No one expects a 3-year-old who loves to dress like a princess to swear like a sailor.
But early exposure is not so uncommon. Who’s to blame? Well, there’s a pretty apt quote from a 1970 Pogo cartoon: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
The “us” are parents. A few weeks ago, I put a question out to hundreds of mothers on a local list-serv asking for anecdotes about the first time they heard their children use inappropriate words.
The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc (T.N) said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India.
“We’re having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs,” AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio, where the company’s headquarters is located.
So far, only around 1,400 jobs have been returned to the United States of 5,000, a target it set in 2006, the company said, adding that it maintains the target.
Stephenson said he is especially distressed that in some U.S. communities and among certain groups, the high school dropout rate is as high as 50 percent.
When she was laid off in February, Patricia Guerrero was making $70,000 a year. Weeks later, with bills piling up and in need of food for her family, this middle-class mother did something she never thought she would do: She went to a food bank.
It was Good Friday, and a woman helping her offered to pay her utility bill.
“It brought tears to my eyes, and I sat there and I cried. I was like, ‘This is really where I’m at?’ ” she told CNN. “I go ‘no way;’ [but] this is true. This is reality. This is the stuff you see on TV. It was hard. It was very hard.”
Guerrero is estranged from her husband and raising her two young children. She’s already burned through her savings to help make ends meet, and is drawing unemployment checks. She has had to take extreme measures to pay for her interest-only mortgage of $2,500 a month. In fact, her mother moved in with her to help pay the bills.
Guerrero even applied for food stamps, but was denied.
The procedures laid out in Title IV, Canon 9, sections 1 and 2 (the abandonment canon) to depose a bishop state that after the Title IV review committee issues a certificate of abandonment the Presiding Bishop “shall” “forthwith” notify the accused. The Presiding Bishop then “shall” seek the consent of the three senior bishops with jurisdiction to inhibit the accused bishop, and trial “shall” take place at the “next” meeting of the House of Bishops.
At a March 12 press conference Bishop Schori outlined the procedural history surrounding the Cox case. She said the Title IV review committee had “certified [Bishop Cox] several years ago. … before her time.” She added, however, that “it was never brought to the House of Bishops for action.”
She then said she “did not send it to the three senior bishops” and the House of Bishops “did not consider it in September” at their meeting in New Orleans with the Archbishop of Canterbury due to the “the press of other business.” Several minutes later, Bishop Schori said she wanted to “clarify” her earlier statements. She said she had been “unable to get the consent of the three senior bishops last spring. That’s why we didn’t bring it to the September meeting” of the House of Bishops.
Contacted after the press conference, one of the three senior bishops, who declined to be named, stated he had never been asked by Bishop Schori to consent to Bishop Cox’s suspension. The Presiding Bishop’s Chancellor, Mr David Booth Beers, declined to address the issues surrounding Bishop Cox’s case in a March 15 statement released through the Episcopal Church’s press office. However, he stated that his “position” was that there had been a legal quorum to depose the two bishops on March 12.
Canon lawyer, retired Bishop William Wantland of Eau Claire told CEN the deposition of Bishop Cox was “void” for failing to achieve the required “majority vote of all bishops entitled to vote” and because the “canonical procedure was simply not followed.”
Most Americans hold a favorable opinion of Pope Benedict XVI, but the vast majority confess they don’t know much about the pontiff, according to a new poll.
Just weeks before Benedict’s first trip to the U.S. as leader of the Roman Catholic Church, 58 percent of Americans say they have a favorable or “very favorable” opinion of him.
But when asked how much they know about the 80-year-old German, 52 percent said “not very much,” and nearly 30 percent said “nothing at all.”
Old wood benches quaked under the thunder of the pipe organ at Calvary Episcopal Church, fully awakening the overflowing Easter morning crowd.
As light filtered into the sanctuary through an elaborate stained glass window portraying Jesus on the cross, a traditional service, unyielding to time, unfolded.
But for those who couldn’t make it to Easter services, even some of the most traditional churches offered other options.
As more churches are creating an online presence with podcasts, Web streaming and cyber-giving, worshipers don’t have to leave the comfort of their homes to get religion.
