Looking for a wild-and-crazy time at college? Don’t sign up for Justin McDaniel’s religious studies class.
The associate professor’s course on monastic life and asceticism gives students at the University of Pennsylvania a firsthand experience of what it’s like to be a monk.
At various periods during the semester, students must forego technology, coffee, physical human contact and certain foods. They’ll also have to wake up at 5 a.m. ”” without an alarm clock.
With millennial children now in their 20s, more helicopter parents are showing up in the workplace, sometimes even phoning human resources managers to advocate on their child’s behalf.
Megan Huffnagle, a former human resources manager at a Denver theme park, recalls being shocked several years ago when she received a call from a young job applicant’s mother.
“An employee was hired as an IT intern, and the parent called and proceeded to tell me how talented her son was, and how he deserved much more [compensation], and that he could make much more money outside of this position,” Huffnagle says.
Voorhees College will celebrate Absalom Jones, the first African-American priest in the Episcopal Church, at 5 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 14, in St. Philip’s Chapel on campus.
The Annual Absalom Jones Feast Day will feature the Right Rev. W. Andrew Waldo, bishop of the Diocese of Upper South Carolina, as chief celebrant, and the Right Rev. Mark J. Lawrence, bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina, as preacher.
In 2009, Julea Ward, a teacher and an evangelical Christian, was studying for a master’s degree in counseling at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. As part of her training, she was required to treat clients, and she expressed her reluctance to work with any who were in same-sex relationships. A professor, heeding Ms. Ward’s wishes, referred a gay client to another counselor.
That seemingly simple request became a problem for Ms. Ward when the university expelled her for having made it. Ms. Ward sued, and her case raises the question of whether a counselor’s religious convictions can disqualify her from the profession.
A federal court dismissed Ms. Ward’s claim of religious discrimination. But on Jan. 27, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ordered the lower court to rehear the case, finding that Eastern Michigan “cannot point to any written policy that barred Ward from requesting this referral.”
Seven months after same-sex marriage was legalized in New York State, the Cornell campus still has yet to see a same-sex wedding. Even so, religious leaders and gay rights advocates say, the legislation has already affected Cornell students and faculty.
The Rev. Clark West, chaplain at the Episcopal Church at Cornell University, will perform his first legal same-sex wedding for two Cornell alumni in a year.
“I will be ready, willing, and able to do it” when the time comes, he said. “[There are] a number of openly gay and lesbian students in our community, and if they ever decide to get married, I would be overjoyed at doing a wedding service if they would like me to.”
Professors at Elon University in North Carolina, which is no longer affiliated with its founder, the United Church of Christ, agree that understanding religion is clearly an important component to global citizenry, said Peter Felten, an assistant provost at Elon and director of its Center for Advancement of Teaching and Learning. “But,” he continued, “almost all of our faculty will say, ‘It’s just not an important issue in my course.’ ”
While students may not be especially religious in the sense of attending services or identifying with a particular faith, their spirituality in college — the search for meaning and purpose in life, and asking existential questions — is on the rise, recent research has found. Yet the majority of these students also said their professors never encouraged discussions of religious or spiritual matters.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. After six decades of peace, Europe should be basking in a golden age of prosperity. Instead its young are being ravaged by unemployment, with a record 5.6 million under-25s out of work.
Just over a million of the young unemployed are in Britain, the worst level in the country since figures began to be collected by Eurostat, the EU statistics agency, in 1983.
Bleak as Britain’s young jobless rate of 22.3 per cent is, the picture is far worse in eurozone countries enforcing deep austerity measures. As Spain’s jobless count broke the 5 million barrier yesterday, unemployment for those aged 16 to 24 was put at 51.4 per cent, meaning that for the first time in a modern European country a majority of the young are out of work.
In Greece the young jobless figure is 46.6 per cent, and in Portugal 30.7 per cent, according to Eurostat.
Read it all (requires subscription).
This year’s college freshmen are more studious than their counterparts of the past few years, says an annual survey released today on their high school academic habits.
More of them took notes in class, did homework and took more demanding coursework as high school seniors, and fewer said they drank alcohol, partied or showed up late for class.
Those and other trends point toward an entering college freshman class that has a better chance of succeeding academically, say researchers who conducted the survey.
A group of American college students stands in a semicircle, clapping and hopping on one foot as they sing in Yiddish: “Az der rebe tantst, tantsn ale khsidim!”
In English, the lyrics mean: “When the rebbe dances, so do all the Hasidim.”
