The economy continues to weigh on pastors, with a new survey showing that nearly two-thirds say it has affected their churches negatively.
LifeWay Research asked 1,000 pastors about the economy’s effect on their churches and found that 56 percent described it somewhat negatively and 8 percent very negatively. Nine percent reported a positive effect on their churches and one-quarter said the economy was having “no impact on my church.”
Driven by increased demand from developed regions for high-end models, along with an unexpectedly strong push from emerging economies for lower-cost products, smartphones are expected to rise to account for the majority of global cellphone shipments in 2013””two years earlier than previously predicted.
Smartphone shipments in 2013 are forecast to account for 54 percent of the total cellphone market, up from 46 percent in 2012 and 35 percent in 2011, according to an IHS iSuppli Wireless Communications Market Tracker Report from information and analytics provider IHS (NYSE: IHS). The year 2013 will mark the first time that smartphones will make up more than half of all cellphone shipments.
“This represents a major upgrade for the outlook compared to a year ago, when smartphones weren’t expected to take the lead until 2015,” said Wayne Lam, senior analyst for wireless communications at IHS. “Over the past 12 months, smartphones have fallen in price, and a wider variety of models have become available, spurring sales of both low-end smartphones in regions like Asia-Pacific, as well as midrange to high-end phones in the United States and Europe. The solid expansion in both shipments and market share this year of smartphones will make them the leading type of mobile phone for the first time, and shipment growth in the double digits will continue for the next few years.”
In June, it seemed as if any day might bring about the collapse of the Greek economy and with it, the entire euro zone and its decade-old currency. Then in July and August, it seemed as if everyone was on vacation. Now they’re back ”” finance officials and political leaders have been flying all over Europe to meet with one another ”” and along with them the crisis that has been raging for the last two years. Here is a guide to the new season’s most intriguing (and terrifying) [seven] story lines….
Hogewey’s 152 residents ”“ never, warns Van Zuthem, “patients” ”“ have all been classified by the Dutch NHS as suffering from severe or extreme dementia. Averaging 83 years of age, they are cared for by 250-odd full- and part-time staff (most of them qualified healthcare workers, the rest given special training), plus local volunteers. They live, six or seven to a house, plus one or two carers, in 23 different homes. Residents have their own spacious bedroom, but share the kitchen, lounge and dining room.
Two core principles governed Hogewey’s award-winning design and inform the care that’s given here, says Van Zuthem. First, it aims to relieve the anxiety, confusion and often considerable anger that people with dementia can feel by providing an environment that is safe, familiar and human; an almost-normal home where people are surrounded by things they recognise and by other people with backgrounds, interests and values similar to their own. Second, “maximising the quality of people’s lives. Keeping everyone active. Focusing on everything they can still do, rather than everything they can’t. Because when you have dementia, you’re ill, but there may really not be much else wrong with you.”
So Hogewey has 25 clubs, from folksong to baking, literature to bingo, painting to cycling.
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) researchers spent four years developing Watson, the computer smart enough to beat the champions of the quiz show “Jeopardy!” Now they’re trying to figure out how to get those capabilities into the phone in your pocket.
Bernie Meyerson, IBM’s vice president of innovation, envisions a voice-activated Watson that answers questions, like a supercharged version of Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s Siri personal assistant. A farmer could stand in a field and ask his phone, “When should I plant my corn?” He would get a reply in seconds, based on location data, historical trends and scientific studies.
After David Hubbard underwent a routine echocardiogram at his cardiologist’s office last year, he was surprised to learn that the heart scan cost his insurer $1,605. That was more than four times the $373 it paid when the 61-year-old optometrist from Reno, Nev., had the same procedure at the same office just six months earlier.
“Nothing had changed, it was the same equipment, the same room,” said Dr. Hubbard, who has a high-deductible health plan and had to pay about $1,000 of the larger bill out of his own pocket. “I was very upset.”
But something had changed: his cardiologist’s practice had been bought by Renown Health, a local hospital system. Dr. Hubbard was caught up in a structural shift that is sweeping through health care in the U.S.””hospitals are increasingly acquiring private physician practices.
As health care costs continue to increase, employers are looking for ways to cut costs, such as reducing spouse and dependent coverage in 2013, says a study out today.
While the total cost of health care is predicted to rise 5.3%, to $11,507 per employee in 2013, the increase is slowing, says the new Towers Watson survey of 440 midsize and large companies. This year, in comparison, the cost is expected to increase 5.9%.
“Recently employers have been increasing employee premiums, although they can only push the envelope so far,” says Paul Fronstin, director of the Health Research Program at the Employee Benefit Research Institute. If healthy workers drop out of the plan, self-insured employers might lose money, he says.
