A couple of cynical commentators maintain that schools like the Institute have to adapt to today’s culture “because otherwise they cannot recruit enough top-notch staff.” Non-cynically, one can relate this and other change to fresh Biblical scholarship, studies of evangelical hermeneutics, recognition of internal diversity among conservative evangelicals, and awareness that strictures like the old ban often caused embarrassment to many of the most conscientious and able employees, including faculty. It might be most useful to try to assess where compromises like the Institute’s register among adjustments to contemporary culture(s) in general.

Whoever is of temperate disposition and conscientious commitment and has weathered weekend-night drinking-orgies on many kinds of campuses might look with envy for the peace and quiet””not always dullness””in colleges where self-restraint has endured. Still, many who have nothing against, or who favor, the relaxation of rules like the wine-ban can sympathize with leadership caught in the conflict between old restrictions and new experiments with freedom.

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A 22-year-old woman whose life was spared with the help of a Christian adoption agency after her biological mother was raped has been voted Auburn University’s 100th homecoming queen and she is now using her inspiring story to encourage people to adopt.

The young woman, Molly Anne Dutton, was elected homecoming queen by the nation’s most conservative student body over the weekend after running on a platform advocating adoption, according to a Yellowhammer News report.

Dutton shared the inspiring story of her biological mother who became pregnant after she was raped while living with her husband in California. Her mother’s husband threatened to divorce her if she didn’t abort Molly but the brave woman chose a different path.

She chose to get help from Birmingham-based Christian adoption agency Lifeline Children’s Services and gave birth to Molly and put her up for adoption.

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Two high school friends reunited for the weekend, with one, now a USC freshman, showing off her new campus to her out-of-town guest.

But the night ended tragically for the young women, when the freshman was struck by a random bullet while waiting for a taxi near the iconic fountain in Five Points. Martha Childress, 18, is paralyzed from the hips down, after a .40-caliber bullet lodged in her spine, said her uncle, Jim Carpenter, who is serving as the family’s spokesman. She also suffered damage to her liver and a kidney, but doctors were optimistic those wounds would heal, he said.

Childress graduated in the spring from J.L. Mann High School in Greenville. She earned a 4.0 grade-point average there and chose to study at the University of South Carolina, her parents’ alma mater, Carpenter said. She had declared international business as her major and was pledging the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority.

Makes the heart sad–read it all.

…it is still foolish to ignore the leverage that the individual mandate gives opponents of Obamacare. America’s healthcare system for the elderly (Medicare, plus Medicaid for nursing-home care) is already edging the country toward generational war because Washington will sooner or later be forced to choose between drastic limitations on coverage in those programs or drastic increases in taxes on the decreasing portion of working Americans. Now we’re adding a parallel obligation on younger workers to subsidize healthcare for fiftysomethings.

What to do? The path of least political resistance is to tough it out, hoping younger households will be unable to figure out what’s happening, or simply unwilling to throw in their lot with opponents of gay marriage, marijuana reform and the like. Alternatively, we could start paying attention to the building crisis as younger households scramble ever harder for a middle-class living standard.

And none too soon, because the signs of generational conflict are already appearing.

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…what happened late last week was not minor. Kill did not feel well as Minnesota prepared to leave for Michigan, and he stayed behind, and he hoped, right up until he had another seizure, that he would be able to fly to Ann Arbor on Saturday morning and lead his team to a statement win.

Only he did have another seizure. He stayed home. This was the first time he had not attended a game at all because of a seizure. And it was his fifth seizure on a game day and his second one this season.

Kill and the Minnesota football program did the right thing in light of all that Thursday. They did the right thing for the team, but more important ”” way, way more important ”” they did the right thing for Kill. When he can coach, he should. Until then, his health is more important. More coaches should consider that.

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A group of firefighters is making sure the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy are never forgotten by building playgrounds ”“ 26 of them ”“ each honoring a student or teacher who lost their life.
As they help Newtown families heal, they’re also helping communities rebuild — because each will be in an area ravaged by Superstorm Sandy.
The idea of a playground “was more than just a structure or a place for kids to play on,” said New Jersey firefighter Capt. Bill Lavin and founder of The Sandy Ground: Where Angels Play. “It was a symbol of hope.”

Watch the whole video report.

The formula never changed: demand discipline, emphasize recruiting and increase resources. It was simple, but it also worked.

At Southern Illinois, Kill & Company saved a program on the verge of being dropped. They beat Indiana on the road. Kill drove into the rural communities near Southern Illinois and persuaded fans to return, one handshake at a time. When Mike Reis, the Salukis’ veteran play-by-play announcer, spent weeks in the hospital for colon surgery, Kill visited daily. When the university offered him a raise, he spread the money among his assistants.