This isn’t music appreciation or even a class at a synagogue. It’s the first semester of Yiddish at Emory University in Atlanta — one of a handful of college programs across the country studying the Germanic-based language of Eastern European Jews….
On the field, it wasn’t always pretty. In the record book, it will look beautiful forever.
South Carolina made history with its 11th win on Monday, beating No. 21 Nebraska 30-13 in a Capital One Bowl that made up for a lack of style with a dash of drama.
The No. 10 Gamecocks started slow, turned the momentum with a 51-yard Hail Mary touchdown pass to Alshon Jeffery on the final play of the first half and dominated the second half on the way to their first ever victory over Nebraska.
Excuse the capital letters, but sometimes major emphasis is required. This is one such moment. Some football coaches pay recruits. Georgia’s football coach dips into his personal finances to reward the guys who’ve worked for him. He committed a violation, all right. He showed the rest of us what it means to put (literal) money where your mouth is.
For decades young people have flocked to seeker-friendly churches that feature culturally relevant services and a casual environment.
Now, a new denomination that emphasizes tradition and centuries-old sacraments and practices is drawing them in.
The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) officially began in 2009 with hundreds of congregations that severed ties with the Episcopal Church.
In Albany Park on Chicago’s north side, a group of college students and recent graduates have started one of the ACNA’s newest church plants.
Since I’ve been chairing a national Presbyterian Church (USA) committee on the Nature of the Church for the 21st century, I’ve been gaining a different perspective on many of the larger trends of our denomination. One thing that has been difficult to realize (and equally difficult to communicate to the larger church) is the young clergy crisis.
Why would I call it a crisis? We’ve known for a long time about the startling decline of young clergy. The drop-out rates don’t help (I can’t find hard and fast stats on this… but some claim that about 70% of young clergy drop out within the first five years of ministry, usually because of lack of support or financial reasons). The average age of a pastor in the PCUSA is 53. And I’ve realized that the age of our leadership might be much higher.
In Afghanistan, Cpl. Clayton Rhoden earned about $2,500 a month jumping into helicopters to chase down improvised explosive devices or check out suspected bomb factories.
Now he lives with his parents, sells his blood plasma for $80 a week and works what extra duty he can get for his Marine Corps Reserve unit.
Cpl. Rhoden, who is 25, gawky and polite with a passion for soldiering, is one of the legions of veterans who served in combat yet have a harder time finding work than other people their age, a situation that officials say will grow worse as the United States completes its pullout of Iraq and as, by a White House estimate, a million new veterans join the workforce over the next five years.
Lord, for thy tender mercy’s sake,
lay not our sins to our charge,
but forgive that is past,
and give us grace to amend our sinful lives.
To decline from sin and incline to virtue,
that we may walk in a perfect heart before thee,
now and evermore.
Amen.
–Richard Farrant (1530–1580)
The setting is Bowdoin College Chapel. This is posted by one who sang in this very group what seems like many moons ago–listen to it all–KSH.
The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, announced on Thursday 8 December 2011 that the Reverend Canon Dr Samuel Wells has been appointed as the next Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields.
Sam, who will take up the post in the summer of 2012, is currently Dean of the Chapel and a Research Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke University in North Carolina, USA, where he leads a staff of 25 in upholding the Chapel’s reputation for preaching, music and liturgy, oversees the 35 campus ministers and is the regular preacher at the year-round Sunday services, which regularly attract a congregation of around 900….
In 2010 only 48.2% of the adult population of England and Wales were married. Of the rest, 35.6% were single, 9.3% were divorced, and 7% were widowed. It is estimated around one in six people are cohabitating.
“One of the main reasons for the decrease in the married population and the increase in the single population is the growth of cohabitation by unmarried couples,” the report stated.
Earlier this year cohabitation in England was examined in a study published by the Jubilee Centre, a group that describes itself as a Christian social reform organization.
In “Cohabitation: An Alternative to Marriage?,” authors John Hayward and Guy Brandon said that although the rise in rates of cohabitation is now stabilizing, an increasing proportion of these relationships do not lead to marriage but end in separation.
Pondering a gender change began with his doctoral studies at Harvard Divinity School in the ’90s. “I was out as gay at that point,” he recalls. The run-up to his change was not the turmoil-filled time you might expect. “I’m not a huge fan of the trapped-in-the-wrong-body narrative” of some other transgendered people, Partridge says. “I know it’s true and real for some folks, but I never felt like God made a mistake. I’ve not had a problem with God about this, I really haven’t. I just had a sense of this growing””discomfort, disjunction.” With the change, “I felt like I was able to kind of reclaim the body that God had given me.”