What’s the fiercest rivalry in American politics today? There’s Obama-Romney, of course, but try O’Malley-McDonnell””neighboring governors battling across the Potomac River over how best to resuscitate a moribund economy.
Martin O’Malley, Maryland’s liberal Democratic governor, is competing for jobs, businesses and tax dollars with Bob McDonnell, Virginia’s conservative Republican chief executive. Both are rising stars considered potential presidential hopefuls in 2016. Both are Irish Catholics””Mr. McDonnell playfully calls Mr. O’Malley “the big Irishman to our north”””and each leads his party’s association of governors. The two regularly spar on the Sunday talk shows, on the pages of Washington-area newspapers, and over the radio.
Each man seems obsessed with proving that his economic model has outperformed the other’s….
The way food prices are these days, Sheanna Caban and her family have had to adjust to a life of meatless Mondays and a whole lot of pasta on the dinner menu.
The 32-year-old mother of two and her husband work behind the scenes at local television stations. But even with two incomes, they struggle to keep pace with the ever-rising cost of living and raising a family.
With staples like milk going for $3.50 or more per gallon, just putting food on the table leaves a big dent in the budget of middle-class families like the Cabans.
“It’s a big concern,” she said. “Our grocery bills are second on the list of expenses, right after rent.”
Read it all from the local paper.
To find satisfaction and meaning in our vocational callings we must begin to understand the importance of the Cultural Mandate. It is the only way to see our work in a truly Biblical framework.
Through the lens of the Cultural Mandate we will finally see our work as “the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.” (Dorothy Sayers, Unpopular Opinions)
Read it all (seven parts).
They’re often criticized as spoiled, impatient, and most of all, entitled.
But as millennials enter the workforce, more companies are jumping through hoops to accommodate their demands for faster promotions, greater responsibilities and more flexible work schedules””much to the annoyance of older co-workers who feel they have spent years paying their dues to rise through the ranks.
Employers, however, say concessions are necessary to retain the best of millennials, also known as Generation Y, which is broadly defined as those born in the 1980s and 1990s. They bring fresh skills to the workplace: they’re tech-savvy, racially diverse, socially interconnected and collaborative. Moreover, companies need to keep their employee pipelines full as baby boomers enter retirement.
Many workers are nervous about their livelihoods despite the economic recovery ”” and for good reason, it turns out.
Among those workers who lost a good job because of the struggling economy over the past three years, roughly one in four found a job that pays as well, according to data released Friday by the Labor Department.
The others remained unemployed, stopped looking for work or accepted jobs at lower wages.
“This data is telling a story of unemployment inflicting long-term damage for a lot of people,” said Michael Mandel, an economist at the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist think tank. “This won’t turn around until wages overall start rising ”” and so far, we haven’t seen any strong signs of that.”
South Carolina’s pension fund investments have generated far less over the past year than hoped, but officials say there’s no cause for alarm.
Preliminary numbers from the state’s Retirement System Investment Commission show a return on investments of 0.6 percent for the fiscal year ending June 30. The state assumes a 7.5 percent annual return when calculating what it needs to keep the system solvent long-term.
[A]…bleak view of the future is misdirected. First of all, solid theological education, steeped in the classical disciplines, has a long history; so does low-quality religious education by unaccountable schools offering credentials to the lazy and unqualified. Churches and future ministers know the difference. The technological revolution may empower dumbed-down schools, but no more so than the dubious correspondence programs of the past.
And not all online ministerial education will be suspect””just as first-rate universities like Stanford and Harvard are exploring ways to offer classes online to a wider audience, so too will solid seminaries. Churches and future ministers will know the difference there as well. I suspect that the next generation will find what the seminary I serve has seen: online programs supplementing rather than supplanting the life-on-life classical theological education.
More important, the sorts of questions raised by student debt and ministerial career instability may help reattach ministerial education to its real-world moorings: education with churches in mind, not just theology. In order to train ministers, Protestant communities must abandon the current system in which future pastors discern, almost in isolation, a call from God and then seek out training ad hoc.
Do you hate it when people complain? It turns out there’s a good reason: Listening to too much complaining is bad for your brain in multiple ways, according to Trevor Blake, a serial entrepreneur and author of Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life. In the book, he describes how neuroscientists have learned to measure brain activity when faced with various stimuli, including a long gripe session.
“The brain works more like a muscle than we thought,” Blake says. “So if you’re pinned in a corner for too long listening to someone being negative, you’re more likely to behave that way as well.”
Even worse, being exposed to too much complaining can actually make you dumb. Research shows that exposure to 30 minutes or more of negativity–including viewing such material on TV–actually peels away neurons in the brain’s hippocampus. “That’s the part of your brain you need for problem solving,” he says. “Basically, it turns your brain to mush.”