At Northern Illinois, Kill and his crew replaced Joe Novak and began another turnaround. In his interview, Kill told Novak and Jim Phillips, now the athletic director at Northwestern, about the seizures and said he had a handle on them. Phillips said Kill’s health did not factor “an iota” into his decision.

Even then, a Big Ten job seemed far away. What school would take that kind of chance?

Read it all (Hat tip: Elizabeth Harmon).

Who played whom and what was the final score?

No peeking, googling, phoning a friend, etc.

ccording to Fidelity Investments, 2013 graduates who had borrowed had an average of $35,200 in college-related debt, so lots of millennials bring debt into their marriages. The average household headed by someone under 35 carried $89,500 in debt in 2010, including mortgage debt, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances shows. (That’s up from $53,700 in 1989, measured in 2010 dollars.)

The first thing to do is have an open conversation with your spouse in which you both disclose all the skeletons in your financial closets. You should also make a plan for tackling that debt that makes clear whether each person will help pay down the other’s debt or if it’s the responsibility of the borrower alone. Before even getting married, you should also share credit reports with your spouse so you can work to improve your scores in advance of a major purchase, says Theresa Fette, CEO of Provident Trust Group in Las Vegas.

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Young Christians need encouragement to see their calling as scientists as a valuable Christian vocation. Though there are painful exceptions, the work environment for most Christian students in science today is not hostile. In fact, there are many young Christians in training in the sciences. Christian fellowship groups for graduate students are beginning to form and flourish on many campuses, and a large percentage of these Christian graduate students and postdocs are scientists.

It is during these formative years that young scientists are faced with some weighty decisions. For example: What kind of thesis research should I pursue? My advisor has asked me to do fetal tissue experiments; should I refuse and risk my position in graduate school? (This really happened to one student.) How do I explain my faith to my advisor and my fellow graduate students? Wouldn’t it be more valuable to God for me to join some of my Christian friends who are planning careers as evangelists or in direct ministry to the poor rather than to spend my life, for example, evaluating molecular spectra? Traditional Christian churches and circles do not always recognize the unique environment that the young Christian scientist faces. Science is sometimes viewed with misunderstanding and suspicion or ignored as unspiritual. These reactions are discouraging to young people who want to choose a career path that glorifies God. Hearing encouraging talks from older Christian scientists can be a great encouragement to younger people seeking guidance.

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A state university has become the first in Alabama to offer a faith-based dorm to students who meet certain requirements, such as a 2.5 GPA and a letter of recommendation from a minister or other community leader.

The dorm, which opened in August at Troy University, has brought both praise and criticism.

“Over time, our students indicated in surveys that their interest in faith and spiritual issues is very high compared to students across the land,” said John W. Schmidt, Troy’s senior vice chancellor for advancement and external relations. In building the dorms, Schmidt said, the university was “meeting a need for student housing but also satisfying some of our student requirements.”

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Ever since 9/11, the struggle against terrorists has focused too much on killing them rather than their message. That may change with a new public-private effort to counter the appeal of jihadists with a grass-roots campaign aimed at young and vulnerable Muslims….

[Last] Friday, Turkey and the United States announced plans to raise more than $200 million for a global fund to counter the “local drivers of radicalization to violence.” Much like campaigns against illiteracy or the child sex trade, this one has dozens of countries behind it. A coalition called the Global Counterterrorism Forum will build on the expertise of countries such as Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Indonesia that have successfully “deradicalized” captured terrorists.

Lessons from those rehab programs can be applied by civic groups and governments to prevent radicalization of Muslims. At the heart of these efforts will be moderate Muslims, such as Islamic scholars or former terrorists, who can effectively deliver the message that Islam does not justify the purposeful killing of innocents.

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From here:

West Point breeds restraint deep into a man’s soul. A senior cadet can stand behind a plebe and put his face up close to that man’s neck and tell him to stand straighter, or to recite “Schofield’s Definition of Discipline,” or to lead his squad mates in a rousing cheer-or he can give that plebe a series of tasks rapid fire, tasks that would lead most anyone else to frustration; and the plebe will stand there cool as Napoleon’s seventy-fifth maxim demands that he be, and he will take up the tasks one at a time until he gets them right-or he will suffer the wrath of the upperclassman. Take that same plebe to the bayonet course down by the river and tell him to execute the vertical butt stroke series with his bayonetted rifle, and he will rip the sawdust-filled dummy to shreds. A casual observer, on the sidelines of these military spectacles, might think he’s watching homicidal maniacs at work. But he would be wrong. The cadet is no less human than he, and probably much less prone to random acts of violence. The cadet just happens to be trained in the art of war. He understands the merits of restraint as well as the application of force.

