When today’s college graduates get together for a reunion someday, they may decide to do it by computer. That’s because right now, nearly one in five college students takes at least one class online, according to a new survey.

For professors, the growth of e-learning has meant a big shift in the way they deal with students.

Take professor Sara Cordell of the University of Illinois-Springfield: Her day doesn’t end at 6 p.m., as it does for some college professors.

Cordell sits at her computer in her campus office to chat with a half-dozen students gathered in front of their screens: One is in Tennessee, another in California’s central valley, another in Ohio. They’re all here to talk about Thomas Hardy’s 19th-century novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Cordell has a microphone hooked up to her PC, and her students listen from home. All but one of them type their responses, which appear in chat-format on Cordell’s screen.

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Muslim leaders are to carry out spot checks and will introduce programmes to fight extremism in the first set of national guidelines for mosques.

The draft guidelines, to be published tomorrow, represent the most radical attempt so far by leaders of the country’s two million Muslims to tackle extremism and introduce an effective system of self-regulation.

The hope is that the new measures will help to prevent young people from being drawn to extremism through extremist teaching in and around unregulated mosques.

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The Church of Ireland has responded to the Anglican Draft Covenant by producing its own draft covenant. The document was prepared by a small group former and present Irish members of ACC and other church members experienced in ecumenical affairs, who hold “a wide variety of views in relation to both churchmanship and issues of human sexuality.” It has been presented to both the House of Bishops and the Standing Committee of the Church of Ireland, with suggestions from both bodies incorporated into the document.

In redrafting a proposed Anglican Covenant the working group wanted to express very clearly the themes of Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence within the Body of Christ, to be inclusive, insofar as possible and produce an agreement which might prevent similar crises in the future. To achieve this, the working group sought to remove elements of legislative structure from any proposed Anglican covenant and emphasised provincial autonomy within the Communion.

IrishAngle reproduces the text of the draft covenant below:

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The British school teacher arrested in Sudan has been charged today with blasphemy, insulting Islam and inciting hatred after her pupils named a teddy bear Muhammad.

Gillian Gibbons, 54, now faces 40 lashes, a six month prison sentence or a fine if convicted of the crime.

The decision to press charges has triggered diplomatic tensions between Sudan and Britain. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, immediately summoned the Sudanese diplomat in London to the Foreign Office.

“We are surprised and disappointed by this development, and the Foreign Secretary will summon as a matter of urgency the Sudanese ambassador to discuss the matter further,” a spokesman for Gordon Brown said.

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Almost six months after withdrawing from the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York, members of St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in Vestal will leave their buildings on Mirador Road this week and share facilities with a Baptist congregation on Front Street.

After the congregation’s vestry voted in June to leave the Episcopal Church, leaders faced the prospect of a long and costly legal battle with the diocese over the local parish’s buildings, which include a church, community center and rectory.

“We said all along that we would not go to court for our buildings,” said the Rev. Anthony Seel, pastor of St. Andrew’s Anglican Church. “We do not believe that Christians ought to be suing Christians. The diocese had already sued St. Andrew’s in Syracuse (which also withdrew), and we decided we weren’t going to get involved in a court battle.”

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Like Bonhoeffer, I fear that the gospel has been humiliated in our time. But if this has happened, it is not because the message — the good news that God loves us unconditionally in Jesus Christ, that we are freed and forgiven in God’s amazing grace — has changed. Nor is it due to the machinations of secularists, or because the post-Enlightenment world has dispensed with the hypothesis of God. The Christian faith has not only endured modernity and post-modernity, but flourished in its new settings.

The gospel has been humiliated because too many American Christians have decided that there are more important things to talk about. We would rather talk about our country, our values, our troops, and our way of life; and although we might think we are paying tribute to God when we speak of these other things, we are only flattering ourselves.

If only holiness were measured by the volume of our incessant chatter, we would be universally praised as the most holy nation on earth. But in our fretful, theatrical piety, we have come to mistake noisiness for holiness, and we have presumed to know, with a clarity and certitude that not even the angels dared claim, the divine will for the world. We have organized our needs with the confidence that God is on our side, now and always, whether we feed the poor or corral them into ghettos.