Nevertheless, local clergy say virtual worship did not reduce Easter turnouts this year, but may have helped bolster numbers on one of the largest church attendance days of the year.
Iraq’s Prime Minister was staring into the abyss today after his operation to crush militia strongholds in Basra stalled, members of his own security forces defected and district after district of his own capital fell to Shia militia gunmen.
With the threat of a civil war looming in the south, Nouri al-Maliki’s police chief in Basra narrowly escaped assassination in the crucial port city, while in Baghdad, the spokesman for the Iraqi side of the US military surge was kidnapped by gunmen and his house burnt to the ground.
Saboteurs also blew up one of Iraq’s two main oil pipelines from Basra, cutting at least a third of the exports from the city which provides 80 per cent of government revenue, a clear sign that the militias ”” who siphon significant sums off the oil smuggling trade ”” would not stop at mere insurrection.
In a sweeping accusation against one of the country’s largest accounting firms, an investigator released a report on Wednesday that said “improper and imprudent practices” by a once high-flying mortgage company were condoned and enabled by its auditors.
KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms, endorsed a move by New Century Financial, a failed mortgage company, to change its accounting practices in a way that allowed the lender to report a profit, rather than a loss, at the height of the housing boom, an independent report commissioned by a division of the Justice Department concluded.
The result of a five-month investigation, the report is the most comprehensive and damning document that has been released about the failings of a mortgage business. Some accusations echoed claims that surfaced about the accounting firm Arthur Andersen during the collapse of Enron, the energy giant, more than six years ago.
The 580-page report documents how New Century lowered its reserves for loans that investors were forcing it to buy back even as such repurchases were surging. Had it not changed its accounting, the company would have reported a loss rather a profit in the second half of 2006. The company first acknowledged that its accounting was wrong in February 2007 and sought bankruptcy protection less than two months later as its lenders stopped doing business with it.
A recent survey showing that Americans are changing their religious affiliations in record numbers was particularly relevant to me, for I have decided to leave the Roman Catholic Church. This Easter will be my first as a non-Catholic.
The Catholic Church has lost more members than any other religious group, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, with about 10 percent of all Americans now identifying themselves as former Catholics. This remarkable statistic offers little solace, other than to prove to those who have agonized over abandoning their religious convictions that they are not alone.
With the approach of Easter, the ominous distinction of being labeled a “former Catholic” has filled me with dread. My feelings of estrangement and self-doubt have increased, and I have questioned whether I made the right decision, whether abandoning Catholicism, of all days on Fat Tuesday, could have been better thought out. However, my decision came after a time of spiritual starvation and reflection.
I wonder if there is something I can do to prepare for this, yet it is hard to imagine that anything could compensate for what has been so much a part of my spirituality and sense of being.
Over the course of her career, photojournalist Robin Bowman has worked for People magazine, traveled to dozens of countries and negotiated countless difficult situations, including the conflicts in Darfur and Bosnia.
Recently, Bowman spent four years driving across the United States, covering more than 20,000 miles, and photographing and interviewing more than 400 American teens. Some of those pictures ”” and the teens’ words ”” are included in her new book, It’s Complicated: The American Teenager.
The project was, at times, very different from Bowman’s previous work as a photojournalist. For one thing, although she always obtained a signed release form from her subjects’ parents, she resisted extensive prep work before shooting the teens.
PETER JENSEN: There’s become a great deal more freedom then there used to be decades ago, with mind and spirit stuff; new age religions. All the sort of stuff you see very prominently in book stores.
But there’s also been a large migrant intake into this country from people who haven’t been impacted by Western cynical secularism, but culturally have a strong belief in the afterlife and in supernatural beings; in ghosts and spirits.
And a surprising number of people therefore who are now living in Australia are quite concerned about, and fearful of I think, of this supernatural realm.
BARNEY PORTER: Do you think it also suggests that traditional religion is becoming less relevant to young people?
PETER JENSEN: No. It’s still as relevant as ever, but they think it’s not as relevant; if I can make that cute distinction.
We are actually incurably religious, and we will worship; we will dabble in the supernatural, we will think of these things. And there’s a spiritual vacuum caused when Christianity declines in any way. People search for meaning they search for purpose and of course, they’re worried about the big one – that is death itself.
