We need…to speak frankly with each other when our freedoms are threatened. Now is such a time. As Catholic bishops and American citizens, we address an urgent summons to our fellow Catholics and fellow Americans to be on guard, for religious liberty is under attack, both at home and abroad.

This has been noticed both near and far. Pope Benedict XVI recently spoke about his worry that religious liberty in the United States is being weakened. He called it the “most cherished of American freedoms”””and indeed it is. All the more reason to heed the warning of the Holy Father, a friend of America and an ally in the defense of freedom, in his recent address to American bishops

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Video games are a prevalent and increasingly expressive medium within modern society. In the forty years since the introduction of the first home video game, the field has attracted exceptional artistic talent. An amalgam of traditional art forms””painting, writing, sculpture, music, storytelling, cinematography””video games offer artists a previously unprecedented method of communicating with and engaging audiences.

The Art of Video Games is one of the first exhibitions to explore the forty-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus on striking visual effects and the creative use of new technologies. It features some of the most influential artists and designers during five eras of game technology, from early pioneers to contemporary designers. The exhibition focuses on the interplay of graphics, technology and storytelling through some of the best games for twenty gaming systems ranging from the Atari VCS to the PlayStation 3. Eighty games, selected with the help of the public, demonstrate the evolution of the medium. The games are presented through still images and video footage. In addition, the galleries will include video interviews with twenty developers and artists, large prints of in-game screen shots, and historic game consoles. Chris Melissinos, founder of Past Pixels and collector of video games and gaming systems, is the curator of the exhibition.

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…talk about landmark status for the perpetually unfinished Episcopal church is starting to percolate again, as developers ready plans for a new apartment building on leased cathedral property along 113th Street in Morningside Heights.

Real-estate firm Equity Residential hopes to start construction on the 15-story apartment building next year. The new structure’s footprint would be some 70 feet north of the cathedral itself, replacing large metal sheds and parking spaces in the area now.

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[STEVE] INSKEEP: You’re touching on the part that is maybe even more poignant, that this is a guy, as his story unfolds, who, early in life, had an opportunity for adventure – go off to Alaska, something – and seems to have turned that aside in order to get security. He thought that selling was something that you could do all your life, you could do as an old man and support yourself. And in the end, he doesn’t even get the security.

[PHILIP SEYMOUR] HOFFMAN: No. But it’s his son. It’s his son. You know, he had sons. He really did give his life for his sons. He didn’t do it in a way that, obviously, was effective or got what he wanted or actually nurtured his sons in a way that was going to help them, but he did.
INSKEEP: Has your job of portraying this disappointed father affected your thoughts at all when you go home and you go home to your three kids?

HOFFMAN: Well, it’s – you know, it affects your life. It’s – I really do think it’s one of those plays that just seeps into – as we talk about all these aspects, I mean, it’s never that simple. I mean, this play really seeps into why we’re here, you know, what are we doing – family, work, friends, you know, hopes, dreams, careers….

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…if there’s one element of Judaism I’d love to share with everyone it’s this: If you want to survive and thrive as a people, a culture, a civilization, celebrate the family. Hold it sacred. Eat together. Tell the story of what most matters to you across the generations. Make children the most important people. Put them centre stage. Encourage them to ask questions, the more the better. That’s what Moses said thirty three centuries ago and Judaism is still here to tell the tale having survived some of the most brutal persecutions in human history, yet as a religious faith were still young and full of energy.

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Commemorations of the sinking of the Titanic 100 years ago will put the spotlight on a young Irish priest whose photographs are some of the only surviving images of life onboard the liner on its first and last voyage.

Jesuit Father Frank Browne, 1880-1960, became a prominent documentary photographer and a much-decorated chaplain in the British army in World War I.

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In the service lay a story of black Christians and white Jews who once shared a kind of promised land, a peacefully integrated section of Indianapolis called Southside. Its decades of harmony were a rebuke to the Southern-style racial divisions that characterized Indiana for much of the 20th century, from the Ku Klux Klan’s heyday in the interwar years to George Wallace’s popularity with the state’s voters in the 1960s.

Upward mobility, Interstate 70 and the construction of a football stadium hollowed out the neighborhood starting in the late 1960s, scattering its residents and severing bonds of commerce and friendship. But in the last four years, an anthropology professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Susan B. Hyatt, has set about finding former Southsiders and restoring those ties through social events and reciprocal worship services at South Calvary and the Etz Chaim Sephardic synagogue.