To a nation filled with intense religious fervor, the Hebrew prophet Amos said: You are not the holy people you imagine yourselves to be. Though the land is filled with festivals and assemblies, with songs and melodies, and with so much pious talk, these are not sounds and sights that are pleasing to the Lord. “Take away from me the noise of your congregations,” Amos says, “you who have turned justice into poison.”

Psalm 46 tells us, “Be still and know that I am God.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his classic work on Christian community, “Life Together,” spoke of a silence “before the Word.” He affirmed the wisdom of the Psalmist, and spoke of a listening silence that brings “clarification, purification, and concentration upon the essential thing.”

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In other words, we should never prefer our own private judgment to the collective discernment of the Church. It is the Church that gets to define both the limits of belief and the “suitable means” for bringing people to belief. It is not up to individuals to decide who is heretical and who is not, or even what positions are heretical and what is not; those are matters for the Church to decide. If the Anglican Communion is, in fact, a communion and not a loose association, it is up to the Communion as a whole to determine its own doctrine and its own membership. That is not a decision to be made by individual people, congregations, dioceses, or even provinces.

If the time comes when we find it impossible to submit to our faith community’s teaching, our modern context of multiple denominations allows us to drop out of that community and join another that agrees with us. If we become convinced that the Church subsists in independent local congregations that elect people to membership based on their testimony of an adult conversion experience and immersion baptism, we can become Baptists. We cannot expect all Anglicans to adopt those views, any more than we can expect them all to become Unitarian Universalists.

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Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said yesterday that he hopes to convince voters that his Mormon faith is mainstream.

“I think as people come to know my faith they’ll recognize that the values of my faith are ”” they very much flow from the Judeo-Christian tradition of this country. I believe in God, I believe in Jesus Christ, I believe in the equality of all humankind,” Mr. Romney said in an interview with The Washington Times.

The former governor of Massachusetts, who is leading all polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, also said that Rudolph W. Giuliani’s strategy of seeking wins in later primary states is a proven loser and that some members of Congress are responsible for the current mortgage crisis, which could turn in to a full-blown recession.

Still, it is Mr. Romney’s Mormon faith that remains a question mark in his presidential quest. The governor is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a faith that says adherents are on a journey toward godhood, that God speaks to man today through living apostles and prophets, and that the Book of Mormon, published by Joseph Smith in 1830, is the word of God.

Mr. Romney has remained mostly mum on the topic; despite his desire to deliver a speech about his Mormon faith, he has accepted the advice of political aides who advise against the move. When he was asked last year whether he wears temple garments, white underwear similar to a mesh shirt and boxer shorts that signify purity, he said: “I’ll just say those sorts of things I’ll keep private.”

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An audio segment from BBC northern Ireland.

Listen to it all as he gives his perspective on the Communion and some matters with which it is involved.

The Primates have returned a vote of no confidence in the Episcopal Church. Lambeth Palace reports that a majority of primates have rejected the conclusions of the ACC/Primates Joint Standing Committtee (JSC), and have told the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams the Episcopal Church has failed, in whole or in part, to honor the recommendations of the Windsor Report and the Primates’ Dar es Salaam communiqué.

The majority rejection of the JSC report comes as a blow to Dr. Williams’ hopes to avert a showdown between the liberal and conservative wings of the Communion. It also marks an unprecedented repudiation of the competence and judgment of the central apparatus of the Anglican Consultative Council.

Following the publication of the positive assessment by the JSC of the actions of the New Orleans meeting of the US House of Bishops, Dr. Williams wrote to the primates asking “How far is your Province able to accept the JSC Report assessment that the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops have responded positively to the requests of the Windsor Report and those made by the Primates in their Communiqué at the end of their meeting in Dar es Salaam?”

Of the 38 primates, including the Archbishop of York, Dr. John Sentamu, Lambeth Palace reported it had received 26 responses, and no reply from 12. Of the 26, 12 stated they could accept the JSC’s findings, 12 stated they rejected the JSC’s findings, while three offered a mixed verdict, and one said it was continuing to review the matter.