It may well be that American birthrates have been more impacted than Europe’s by the recent recession due to the relative weakness of the country’s social safety net. Finnish demographer Anna Rotkirch has pointed out that Europeans have tried to mitigate the impact of recession through generous transfer payments to young families. This may account as well for the fact that France’s birthrate last year surpassed that of the United States.
But without strong economic growth, it seems likely that family formation and birthrates will continue downward everywhere, particularly as economic realities force reductions in state aid. A mindlessly ever-expanding welfare state, trying to enlist more clients, even tiny ones, will diminish private sector growth and usher in even more quickly the onset of “demographic winter.” A lethal demographic cocktail of high taxes, low growth and fewer babies could set the stage for an even greater financial crisis in the decades ahead.
Shortly after confiding to his countrymen that he had been unable to sleep at night because of all the young unemployed people in his country, Spanish King Juan Carlos secretly hopped aboard a plane and went on a lavish safari to Botswana, where he shot elephants.
When word leaked out this spring, Spaniards were outraged. Newspapers calculated that such hunting trips cost twice the country’s average annual salary. Tomas Gomez, a Socialist party leader, called on the king to choose between his “public responsibilities or an abdication.” Now, critics are calling on him to slash his budget and reveal how he is spending the money.
The backlash against the 74-year-old king is part of a broader soul-searching in Europe about the role and relevance of monarchies as the economic crisis deepens.
In one of the strongest stances yet taken against corruption, people of all faiths came together in Khayelitsha on Wednesday to launch an anti-corruption campaign led by the Western Cape Religious Leaders Forum.
The forum is supported by Kairos Southern Africa and the SA Council of Churches.
Religious leaders in the city, headed by Anglican Archbishop Thabo Makgoba, issued a stern warning to political leaders about their reluctance to deal with corruption.
The Bishop of the Connecticut Episcopal Diocese said Tuesday he would meet with area clergy next week to discuss the future of the Bishop Seabury Church in Groton.
The building has functioned as a church since it as built more than 30 years ago, and was the subject of a lengthy court battle.
The congregation of 750 members, called Bishop Seabury Anglican Church, split with the Episcopal Church in 2007, then wound up in court over whether it could continue to use the building.
The middle class is receiving less of America’s total income, declining to its smallest share in decades as median wages stagnate in the economic doldrums and wealth concentrates at the top.
A study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center highlights diminished hopes, too, for the roughly 50 percent of adults defined as middle class, with household incomes ranging from $39,000 to $118,000. The report describes this mid-tier group as suffering its “worst decade in modern history,” having fallen backward in income for the first time since the end of World War II.
Three years after the recession technically ended, middle class Americans are still feeling the economic pinch, with most saying they have been forced to reduce spending in the past year. And fewer now believe that hard work will allow them to get ahead in life. Families are now more likely to say their children’s economic future will be the same or worse than their own.
A great teacher can have a huge effect on a child’s life. So, unfortunately, can a bad teacher. But in education, job performance has virtually nothing to do with opportunities for advancement. Teachers who are consistently successful with students are not given leadership roles that would allow them to reach students beyond their own classrooms, and if they don’t have enough seniority, they can be let go without anyone seeming to care come layoff time. This is enormously frustrating.
I’ve taught for 11 years at the same high-poverty elementary school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. My fourth- and fifth-grade students arrive in my classroom with varying degrees of preparedness, but they leave with a strong set of skills and a desire to continue learning. Both their intellectual curiosity going forward and their test scores reflect what they get from my class.
I’m just one among many hardworking, high-achieving teachers in L.A. Unified and other districts. But we are at risk. A recent study by the educational nonprofit organization TNTP found that each year urban school districts are losing high-achieving teachers because they make little effort to retain them, or to push out the low achievers.
Federal Reserve officials in their last meeting discussed a “number of policy tools” that the central bank might use to further stimulate the economy in the face of the weakening recovery, an official account released on Wednesday said, but they remained in wait-and-see mode.
“Many members judged that additional monetary accommodation would likely be warranted fairly soon unless incoming information pointed to a substantial and sustainable strengthening in the pace of the economic recovery,” the account of the meeting that ended Aug. 1 said.
With few signs of a substantial and sustainable strengthening evident this summer, the report will likely solidify investors’ expectations that the bank will take new measures this fall.
Americans are throwing out nearly every other bite of food, wasting up to 40% of the country’s supply each year ”“ a mass of uneaten provisions worth $165 billion, according to a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council.
An average family of four squanders $2,275 in food each year, or 20 pounds per person per month, according to the nonprofit and nonpartisan environmental advocacy group.