Having a large gut in midlife increases the chance of dementia in old age, according to new research published Wednesday that suggests that abdominal fat is a bigger risk factor than even family history.
The study of 6,583 adults found that people with the highest amount of abdominal fat between the ages of 40 and 45 were about three times more likely to develop dementia than those with the lowest amount.
By contrast, people who have parents or a sibling with Alzheimer’s face twice the risk of developing the disease.
Like dozens of other Pakistani-American girls here, Hajra Bibi stopped attending the local public school when she reached puberty, and began studying at home.
Her family wanted her to clean and cook for her male relatives, and had also worried that other American children would mock both her Muslim religion and her traditional clothes.
“Some men don’t like it when you wear American clothes ”” they don’t think it is a good thing for girls,” said Miss Bibi, 17, now studying at the 12th-grade level in this agricultural center some 70 miles east of San Francisco. “You have to be respectable.”
Across the United States, Muslims who find that a public school education clashes with their religious or cultural traditions have turned to home schooling. That choice is intended partly as a way to build a solid Muslim identity away from the prejudices that their children, boys and girls alike, can face in schoolyards. But in some cases, as in Ms. Bibi’s, the intent is also to isolate their adolescent and teenage daughters from the corrupting influences that they see in much of American life.
Bishop Lawrence has previously said he will wait a year before making any major changes in South Carolina. That said he has a low tolerance for weak, uninspired preaching.
“I feel unabashedly comfortable talking about my personal experience with Jesus Christ,” he said. “We [as a church seem to] get all tied up arguing about whether Jesus is the only way to God. He is God.
“The trouble with so much preaching in The Episcopal Church is that it resembles a new moralism. We ought to oppose the war. We ought to support the Millennium Development Goals ”¦ It’s a religion of nagging.
“Our preaching needs to be faithful to the gospel of the lordship of Jesus Christ. When our preaching is faithful, the Anglican/Episcopal tradition is more than capable of reaching our culture for Christ.”
TThe power of the preacher is an unmeasured force in American life. Of course, now that it has become an issue in a political campaign, we are focusing on the one minister and the one candidate whose lives at church have been intertwined both in fact and in the public eye. The two men are each charismatic in their own ways, different ways, as anyone who has seen them speak (if even just on television or on syncopated and, thus, distorted YouTube clips) can attest.
Barack Obama speaks in a professorial manner in which the logic of his argument, calmly laid out, is the drama of the oration. I have my own analogy. Of course, I never heard Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. speak. But I read into his addresses and opinions the moral and legal ganglion of more than seven decades of our national history, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. And I hear in Obama’s cadence not only what makes him attractive to audiences but also something very much like Holmes’s disciplined thinking, and it is this that makes this presidential aspirant truly eloquent. In only a decade in public life, he has become the (oh yes, gangling) ganglion of our hopes for a post-racial country. It is ironic–isn’t it?–that we should have come so quickly to the dawn of post-racialism while still lumbering clumsily through the miasma of a misnamed multi-culturalism.
We are all linked to the places from which we came, though some of us have moved very far from them….
Michael Northcott: Well I think there are quite a lot of people in Australia and beyond who would deny that global warming is a moral issue, but many people in the world still do not think that global warming is a consequence of human action. So first of all, to understand it as a moral issue, you have to embrace what the science now clearly shows, which is that industrial emissions of greenhouse gases are changing the climate, and that’s the first thing. The second thing then is if you accept that industrial emissions are changing the climate, those who have put the most emissions up there historically have a very grave moral duty to act, and act first. Well what is actually happening is that countries like America, and indeed Australia until very recently, have argued that they’re not going to act until China and India act. And that’s why this is a fundamentally immoral issue because of the injustice of the fact that here in Australia you have 20 tonnes per person greenhouse gas emissions; in Africa you have about 0.2 tonnes per person greenhouse gas emissions, but it’s the Africans who are already suffering from malnutrition, whose farms and crops are failing.
Stephen Crittenden: The big ethical enemy in the book is neo-liberal economics, and the accompanying loss of a sense of the common good.