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From the USS Kearsarge: U.S. Marine Corps helicopters began delivering emergency supplies Monday to survivors of a deadly cyclone along the southern coast of Bangladesh in a joint relief operation.

Helicopters from the USS Kearsarge, detached from the 22nd Marine Expediationary Unit (MEU) began delivering 5,000 water containers to remote areas of Dublar Char, Bagherat and Barguna, the most devastated districts in the Nov. 15 cyclone that killed some 3,200 people.

Marines will also deliver food and other supplies, help set up water purification plants, and provide medical care to victims in the coming days, Bangladeshi army officials said.

“Our first priority is get food, water and clothes to the survivors,” said Gen. Moeen U. Ahmed, the chief of army staff, after meeting U.S. officials.

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The couples who choose abortion and sterilization may not save the planet, but they’re saving the gene pool a mess o’ trouble by purging their DNA from the mix. The Darwin Awards folks, who honor those who improve the species by accidentally removing themselves from it, will have to create a new category: People Too Narcissistic To Procreate.

Far be it from me to suggest that people must have children to be content or to contribute to life on Earth. But abortion should never be confused with a selfless act. It is clearly the ultimate and most-vivid expression of the opposite.

Raising children is quantifiably the most persistently unselfish act known to mankind, as millions of veterans of sleepless nights will attest. Parenthood is when “I” takes a backseat to “thou” — when the infant-self submits to adulthood so that the real infant gets a necessary turn at the well of self-importance.

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A court hearing between the Anglican District of Virginia and the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia for rights to 11 church properties has ended for now.

The week-long trial, presided over by Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Randy L. Bellows, began Nov. 13 and concluded Nov. 20, with Bellows taking the case under advisement.

Last January, two of Fairfax County’s oldest Episcopal churches, the Falls Church and Truro Church, made national headlines by leading a secession of 11 parishes, including the Church of the Epiphany in Oak Hill, from the Episcopal Church.

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As worshipers walk into Central Park United Methodist Church, Bob Swoverland usually pulls one of them aside and asks him or her to help serve communion. One day he felt moved to ask Karen (last name withheld) to help. As he remembers, “Normally, I’ll just ask anybody, but when she came in it was like God grabbed me by the collar.”

Swoverland recalls what came next. During the testimony portion of that Sunday’s worship service, Karen confessed for the first time that years earlier she had killed a woman while driving drunk. She had served five years in a Minnesota prison as her punishment, and then, despite promises to herself and others, she began drinking again. She spent two more years in a county workhouse. “The judge told me I was a menace to society,” she recalls.

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Hundreds of hospice providers across the country are facing the catastrophic financial consequence of what would otherwise seem a positive development: their patients are living longer than expected.

Over the last eight years, the refusal of patients to die according to actuarial schedules has led the federal government to demand that hospices exceeding reimbursement limits repay hundreds of millions of dollars to Medicare.

The charges are assessed retrospectively, so in most cases the money has long since been spent on salaries, medicine and supplies. After absorbing huge assessments for several years, often by borrowing at high rates, a number of hospice providers are bracing for a new round that they fear may shut their doors.

One is Hometown Hospice, which has been providing care here since 2003 to some of the most destitute residents of Wilcox County, the poorest place in Alabama.

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The higher the percentage of residents in a state who say they can’t afford health care, the greater the prevalence of serious depression and the higher the suicide rate in that state, suggests a report released to USA TODAY.

The state-by-state analysis also links fewer suicides to more adults receiving mental health treatment, greater availability of psychologists and psychiatrists, and “parity” laws requiring equal insurance coverage for physical and mental illness.

The report doesn’t prove that lack of care causes depression or suicide, says senior author Tami Mark of Thomson Healthcare. “But it suggests we should be monitoring mental health care and comparing outcomes,” she says.

Mark used federal data on mental health and state databases to develop a “depression index,” ranking states and the District of Columbia on seriousness and prevalence of depression, as well as suicide rates.

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When we seek to resolve disquieting passages in the Bible, are we saying that life with God can involve no ambiguities, no times of darkness or absence, no times of difficulty or challenge? Are we suggesting that we would prefer the story of God and God’s people to be a triumphalist narrative of prosperity, where the voiceless and the marginalised have no place, and the abandoned are an embarrassment?