College-age Americans participating in a new survey of religious identification were evenly divided between three distinct worldviews, Religious, Secular, and Spiritual, according to a groundbreaking report in the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) series from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., in conjunction with the Center for Inquiry (CFI). The study finds that these three groups have distinctly different positions on political, scientific, and moral questions.

Among the students surveyed, 31.8% identified their worldview as Religious, 32.4% as Spiritual, and 28.2% as Secular. Within each group there was a remarkable level of cohesion on answers to questions covering a wide array of issues, including political alignment, acceptance of evolution and climate change, belief in supernatural phenomena such as miracles or ghosts, and trust in alternative practices such as homeopathy and astrology.

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Last Saturday, Michael McDuffee had his first beer since 1994. It was a cold beer, refreshing. It was a long time coming.

“I had been a man convinced that three drinks can quench our thirst: milk, lemonade and a cold beer,” said Mr. McDuffee, who practiced his drinking as a Marine. “And for 20 years I was drinking milk and lemonade.”

Mr. McDuffee is not an alcoholic newly fallen from the wagon, but rather an evangelical Christian professor at Moody Bible Institute, which includes a seminary, an undergraduate college, and radio and publishing arms, with its main campus in Chicago. When he joined the faculty, in 1994, he agreed to abide by its requirement that faculty members, staff and students not drink alcohol, smoke, or have extramarital sex….

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Leaders of the nation’s largest Somali community say some of their young men are still being enticed to join the terror group that has claimed responsibility for the deadly mall attack in Kenya, despite a concentrated effort to shut off what authorities call a “deadly pipeline” of men and money.

Six years have passed since Somali-American fighters began leaving Minnesota to become part of al-Shabab. Now the Somali community is dismayed over reports that a few of its own might have been involved in the violence at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi.

“One thing I know is the fear is growing,” said Abdirizak Bihi, whose nephew was among at least six men from Minnesota who have died in Somalia. More are presumed dead.

Read it all.

Watch it all, and note the participation of Cameron Cole, director of student ministries at Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama.

New guidance for psychologists will acknowledge that adolescence now effectively runs up until the age of 25 for the purposes of treating young people. So is this the new cut-off point for adulthood?

“The idea that suddenly at 18 you’re an adult just doesn’t quite ring true,” says child psychologist Laverne Antrobus, who works at London’s Tavistock Clinic.

“My experience of young people is that they still need quite a considerable amount of support and help beyond that age.”

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There’s plenty of fodder for deficit hawks in a new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. In short, the future looks grim….

First, the good news: The CBO projects the deficit will shrink to $378 billion in 2015, or 2.1 percent of the size of the overall U.S. economy. Compared with just a few years ago when the budget gap ballooned as a result of the recession, this marks a nearly unprecedented improvement in the deficit picture. It’s a rapid decline in budget shortfalls not seen since the end of World War II. The national debt will bottom out in 2018, at 68 percent of GDP.

The bad news: From there, the picture gets decidedly less rosy. Budget deficits gradually rise, “mainly because of increasing interest costs and growing spending for Social Security and the government’s major health care programs (Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and subsidies to be provided through the health insurance exchanges),” says the report. By 2038, the national debt will reach 100 percent of GDP….

Read it all and follow the link to the actual report.

A controversial topic was reignited this summer when blogger and author Rachel Held Evans wrote a piece about why Millennials leave church. Her editorial struck a nerve, sparking response pieces all across the web and generating more than 100,000 social media reactions in the first week alone.

Yet whatever one’s personal view of the reasons behind Millennials staying or going, one thing is clear: the relationship between Millennials and the Church is shifting. Barna Group’s researchers have been examining Millennials’ faith development since the generation was in its teen years””that is, for about a decade. During that time, the firm has conducted 27,140 interviews with members of the Millennial generation in more than 200 studies.

And while Barna Group’s research has previously highlighted what’s not working to keep Millennials at church, the research also illuminates what is working””and what churches can do to engage these young adults.

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While the subject of his fiction has shifted in venue and somewhat in tone, it remains in a generational vein. Speaking of his work, Mr. Coupland explained: “I’m interested in people my age and younger who have no narrative structure to their lives. The big structure used to be the job, the career arc, and that’s no longer there. Neither is family or religion. All these narrative templates have eroded.”

–From a 1994 profile article in the New York Times (emphasis mine)

When American University graduate Elyse Barletta, 27, was looking for a full-time nannying position recently in Charlotte, N.C., three families wanted to hire her””all were impressed by her college education.

“They wanted someone who could help with their children’s homework,” said Barletta, a history major who made the dean’s list and is proficient in French.