Michael Northcott: Yes, well I think neo-liberalism is easier to fix than sin. It’s a fairly recent idea, or set of ideas, it had its day in the 19th century, it was called laissez-faire economics in those days and it’s come back in the late 20th century to affect Australia, New Zealand, Britain and America primarily, but from their influence, much of the rest of the world.
Little by little, millions of Americans surrendered equity in their homes in recent years. Lulled by good times, they borrowed ”” sometimes heavily ”” against the roofs over their heads.
Now the bill is coming due. As the housing market spirals downward, home equity loans, which turn home sweet home into cash sweet cash, are becoming the next flash point in the mortgage crisis.
Americans owe a staggering $1.1 trillion on home equity loans ”” and banks are increasingly worried they may not get some of that money back.
To get it, many lenders are taking the extraordinary step of preventing some people from selling their homes or refinancing their mortgages unless they pay off all or part of their home equity loans first. In the past, when home prices were not falling, lenders did not resort to these measures.
Such tactics are impeding efforts by policy makers to help struggling homeowners get easier terms on their mortgages and stem the rising tide of foreclosures. But at a time when each day seems to bring more bad news for the financial industry, lenders defend the hard-nosed maneuvers as a way to keep their own losses from deepening.
The Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, doesn’t like to see its employees working too late, and it expects even senior staff members to be headed home by 8 p.m. On weekends, employees seeking to escape the confines of their own homes are required to sign in at the front desk and are accompanied to their own desks by a security guard. Sensitive documents are kept in safes in many offices, and a portion of Germany’s gold reserves is stored behind meter-thick, reinforced concrete walls in the basement of a nearby building. In this environment, working overtime is considered a security risk.
But the ordinary working day has been in disarray in recent weeks at the Bundesbank headquarters building, a gray, concrete box in Frankfurt’s Ginnheim neighborhood, where the crisis on international financial markets has many employees working late, even on weekends.
Unlike the soldiers of some previous wars, who were only occasionally able to send letters back home to loved ones, many of those who died left behind an extraordinary electronic testimony describing in detail the labor, the fears and the banality of serving in Iraq.
In excerpts published here from journals, blogs and e-mail, six soldiers who died in the most recent group of 1,000 mostly skim the alarming particulars of combat, a kindness shown their relatives and close friends. Instead, they plunge readily into the mundane, but no less important rhythms of home. They fire off comments about holiday celebrations, impending weddings, credit card bills, school antics and the creeping anxiety of family members who are coping with one deployment too many.
At other moments, the service members describe the humor of daily life down range, as they call it. Hurriedly, with little time to worry about spelling or grammar, they riff on the chaos around them and reveal moments of fear. As casualties climb and the violence intensifies, so does their urge to share their grief and foreboding.
Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s New York Times.
I find it interesting to reflect on what it was in the experience of their human authors, inspired as they may have been, to describe the beginnings as they do. The author of the above text appears to be aware that a vocation was given to him along with life. God dignified him with a calling to “till and keep” the garden, and gave him the competence to do so””since human beings are the only creatures who can learn skills and see to the consequences of what they do.
In my reading of this story, that first human creature is now everyman, the ‘green’ vocation is universal, and the garden is God’s precious earth. It is a vocation we must all reclaim””in whatever way and place that is given us to do.
In one of our Eucharistic prayers we speak of “this fragile earth, our island home.” In many respects it is fragile, but it is also resilient if not endlessly forgiving; we now know more about all its creatures and ecosystems than any generation before us; and we understand the interdependence of all life and all the conditions of life. Still, time is not on our side.
I have often heard theologians say that all creation “fell” when Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating of the fruit of the tree that was forbidden them. That seems to me an utterly simplistic and useless understanding of what has happened, and lets modern generations off much too easily. More truthfully, it is the vast technologies of the industrial revolution that have enabled and magnified our ongoing abuse of earth and her intricate systems of interdependence
It is late Lent, but it is still time for repentance and amendment of life.
Rice farmers here are staying awake in shifts at night to guard their fields from thieves. In Peru, shortages of wheat flour are prompting the military to make bread with potato flour, a native crop. In Egypt, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso food riots have broken out in the past week.