What kind of Christian hermeneutic are we talking about if we say that God cannot be present among the silent, the battered, the rejected; that the voice of God simply cannot be speaking there? Surely, from our collective experience, it is in these places that we should be pricking up our ears and waiting expectantly? In short, I believe it is vital for us to explore a hermeneutic that refuses to skip over the difficult and challenging or awkward passages of the Bible, just as in the Inclusive Church we are hopefully committed to refusing to skip over those who can be made to feel like the difficult, challenging or awkward members of the people of God; a hermeneutic which resists avoiding passages because they are painful for us to hear, just as we are committed to hearing all people’s stories, no matter how uncomfortable they might make us feel.

In reading the disquieting passages of the Bible, the vital question is ”˜where is the voice of God in this place?’ And it is important to begin with the recognition that it may not always be straightforward to perceive God’s voice within the pages of the Bible (just as it is not always straightforward to discern God’s voice within life). One of the great modern fallacies proliferating today is that we can assume that God speaks opaquely within the Bible. There is little within tradition to suggest this. As good Anglicans (!), we may be keen to affirm Article VI of the 39 articles: ”˜Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation’. But as that important Anglican voice Richard Hooker stresses, affirming this belief does not mean that we must act like those who (quote) ”˜grow unto a dangerous extremity as if Scripture did not contain all things in that kind necessary, but all things simply’. God’s voice will not always be simple to discern within the pages Bible. Indeed, if we are to look at the Bible itself, it suggests nowhere that the ”˜voice of God’ will be easy to locate and interpret: rather it frequently suggests the opposite.

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Westminster Abbey will hold its first ever Jewish-Christian service next weekend with a joint celebration of the festivals of Advent and Hanukkah.

Rabbi Mark Solomon of the liberal St John’s Wood Synagogue and the Abbey’s Canon Robert Reiss will do readings that will be interspersed with songs and carols from both faiths, and the lighting of candles.

The service, organised with the help of the Council of Christians, takes place next Sunday evening and is open to all members of the public.

Canon Reiss said: “Hanukkah and Advent occur at the same time of the year and both involve the lighting of candles. Westminster Abbey is very happy to respond to a suggestion from the Council for Christians and Jews that this joint event should take place, which will give an opportunity of representatives from both faiths to learn and understand of one another’s practices and, it is hoped, to share in the celebration of the light that flows from God.”

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Some Republican presidential candidates are breathing easier because of the news on stem-cell research, and some religious leaders are proclaiming a truce in their conflict with scientists. But I wouldn’t bet on any longterm peace, for a couple of reasons.

First, despite the breakthrough in producing stem cells without using embryos, researchers will continue working with embryos. Some still believe it’s the most promising approach for stem-cell therapy, as Nature reports. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, the scientist who reported the first creation of stem cells from cloned monkey embryos (the other big stem-cell news this month) says that the embryos is the only “perfect reprogramming machine” and is confident that this method of producing stem cells will be the first to show therapeutic value.

Second, no matter what happens with stem-cell research, there are lots more areas of conflicts between religion and biotechnology ”” and lots of religious leaders, politicians and bioethicists ready to fight. Leon Kass, the former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, recently gave a lecture at the Manhattan Institute in which he listed some of the threats to our “human nature” coming from biotechnology: cloning, genetic engineering, organ swapping, mechanical spare parts, performance-enhancing drugs, computer implants into brains.

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Sometimes when Asma Haidara, a 12-year-old Somali immigrant, wants to shop at Target or ride the Minneapolis light-rail system, she puts her Girl Scout sash over her everyday clothes, which usually include a long skirt worn over pants as well as a swirling head scarf.

She has discovered that the trademark green sash ”” with its American flag, troop number (3009) and colorful merit badges ”” reduces the number of glowering looks she draws from people otherwise bothered by her traditional Muslim dress.

“When you say you are a girl scout, they say, ”˜Oh, my daughter is a girl scout, too,’ and then they don’t think of you as a person from another planet,” said Asma, a slight, serious girl with a bright smile. “They are more comfortable about sitting next to me on the train.”