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Toward the end of “A Night to Remember,” Walter Lord briefly nodded to “the element of fate” in the story, which teases its audience with a sense at once of inevitability and of how easily things might have turned out differently. It is, he says, like “classic Greek tragedy.”

He was right. All the energy spent on the mechanics, the romance, the construction, the passenger list, the endless debates about what the Californian might have done and just how many people perished (still never resolved) has distracted from what may, in the end, be the most obvious thing about the Titanic’s story: it uncannily replicates the structure and the themes of our most fundamental myths and oldest tragedies. Like Iphigenia, the Titanic is a beautiful “maiden” sacrificed to the agendas of greedy men eager to set sail; the forty-six-thousand-ton liner is just the latest in a long line of lovely girl victims, an archetype of vulnerable femininity that stands at the core of the Western literary tradition.

But the Titanic embodies another strain of tragedy. This is the drama of a flawed and self-destructive hero, a protagonist of great achievements and overweening presumption….

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Higher commodity prices, however, are a cost borne by businesses and consumers and this has mitigated the economic stimulus provided by prior bouts of QE. Higher equity prices, alas, can’t offset pain at the petrol pump and the supermarket for many consumers.

All that raises the prospect that introducing QE3 simply runs the risk of entrenching the economy in its post-financial crisis mode of a stop and start recovery.

In fact, advocates of QE3 are really betting that the Fed will err far more on the side of risking much higher inflation in the long run as it seeks to lower the unemployment rate towards 7 per cent.

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(The full title is: “White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You”)–KSH

What was the main difference between Great Britain and France? It -wasn’t the size of their national debts: at the time of the French Revolution, Great Britain’s debt per person was much larger than France’s. The difference was politics. In Great Britain, the political system was dominated by elected representatives who supported an activist government and were willing to endorse the taxes necessary to pay for its resulting debts. In France, the government did not have the legitimacy necessary to raise the money to service its smaller debts. And although its tax rates were lower than Britain’s, the problem of taxation without representation was an important cause of the Revolution.

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In 1956, [William] Shockley won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the transistor. His next dream was to make transistors out of silicon; he decided to set up his lab in Mountain View ”” near Palo Alto ”” largely for personal reasons.

“He’d grown up in Palo Alto,” Berlin says. Most importantly, she says, “his mother was still living in Palo Alto.”

Of course, it helped that nearby Stanford University was also doing federally funded electronics research. Shockley was a magnet who drew more brilliant scientists to the valley. Among them was Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and the man who would come up with Moore’s Law ”” the observation that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years.

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The Barnabas Fund reports that the “city of Homs, the third largest in Syria, has now seen almost its entire Christian population of 50,000 to 60,000 flee.”

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Church leadership in the 21st century involves making numerous decisions about the future of ministry, frequently against a backdrop of rapid change and poorly understood but increasingly challenging circumstances.

For example, at the beginning of the 21st century, a number of churches are either in decline or (by contrast) are experiencing significant numerical growth.

Churches are facing major decisions as to whether to sustain or expand their present facilities, continue to minister in the same way, relocate to another community, disband or even sell their property and facilities.

Austerity measures and declining budgets further compound these issues.

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Books on the decline of America are coming thick and fast. The latest, Time to Start Thinking: America and the Spectre of Descent, by The Financial Times’s chief US commentator Edward Luce, is published this week….In summary, he concludes that global economic dominance, having quit Europe around the end of last century, moved west to the United States and now, after another hundred years, is relocating to Asia. Nothing can be done about this, he says. It is just the way it is. China and India (and he throws in Indonesia for good measure) are simply too big and too industrious not to fight it out for the soon-to-be vacated Number One slot.
But ”“ and this is where it gets interesting ”“ Luce is frustrated by the way in which the US, outside of rhetoric, is capitulating to the inevitable, giving up almost without a fight. Were its leaders to defy history, he suggests, they would quickly regain the world’s respect and write a new and valuable interpretation of the American dream.

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The 1,517 lives lost in the Titanic tragedy will be commemorated in a beautiful hand”“crafted funeral pall which will be dedicated in St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast, a century after the disaster.

The pall, made of 100 per cent Merino felt, is backed with Irish linen and dyed an indigo blue, evoking an image of the midnight sea in which the Titanic finally came to rest.

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“New Haggadahs will be written until there are no more Jews to write them. Or until our destiny has been fulfilled, and there is no more need to say, ”˜Next year in Jerusalem,’” according to the preface to the New American Haggadah. Watch our interviews at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, DC with writers Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander about the new Haggadah edited by Foer, translated by Englander, designed by Oden Ezer, and published by Little, Brown. Interviews by Julie Mashack. Edited by Fred Yi.