Food waste is the largest single portion of solid waste cramming American landfills. Since the 1970s, the amount of uneaten fare that is dumped has jumped 50%. The average American trashes 10 times as much food as a consumer in Southeast Asia, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel faces one of the toughest choices of her career in the coming weeks: whether to risk the unraveling of the euro zone, or her government.
After a summer lull, Greece is again Ms. Merkel’s biggest headache.
The Greek government, struggling with depression-like conditions that have pushed the economy to the brink, is likely to need many billions of euros of additional aid to avoid bankruptcy.
Access to fast Internet is spreading in the U.S., but about 19 million Americans can’t get it, according to a new government report out Tuesday….
The lack of access continues to hamper rural Americans in particular. About 14.5 million rural Americans ”” or 23.7% of 61 million people living in rural areas ”” had no fast Internet service offered for their homes. In contrast, only 1.8% Americans living in non-rural areas ”” 4.5 million out of 254.9 million ”” had no broadband access. The FCC categorizes an Internet service as “broadband” if it transmits at a speed of at least 4 megabits per second.
The report’s ranking of states again underscored the correlation between broadband access and economic productivity. Economically struggling states fared worse than more thriving areas of the country. West Virginia had the least amount of access, with 45.9% of the state without broadband access. Montana (26.7%), South Dakota (21.1%) and Alaska (19.6%) followed.
The General Conference of the United Methodist Church voted in May to stop guaranteeing continuous appointments to ordained clergy. Supporters say the move will allow churches to more easily remove ineffective clergy; opponents argue the practice protects clergy members.
“A lengthy renewable contract makes some sense, and I can envision a scenario where it might endow a pastor with necessary authority, time, and freedom. But accountability always needs to be in place. Few things are more dangerous in a pulpit than a lack of it.”
–Jason Hood, scholar in residence, Christ United Methodist Church
“A church covenant specifying responsibilities of a pastor to a congregation and vice versa””including a biblical process to address grievances””would be appropriate and helpful. I would not support some legal arrangement that spelled out guaranteed terms of office.”
–Russell Moore, dean, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
The Well By the Sea in Myrtle Beach, the Diocese’s newest congregation, signed a contract and purchased the former Genesis Christian Missionary Alliance Church located at 211 Forestbrook Road in Myrtle Beach on Thursday, August 16, 2012.
The Well, which began holding services in 2009 and was recognized by Bishop Lawrence as a mission church during the 2012 Diocesan Convention, had previously met in two storefronts in the Market Common section of Myrtle Beach and an elementary school. Currently, The Well meets in a strip-mall in Myrtle Beach….
It’s game on. But to understand the contest ”” and the associated scare tactics ”” it’s best to first understand a few unpleasant facts that are not in dispute:
”¢The popular old-age health insurance plan is on a financially unsustainable course. Medicare’s payroll tax and premiums that beneficiaries pay cover barely half the program’s costs, and as Baby Boomers retire, things will get worse. The tab is projected to rise rapidly: 7.6% a year for the doctor-care part of Medicare and 8.8% for the program’s prescription drug benefit, for example. The economy, a rough proxy for the nation’s ability to afford this, is growing less than 2% a year, leaving a huge gap.
”¢There is no painless fix. Both presidential candidates have committed to detailed plans for curbing costs, and no matter who wins, beneficiaries will pay more or get less, likely both. People who say otherwise are deluding themselves. As economist Herb Stein famously said: Anything that can’t go on forever won’t.
Reporting six months ago on the announcement of an initial public offering by Facebook, this paper sounded a warning to the social networking site. “An increasing number [of users] are likely to feel bruised as they are confronted with the bitter truth that they are mere fodder for a machine that means business,” wrote our consumer correspondent. A marketing expert added: “It takes clever leadership and in-depth understanding of where you can introduce business elements without destroying your value for users.”
Last week, stock in the company slumped to a new low. Many investors jumped at the first opportunity to offload their shares, reducing the value of the company to £34bn, from £104bn at its debut. To some who use Facebook, it was just desserts.
In many ways, the rise and potential fall of Facebook can be seen as a metaphor for the internet. It was invented in 2004 by a team of college students to fulfil a need that nobody knew they had, and quickly became one of the biggest companies in the world. It went “cash flow positive” in September 2009 with an annual advertising revenue of hundreds of millions of dollars. But although the internet has been around for longer than Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, still nobody really knows how to use it. Or to “monetise” it, as the reports in the past week’s business pages put it.
One in four Mississippi residents report there was at least one time in the past 12 months when they did not have enough money to buy the food they or their families needed — more than in any other state in the first half of 2012. Residents in Alabama and Delaware are also among the most likely to struggle to afford food. Residents of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont are among the least likely to have this problem.