Seeking a unisex name, he was stumped until he went for take-out sushi one day when he was still a woman and the clerk misheard the name, asking, “Cameron?” Partridge looked the name up and learned it meant “crooked,” just the name, he thought, for someone who believes gender is not linear.
As for his agenda as chaplain, he’s exploring ways to involve students in environmental justice, an interest that has come up in conversations with them.
The District of Columbia has dismissed a complaint against The Catholic University of America that charged the school’s return to same-gender student housing discriminates against women.
In an order issued Tuesday (Nov. 29), the city’s Office of Human Rights said offering only single-sex dormitories is not unlawful discrimination under the District’s Human Rights Act.
To follow the complaint’s reasoning would lead to “a prohibition on same-sex bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams, which would lead to absurd results,” the order said.
Mr. [ Robert] Champion, a hard-working clarinet player, tried out twice before being selected as one of six drum majors in the spring of 2010. He died just hours after marching on the field at the Florida Classic, a football game between Florida A&M and its longtime rival, Bethune-Cookman University.
He collapsed in a bus parked at an Orlando hotel, where the band was staying. It was evening, and the buses should have been locked, Dr. White said. After interviewing band members, he said, it appeared that Mr. Champion had been punched repeatedly by a small group of band members on the bus as part of a hazing ritual, then vomited and passed out. When others in the bus could not revive him, they called for an ambulance. He died a short time later at a hospital….
“It’s kind of a ”˜don’t ask, don’t tell’ culture,” said Christopher M. Chestnut, the family’s lawyer. “No one’s shocked. Everyone knew it happened.”
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.
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.
As members walk into the movie theater or auditorium for services, the pastor and his wife are in the front row, singing along and pumping their fists to loud pop music, played by a live band featuring electric guitars.
Suburban megachurches, move over. There’s a hipper game in town.
“We know a lot of people have left their mainline churches because it’s boring,” said Tory Farina, 31, lead pastor at High Point Church in Inver Grove Heights. “They felt they were forced to go. We want them to love it….Our Sunday services feel like a concert.”
High Point, which currently meets in an Inver Grove Heights movie theater, is a small portion of an exploding religious movement in the Twin Cities and nationally.
Committee members continued to meet on Capitol Hill to present legislation that could be voted on by the Congress to cut $1,200bn from the budget over 10 years.
But both sides had already begun to blame each other, with Republicans resisting tax rises in any form and Democrats demanding extra revenues be balanced against spending cuts on the grounds of fairness.
Every year, young adults leave the nest, couples divorce, foreigners immigrate and roommates separate, all helping drive economic growth when they furnish and refurbish their new homes. Under normal circumstances, each time a household is formed it adds about $145,000 to output that year as the spending ripples through the economy, estimates Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
But with the poor job market and uncertain recovery, hundreds of thousands of Americans like Ms. [Hollis] Romanelli (and her boyfriend, who also lives with his parents) have tabled their moves. Even before the recession began, young people were leaving home later; now the bad economy has tethered them there indefinitely. Last year, just 950,000 new households were created. By comparison, about 1.3 million new households were formed in 2007, the year the recession began, according to Mr. Zandi. Ms. Romanelli, who lives in the room where she grew up in Branford, Conn., said, “I don’t really have much of a choice,” adding, “I don’t have the means to move out.”
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.”
The Barna Group team spent much of the last five years exploring the lives of young people who drop out of church. The research provides many insights into the spiritual journeys of teens and young adults. The findings are revealed extensively in a new book called, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church”¦and Rethinking Faith.
The research uncovered five myths and realities about today’s young dropouts.
Myth 1: Most people lose their faith when they leave high school.
Reality: There has been considerable attention paid to the so-called loss of faith that happens between high school and early adulthood. Some have estimated this dropout in alarming terms, estimating that a large majority of young Christians will lose their faith. The reality is more nuanced. In general, there are three distinct patterns of loss: prodigals, nomads, and exiles.
My husband and my marriage are not prizes, lottery tickets or possessions. I did not win or purchase him in the marketplace of courtship. She did not lose in the marketplace of life. I didn’t bargain with marriage for my career; she didn’t trade in anything. We use these metaphors all the time as if they don’t have power, yet we forget that we are talking about are humans. “Dating and mating” is only a marketplace if we consent to being commodities.
To think outside the marketplace is tricky in our society….
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.