Scattered Muslim communities across the United States are forming Girl Scout troops as a sort of assimilation tool to help girls who often feel alienated from the mainstream culture, and to give Muslims a neighborly aura. Boy Scout troops are organized with the same inspiration, but often the leap for girls is greater because many come from conservative cultures that frown upon their participating in public physical activity.

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Eric S. Broida wants to trade up. He has been eyeing a multimillion-dollar house near his Pacific Palisades home and thinks it might be a bargain. Eventually, that is.

The 4,600-square-foot house has languished on the market for six months. The sellers have cut the asking price several times, slashing it from $4.6 million to $3.6 million.

When the price falls by an additional $400,000 or so, Broida will be ready to pounce.

“There is nowhere to go but down from here,” said Broida, a leasing broker for office space. “I know it in my gut.”

Few would argue. Southern California home prices have fallen for five straight months, according to data released this month, and are now down 12% from their peak last spring and summer.

For most of this decade, skyrocketing home values were a frequent topic whenever people gathered along soccer sidelines or at backyard barbecues. But the conversation has taken an about-face, noted Jeff Vendley, a Ventura mortgage broker who is trying to sell two Oxnard town houses he bought in 2004 and 2005.

Now, he said, people are wondering, “How low we can go?”

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The Episcopal Church. American Anglicans have changed their name several times. Each change of nomenclature marks a shift in ecclesiology. Though the Anglican church was established in some states before the revolution (as Presby-terianism was in others), the Protestant Episcopal Church came into existence within a Republic which had outlawed the notion of ecclesiastical establishment. Not that you would have noticed.

PECUSA adopted, in 1790 a constitution which mimicked that of the United States, and set about the task of being, not an Established Church, but the Church of the Establishment. The name located American Anglicans on the smorgasbord of denominations: ‘Protestant’ in common with the then majority in its repudiation of Rome, but over against the majority in retaining a form of ‘Episcopal’ organisation. It is a moot point how ‘episcopal’ the American Church is (in some dioceses the bishop does not even have a vote in the diocesan convention); but bishops had become for the American Church a badge of identity.

The Protestant Episcopal Church claimed a proud roll of founding fathers and later presidents among its members. It slowly developed a self-image as the ‘natural’ church of the well-heeled intelligentsia, as recent statements by Katherine Schori go to show. And as American influence in the world grew with the informal imperialism of the period after the First World War, so ECUSA (by now its Anglo-catholic wing had managed to jettison the word ‘protestant’) expanded with it. The church followed the multinationals.

The recent change of name to ‘The Episcopal Church’ marks a new departure. The emphasis is now on the international nature of the denomination – a fact which Mrs Schori emphasises at every opportunity. As the American Church distances itself from the rest of the Communion, so it increasingly asserts itself as a global alternative to it.

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The second part of Cox’s book turns to the contemporary situation. Cox argues for an understanding of the presbyterate as eldership, following a “canonist” approach (p. 239), which seems to mean a reliance upon Scripture as mediated by the tradition and understood in the light of contemporary scholarship (new term, old Anglican method). Cox likes the term “elder” because it carries the sense ofpresbuteros and projects the image of leadership which Cox regards as important to the role of the presbyter.

Does the “eldership” model, in Cox’s hands, answer the challenges of today? Well, perhaps, though the contemporary part of this book is not quite as strong as the historical section. Cox provides a chapter on the presbyter as elder, in which he accounts for the nature of the priest in what Cox calls a “verbal collage” (p. 277), drawn from various liturgies, and seeks to weld this into a unified whole. He describes the priest as: “person of the sacrament,” “person of the Word,” “person of care,” “person rooted in community” (with a leadership role), “an example to others,” “person of blessing and reconciliation,” and “person of God” (pp. 280-284). These assertions all carry some truth and may, indeed, account for the life of a priest.