Around the world, governments and aid groups are grappling with the escalating cost of basic grains. In December, 37 countries faced a food crisis, reports the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and 20 nations had imposed some form of food-price controls.
In Asia, where rice is on every plate, prices are shooting up almost daily. Premium Thai fragrant rice now costs $900 per ton, a nearly 30 percent rise from a month ago.
Exporters say the price could eclipse $1,000 per ton by June. Similarly, prices of white rice have climbed about 50 percent since January to $600 per ton and are projected to jump another 40 percent to $800 per ton in April.
A canonical case against the Rt. Rev. Edward H. MacBurney, retired Bishop of Quincy, will be heard by Court for the Trial of a Bishop. It will be the first such case since the canons were amended by General Convention in 2006 to include members of the clergy and laity among the judges in a disciplinary case against a member of the episcopacy.
Bishop MacBurney has been served with a presentment, an ecclesiastical indictment. It charges him with violating Article II, Section 3 of The Episcopal Church Constitution and Title III, Canon 12, Section 3 which states: “No Bishop shall perform episcopal acts or officiate by preaching, ministering the sacraments, or holding any public service in a diocese other than that in which the Bishop is canonically resident, without permission or a license to perform occasional public services from the ecclesiastical authority of the diocese in which the bishop desires to officiate or perform episcopal acts.”
Bishop MacBurney, 80, was Bishop of Quincy from 1988-1994….
Signs of distress are piling up in the California housing market, where prices are falling at three times the national rate of decline.
–Statewide, median sales prices fell by a stunning 26% in February, with home prices dropping at a rate of nearly $3,000 a week, the California Association of Realtors reports. Further, the CAR says the Fed’s interest rate-cutting campaign “will have little near-term direct effect on the housing market.”
–In the San Fernando Valley, losing a home to foreclosure is now almost as common for families as buying a home.
For a man so deluded about his past achievements, Robert Mugabe has a painfully clear understanding of his prospects at the polls. His rivals for the Zimbabwean presidency “may win some seats”, he said recently, “but they cannot win the majority. Impossible.”
Few would gainsay him. Zimbabwe’s opposition movement is more vocal than in past years, but more divided. Its voters can expect systematic intimidation this Saturday from police at polling stations. Constituencies have been redrawn in favour of the ruling Zanu (PF) party. The count has been centralised and will be supervised behind closed doors by presidential appointees. There is not even a pretence of fair election coverage in the state media, and in any case voting, for millions, will take second place to the more urgent business of survival. This is why Mr Mugabe’s election forecast is likely to be accurate. It is a tragedy for Zimbabweans; it is also proof of a colossal failure of international diplomacy.
Iraq’s prime minister on Wednesday gave gunmen in the southern oil port of Basra a three-day deadline to surrender their weapons and renounce violence as clashes between Shiite militia fighters and Iraqi security forces erupted for a second day.
At least 55 people have been killed and 300 wounded in Basra and Baghdad after the fighting spread to the capital’s main Shiite district of Sadr City, police and hospital officials said.
The ultimatum came as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was in Basra to supervise a crackdown against the spiraling violence between militia factions vying for control of the center of the country’s vast oil industry located near the Iranian border. The violence has raised fears that the cease-fire declared in August by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr could unravel, presenting the gravest challenge to the Iraqi government in months.
A Nottinghamshire church is at the centre of a conservation row over plans to modernise its interior.
Rev Allan Scriviner has said he wants to create a more flexible space for worship at St Edmund’s Church in Mansfield Woodhouse.
But this means the removal of a number of antique mahogany “poppy head” pews, believed to be unique in the area.
The Victorian Society and English Heritage have lodged objections, saying the pews should be preserved.
There has been a place of worship on the site since at least the 11th century but the building has been regularly rebuilt.
Demand for new homes continues to erode and one reason is that high-profile builder bankruptcies have made people anxious to sign on the dotted line. And with good reason: People like the Carias family in north suburban Chicago are getting stuck with half-finished houses and thousands of dollars locked up in bankruptcy proceedings.
Analysts say as more builders declare Chapter 11, this fear could hobble any housing market recovery ”” especially in the area of new home construction.