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About five years ago, I noticed a longing in myself. Perhaps it was inspired by fatherhood, or just growing older. Despite having been raised in an intellectual and self-consciously Jewish home, I knew almost nothing about what was supposedly my own belief system.

And worse, I felt satisfied with how little I knew. Sometimes I thought of my stance as a rejection, but you can’t reject something that you don’t understand and that was never yours. Sometimes I thought of it as an achievement, but there’s no achievement in passive forfeiture.

Why did I take time away from my own writing to edit a new Haggadah? Because I wanted to take a step toward the conversation I could only barely hear through the closed door of my ignorance; a step toward a Judaism of question marks rather than quotation marks; toward the story of my people, my family and myself.

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Yesterday, for the third time this year, someone expressed to me genuine concern about involving the church in a project because they feared that dealing with a discriminatory organisation would compromise their moral integrity. The Church of England used to be the guardian of the nation’s morals, but is increasingly perceived as irrelevant, or even a threat to them. At first sight this is amazing, because the people I meet in church are usually kind, upright and morally aware. The nation’s moral instinct has changed, however. The church in its own bubble has become, at best, the guardian of the value system of the nation’s grandparents, and at worst a den of religious anoraks defined by defensiveness, esoteric logic and discrimination.
The collapse of empire may have led people to search for a new moral purpose in diversity not conformity. Neoliberal economics since Margaret Thatcher may have broken down networks and social tribes, regional identities and family ties. A new social and moral consensus has emerged. It is broadly Christian in the sense of “inspired by the teaching of Jesus” but disconnected from the institutional church.

This affects more than just the C of E. Evangelical bodies bemuse people who are innately suspicious of religious zeal and unpersuaded about the particularities involved. The Roman Catholic church seems corrupt and weird about sex.

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See how you dol.

With the crack of baseball bats across the land, the singing season for Americans is about to begin. At ballparks from Saint Louis to San Diego, people will stand during the seventh-inning stretch and belt “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” They will feel the pleasure of singing a bouncy, easy song with thousands of other fans. They will be cheered by the sunny lyrics, even if their team is down. They will lose themselves in a bond stretching around the stadium, a few minutes of carefree unity.

And when the season’s over, that’ll be it until next spring.

Adults in America don’t sing communally. Children routinely sing together in their schools and activities, and even infants have sing-alongs galore to attend. But past the age of majority, at grown-up commemorations, celebrations, and gatherings, this most essential human yawp of feeling””of marking, with a grace note, that we are together in this place at this time””usually goes missing.

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An urbanization drive perhaps unparalleled in human history has turned China into a continent-sized construction site. Some of the new buildings have won international acclaim, such as Beijing’s “Bird’s Nest” stadium built for the 2008 Olympics. But far too many are eyesores, complain architects and online critics.

When the architecture website www.archcy.com asked readers to vote for China’s top 10 ugliest buildings, Li Hu, a Beijing-based partner at U.S. Steven Holl Architects, said, “Choosing 10 is very hard, choosing a million is perfectly possible.

“Development is too quick. Architects don’t have time to reflect,” says Li, who blames the ugly edifices in part on interference by government officials, a lack of imagination by architects and corruption.

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From the religious perspective there can be little doubt that the bargain our founders struck with history paid off. Religion has flourished in America as it has in few other places in the western world.

However, there can also be little doubt that the number of Americans for whom religion is an important element in their lives is decreasing; ours is an increasingly secular society.

Many of us are saddened by this slow drift. I, for one, believe that it does not portend well for our nation. We as a people need the insights and sensitivities that religion, at its best, can provide. However, I fear that the religious community has squandered a good portion of our credibility by becoming allied with one or another particular political position.

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Harry Boer, a chaplain during World War II, spent the final days of that war among marines in the Pacific Theater. “The Second Division saw much action, with great losses,” he writes. “Yet I never met an enlisted man or an officer who doubted for a moment the outcome of the war. Nor did I ever meet a marine who asked why, if victory was so sure, we couldn’t have it immediately. It was just a question of slogging through till the enemy gave up.”

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You’ve written often about the importance of storytelling, even to the point of suggesting that first-year divinity students should read a diet entirely of fiction — Flannery O’Connor, the Russian novelists, Faulkner. Wonderful idea. How are people transformed by fiction?