Experts say young women like Barletta make up a fast-growing segment of the nanny industry: College graduates who could go into law, medicine or other fields but are choosing to become career nannies, sometimes because they struggled to find jobs in their desired professions. These highly credentialed child-minders are being greeted with open arms into middle-class and upper-class families who want to give their kids an edge in an increasingly competitive world.

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Alix Generous just turned 21. If she wanted to, she could buy a beer.

Instead, the College of Charleston junior has been a bit busy. In just the past year or so, she has presented her own coral reef research to the United Nations in India, studied neuropathic pain at MUSC and is now examining childhood epilepsy at a prestigious Boston medical school.

And on Saturday, she presented a TED talk in Albuquerque, N.M. The event featured physicists and educators, CEOs and techies, writers, a doctor, a folk healer ”” and her. She discussed the need to tap people’s unique minds to solve the world’s complex problems.

She discussed it by way of personal experience.

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At some point in their lives, one of every three Americans will leave Christianity, according to a 2011 study in the Journal of Religion and Society. Called “leavers,” “deconverts,” or “ex-Christians,” they are targets of fresh concern among church denominations watching their numbers shrink. Pollsters and bloggers tick off reasons why so many are leaving, such as intellectual hurdles to belief, immoral or intolerant church leaders, and profound suffering. But the leavers phenomenon is nothing new. It goes back at least to the parable of the Prodigal Son, told by Jesus and recorded in Luke 15:11”“32.

What about the people whom the prodigals leave behind? The ones who love the leavers? The ones left to hold down the forts of remaining families and faith communities? Few theological and practical resources exist for the two out of every three Christians who remain with the Father while they watch their “younger brother” leave.

The biblical parable centers on the relationship between a father and his two sons. But the essence of the story remains the same, whether the prodigal is a child, sibling, spouse, parent, or friend. This is why P. C. Ennis Jr. argues in the Journal for Preachers that “it is crucial that periodically we preach on the Prodigal Son. . . . Like the Easter story and the Christmas story, it bears repeating, for the story of the Prodigal Son is the gospel in capsule.”

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Millennials””people born between 1981 and the early 2000s””are much closer to their parents than previous generations, and they have gained a reputation for being coddled by so-called helicopter parents, say researchers who study Millennials. But when they started joining the workforce in the early 2000s, managers balked at parents getting involved in their kids’ workplace struggles or job searches.

That was then. Now, some firms have begun embracing parental involvement and using it to attract and hold onto talent and boost employee morale.

One of them is Northwestern Mutual. Michael Van Grinsven, field-growth and development director at the Milwaukee-based financial firm, says the company does everything it can to accommodate the parents of college-aged interns, including regularly inviting them to the office for open houses.

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“No person shall be admitted a member of this College, unless, upon examination by the President”¦he shall be found acquainted with the fundamental rules of arithmetic, and able to read, construe and parse Cicero’s select orations, Virgil’s Aeneid and Greek testament, and to write Latin grammatically, and shall also produce satisfactory credentials of his good moral character.”

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How did marriage lose most of its meaning? How has it gone from being regarded as an institution that formed the conjugal bond, established nuclear families, knit vital social ties across extended familial units, and forged the necessary social cohesion for the sheltering and rearing of children, to a more-or-less optional affirmation of love?

True, the same-sex marriage debate has rekindled some interest in the institution and its purposes. But that imbroglio seems more like the last flaring of a star before it goes cold rather than a true rekindling.

The weakening of the institution has been ongoing for so many years that it is difficult to discern the proverbial tipping point. But I have a good candidate: The 1976 California Supreme Court case, Marvin v. Marvin.

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As students consider how to use their devices in the classroom, they should remember, above all, that tuition merely gets them into the lecture hall. If they want college to culminate in life-changing courses, mentoring from dedicated teachers and compelling recommendations for the world after graduation, they will earn these things the time-honored way, with courtesy and hard work.

As for professors, we can make things easier for students by including detailed etiquette policies in our syllabi. Too many of us leave our likes and dislikes to be discovered by trial and error.

But even the most detailed code of conduct can’t hope to specify or resolve every possible sticking point. Society writ large is constantly struggling to come to grips with technological disruption, and so too are the adults at the front of the college lecture hall and the wired, distracted young adults who are there to learn from them.

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Although none suspected that the faithful had desisted from sin, for years priests have reported a decline in the number of Catholics seeking out the sacrament of confession.

The trend now appears to have been reversed, with a surge in confessions, particularly among the young.

The rise is being credited to the visit to Britain of Benedict XVI in 2010 and the election this year of Pope Francis.

Read it all (subscription required).

Read it all.