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Vendors and shopkeepers are gearing up for business along a market street in the northeastern neighborhood of Adhamiya, when a platoon of American soldiers disgorges from Humvees. The soldiers fan out up and down the street. Even on a low-key patrol to make their presence known and gather intel, the soldiers have to stay on the qui vive. Eyes dart up to rooftops and down side alleys; while one soldier smiles and nods greetings to a vendor, another peers to the back of the store.

From a distance the soldiers are indistinguishable: domed helmets, dark glasses, and tight-fitting armored vests in camouflage grays and greens. But closer inspection reveals differences. From the back of one soldier, a radio antenna quivers: platoon leader. Across the chest of another, only gloved hands ”“ no rifle, no side arm strapped to thigh: chaplain. In orbit around him, another soldier, rifle ready: chaplain’s assistant and bodyguard. Should fighting break out, he’ll shove his charge behind a wall, to the ground, under a vehicle.

Chaplain Ron Eastes is on this patrol with members of his 82nd Airborne Army unit not because he is helping with the platoon’s mission, but because the platoon itself is his mission.

“I’ve heard it said that a shepherd needs to smell like his sheep,” he explains, “and if I’m going to care for these guys, I need to be where they are.”

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If stem cell researchers were oil prospectors, it could be said that they struck a gusher last week. But to realize the potential boundless riches they now must figure out how to build refineries, pipelines and gas stations.

Biologists were electrified on Tuesday, when scientists in Japan and Wisconsin reported that they could turn human skin cells into cells that behave like embryonic stem cells, able to grow indefinitely and to potentially turn into any type of tissue in the body.

The discovery, if it holds up, would decisively solve the raw material problem. It should provide an unlimited supply of stem cells without the ethically controversial embryo destruction and the restrictions on federal financing that have impeded work on human embryonic cells.

But scientists still face the challenge of taking that abundant raw material and turning it into useful medical treatments, like replacement tissue for damaged hearts and brains. And that challenge will be roughly as daunting for the new cells as it has been for the embryonic stem cells.

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The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates one in four women in this country will remain childless for “a wide variety of reasons ”¦ these range from lifestyle choices relating to the pursuit of education and a career, to a preference for a life without children”.

“For some, the cost of raising children, in terms of both time and money, is a barrier, while for others, health concerns such as fear of passing on a genetic defect to a child are contributing factors,” reports the bureau in the 2002 Australian Social Trends study.

I do not have children and I am not ruling them out altogether, but as I get older, the sacrifices faced by my friends who have taken the plunge seem ever more daunting.

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Can non-aboriginals handle the truth about the abuses that happened in Canada’s Indian residential schools?

That is a concern of Robert Watts, named early this year as the interim director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, part of the $4-billion settlement agreement reached between the federal government, the churches involved in running the schools and the Assembly of First Nations.

One of the factors affecting healing and reconciliation between residential school survivors and the rest of the country will be the “receptivity of the country to the truth,” said Mr. Watts, the former chief of staff to Phil Fontaine, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations. “We can have all the truth in the world, but if people aren’t listening ”¦ in terms of building for the future, we will miss an opportunity.”

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If the entire human species were a single individual, that person would long ago have been declared mad. The insanity would not lie in the anger and darkness of the human mind””though it can be a black and raging place indeed. And it certainly wouldn’t lie in the transcendent goodness of that mind””one so sublime, we fold it into a larger “soul.” The madness would lie instead in the fact that both of those qualities, the savage and the splendid, can exist in one creature, one person, often in one instant.

We’re a species that is capable of almost dumbfounding kindness. We nurse one another, romance one another, weep for one another. Ever since science taught us how, we willingly tear the very organs from our bodies and give them to one another. And at the same time, we slaughter one another. The past 15 years of human history are the temporal equivalent of those subatomic particles that are created in accelerators and vanish in a trillionth of a second, but in that fleeting instant, we’ve visited untold horrors on ourselves””in Mogadishu, Rwanda, Chechnya, Darfur, Beslan, Baghdad, Pakistan, London, Madrid, Lebanon, Israel, New York City, Abu Ghraib, Oklahoma City, an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania””all of the crimes committed by the highest, wisest, most principled species the planet has produced. That we’re also the lowest, cruelest, most blood-drenched species is our shame””and our paradox.

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