic bishop, who invited him for coffee and conversation, he rediscovered the richness of Catholicism and came back to the Church of his birth. Now he works with young adults who are seeking the Lord.

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I told my wife I was going to write a few words about my reading habits, and she replied: “You should be able to do it in one.” I knew the word she meant: “Constantly.” After 20 years of marriage to a constant reader, she has the right to make that pronouncement.

The most important advice I can give about reading is to make decisions in advance about what you want from the book you’re about to read. You’ve got to stay in charge, and not just let yourself accidentally fall into the reading experience. Before you really engage the book, decide if it’s the kind of book you need to read slowly, repeatedly, taking notes, and pondering. Or is it the kind of book that covers familiar territory and will only offer a few new details? Is it a book you want to immerse yourself in and get lost in, or the kind you want to dip into for bits of information? Or is it a book that you need to figure out so you can put it on your shelf and know how to use it for reference later on? Some books contain analysis and perspectives that are brand new for you, and require slow assimilation. But others just confirm, deepen, or extend things you already know. And it’s fine to read for fun and entertainment, or even to read haphazardly. But you need to have made a decision that you’re going to do so.

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[The originial languages are]…good for helping us understand the Bible, the Word of God, which for Christians is a person, who asks us to connaître him. This involves spending time with him, pondering the Word, contemplating it, mulling it over, chewing on it even. For an Orthodox Jew, the object of meditation is Torah, and the notion of meditating on it in translation would be almost inconceivable. You want the prize itself, not someone’s prosaic description of it.

By contrast, most Christians who meditate on scripture don’t consult it in the original languages. The argument is sometimes made that the gospel, which is to be preached to all the nations, is by its nature always a translation. For an image of this idea, see the account of Pentecost in Acts, where by the power of the Holy Spirit each member of the international audience assembled in Jerusalem hears the apostles in his own native tongue. Christian faith does not depend on a reading knowledge of Koine Greek.

Still, just as all things lawful are not expedient, not all things optional are bootless. Let’s concede that the fine points you miss by meditating on scripture in mere translation are only a few pixels that drop out of the picture. The subject and the general shape of things are still clear enough. What you’re missing is the meaning of the expression in the subject’s eyes. You can identify their color, however, and the other physical features of his that can be measured and recorded on a driver’s license. You can savoir his identity. That counts for a lot. But you don’t connaître him.

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A small Catholic college in Riverdale, N.Y., last month got some news that sent shivers across religious higher education: part-time faculty have a right to form a union on campus.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The National Labor Relations Board also isn’t convinced that the Catholic school is actually Catholic.

According to Elbert Tellem, the NLRB’s acting regional director, Manhattan College can’t prohibit adjunct faculty from unionizing because the school’s core purpose isn’t religious enough to trigger a labor law exemption.

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The opposition education spokesman, Adrian Piccoli, said the Liberal-National party took the view that ”the battle over ethics classes is finished”.

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But the announcement was met with anger by the influential Australian Christian Lobby.

Its NSW director, David Hutt, said the lobby was extremely disappointed by the decision.

”We had welcomed the opposition’s previous commitment to scrap the ethics classes should they win government and we cannot understand why they have now retreated from this,” Mr Hutt said.

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As you might imagine, a spirited debate is underway on economics blogs about [Tyler] Cowen’s view that the Internet may not really be the productivity bonanza that was once predicted. So far, he notes, the Internet has generated far less income and far fewer jobs than earlier innovations – think of the automobile – and the benefits it has yielded have been confined largely to the upper end of the income scale.

For me, however, the more intriguing argument in “The Great Stagnation” is that much of our recent growth may, in fact, have been a mirage. It is no coincidence, he writes, that during the recent decades of slow growth in incomes and productivity, three of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy have been education, financial services and health care. And while government statistics show productivity in those sectors growing at the same pace as the rest of the economy, other data suggest otherwise.

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