I think that their imaginations are transformed. When you’re reading a novel, you’re following a plot and character development. The best writers leave a lot to your imagination. The task of a writer is to get participation from the reader, and you can’t do that by telling them everything. The Bible is that kind of literature. There’s very little explanation””almost no explanation, no definitions. And the writers of Scripture were also, as they were telling these stories, aware of all the other voices that were in the air””Moses, Isaiah, Daniel, Jesus, Paul.

Our school curriculum teaches you how to study. You learn facts. But they don’t do much to help you read in an imaginative way to help you enter the story. That’s what novelists do. So I think a basic immersion in fiction is almost a prerequisite to reading the Bible, to preaching sermons, to teaching classes. Poetry does the same thing, but it takes a different route to do it.

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This spring semester, California’s Biola University, among the nation’s largest evangelical institutions, opens the doors of its ambitious new Center for Christian Thought. Resembling institutions such as Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Biola’s center seeks to bring a mix of senior and postdoctoral fellows to campus to collaborate with internal fellows and faculty.

The center is unusual in operating from a distinctly Christian vantage point. The mission statement is forthright: “The Center offers scholars from a variety of Christian perspectives a unique opportunity to work collaboratively on a selected theme…. Ultimately, the collaborative work will result in scholarly and popular-level materials, providing the broader culture with thoughtful Christian perspectives on current events, ethical concerns, and social trends.”

If the idea of Christian perspectives raises your eyebrows, it might be time to brush up on Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King, Edith Stein, Reinhold Niebuhr, and many others….

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At the 92nd Street Y in New York, Vanderbilt Divinity School professor Amy-Jill Levine is making the case that Jews and Christians alike need to pay more attention to the Jewishness of Jesus, and the best way to do that, she believes, is by reading the New Testament from a Jewish perspective.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: If I want to understand Jewish history, the New Testament is one of the best sources that I’ve got.

LAWTON: Levine, who is an observant Jew, is co-editor of The Jewish Annotated New Testament, a version of the Christian scripture with footnotes and commentaries written entirely by Jewish scholars.

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After more than a century of widespread antipathy between Catholics and evangelical Christians, a Catholic with Italian immigrant roots from the industrial Northeast has emerged as the favored presidential candidate among evangelicals, even in states he lost over all, like Ohio and Illinois. On the eve of Louisiana’s primary on Saturday, Mr. Santorum had won a plurality of the evangelical vote in 9 of 16 states, according to exit polls by Edison Research.

“Santorum represents a game-changer,” said D. Michael Lindsay, the president of Gordon College, a Christian school near Boston, and an expert in evangelical voting patterns. “His candidacy has the potential to reshape conservative political alignment, securing once and for all evangelical support for a conservative Catholic in public life.”

Mr. Santorum has, in fact, performed far better with evangelical Christians than with Catholics, who have preferred Mitt Romney, a Mormon, in virtually every state. Through a critical reading of the data, Mr. Santorum’s base of evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics could be seen by cynics as a coalition of zealots, held together by intolerance. By another way of thinking, however, his candidacy offers proof of a growing tolerance on the part of evangelical Christians, a willingness to shed ancestral religious prejudices.

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Eliot presented a post-Christian world, despairing of human and divine love or redemption from its despair. The best expression of this diagnosis, in his verse, came in “The Hollow Men” (1925), where Eliot’s speakers are discovered hopelessly – but, paradoxically, with an extraordinary lyrical beauty – on the brink of Hell.
Here was a poet, according to Eliot’s contemporaries, who had evoked the nihilism of modern lives and societies. Phrases from these poems still resonate powerfully, nearly a century later: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,” “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” and so on.

It might have been expected, after Eliot’s conversion a few years later, that his recognition of the promise of salvation which Christianity proposes would have been reflected in revolutionary changes in his poetic subjects and techniques. Instead, it is the consistency of Eliot’s poetry, from 1927 onwards, with what he had been writing before that most often strikes us. Several powerful metaphors remain, such as, for example, that of the journey (which we encounter, for instance, in “Prufrock” and in the quest-motif in The Waste Land).

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Amidst the debris of postmodernism (a movement that has basically run its course) stands a great ambivalence about the nature of truth. The great intellectual transformation of recent decades produced a generation that is not hostile to all claims of truth, but is highly selective about what kinds of truth it is willing to receive.

The current intellectual climate accepts truth as being true in some objective sense only when dealing with claims of truth that come from disciplines like math or science. They accept objective truth when it comes to gravity or physiology, but not when it comes to morality or meaning.

One result of this is that we can often be heard as meaning less than we intend. When we present the gospel, it can easily be heard as a matter of our own personal reality that is, in the end, free from any claim upon others….

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