Buying a research paper online or just recycling a friend’s work might have seemed like a good idea to stressed-out students who’ve been crunching to finish spring-semester projects in recent weeks.

But in the escalating the fight against academic fraud, the work of even high school students is being judged using anti-plagiarism software familiar to their college counterparts.

“It is something that all the high schools need to have,” said Christine Phenix, coordinator of the International Baccalaureate program at Bowie High School in Arlington. The $2,300 annual licensing fee for the Turnitin anti-plagiarism software used on the campus is money well-spent, she said. “The rationale is that plagiarism is a problem worldwide because students have access to everything. It has a great deterrent effect.”

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Here’s my observation: One doesn’t have to suspend his good judgment to have a close relationship with a child. My own dad was fiercely devoted to us kids, but that never caused him to side with us against our teachers at school or do anything else to “win” our affection. He was quite content to earn it. Your children have plenty of pals. You be the dad.

The best dads discipline themselves first, their children second. Most dads understand the importance of disciplining their children, but disciplining themselves can be a different matter. Some dads are notorious for their unpredictability. They laugh at a child’s antics one day and punish the same behavior the next. This sort of emotional roller coaster can be maddening for a child who needs adults to be steady and consistent. As the Book of Proverbs puts it: “A man of understanding walks straight.”

One of the great saboteurs of parental consistency is alcohol. As a family law attorney, I once ran a domestic violence clinic in which we represented abused women and their children. I was surprised to learn that in many cases, the defendant father was a nice guy ”” when he was sober. Most abusive behavior seemed to occur when the defendant was under the influence. Again, as Proverbs puts it: “Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler.” My own father was the son of an abusive, alcoholic father. As a result, Dad became a teetotaler. Other responsible fathers choose to drink alcohol in moderation. Either option is acceptable. What isn’t acceptable is chaos and unpredictability. Children need structure and stability. Dads require self-discipline in order to provide it.

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“O, brilliant kids, I was a fool just like you. I was in my mid-40s before I properly thanked my father for his decades of hard work ”” paying for me to laze around in the cars he bought me, to get drunk in the frat house whose dues he paid, to spend the afternoons with my girlfriends looking at trees and rivers while Pop worked and got so anxious that he took up smoking three packs of Kents a day.

“O, brilliant kids, you get to put on the garments of the morally righteous and upstanding while your parents work ”” because mothers work now and always have worked ”” and your parents must say, ”˜Yes, sir,’ or ”˜No, sir,’ to those who hire them. O, golden children, you get to talk about how you’ll never ”˜sell out,’ and meanwhile your parents stay up late in torment, thinking of how they can pay your tuition. Because, brilliant kids, work (business) involves exhaustion and eating humble pie and going on even when you think you can’t. And you are the beneficiaries of it in your gilded youth.

“Be smarter than Ben Stein ever was. Be a better person than I ever was. Right now, today, thank your parents for working to support you. Don’t act as if it’s the divine right of students. Get right up in their faces and say, ”˜Thank you for what you do so I can live like this.’ Say something. Say it, so that when they’re at O’Hare or Dallas-Fort Worth and they’ve just learned that their flight is canceled and they’ll have to stay overnight at the airport, they will know you appreciate them.

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What is the Lambeth Conference? It is a once-a-decade gathering of bishops from the worldwide Anglican Communion. Every 10 years, bishops come together, at the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, for a time of prayer, Bible study, fellowship and collegiality. Much of our ministry in the church involves work that we share as
bishops, even though we live and work in very different circumstances. It is important to note, however, that the conference is not primarily a legislative body. Each province in the Anglican Communion (the Episcopal Church is one example) has its own canons and sets of rules that govern its common life.

Read it all (pages 1 and 4).

It is at this point that the third and final gnomic utterance from the Gwitchen, to leave is to die, rings in our ears. The male and the female bound together in fidelity is a gift to the Church which bespeaks our bond, one with another, in the Body of Jesus Christ, until we too are parted by death. The conservative who says, “I can bear this corruption no more” and leaves, is deaf to this word. The revisionist who says “we can wait no longer, justice demands this remedy now, whatever the rending,” is deaf to this word. To our fallen minds, in the presence of strife, another child of the fall, bonds are to be loosed. But marriage is a sign of the love of God by which he covenantally binds himself to his people and to his world, and is ready sacrificially to suffer for her.

It is a curious fact of North American Anglicanism that most of our brothers and sisters, of the most divergent points of view, nod their heads in vehement approval when it is suggested that the post-modern and post-Constantinian Church must now be countercultural. It sounds curmudgeonly to some, sixties-ish to others, but it sounds good and bold to us all. Counter-cultural is another way to say we are indeed bound to the culture, to the world around us, for we and they need one another for definition. But we are bound in ways that neither they nor we will find easy. Still we welcome the notion. But as with most vows of fidelity, they work themselves out over the long haul to be something harder, and yet more gracious, than we reckoned. “Peter, do you love me? Yes Lord you know I love you”¦” What if counter-cultural means hanging together in this three-pronged Qwitchen Christian wisdom? All would be counter-cultural, and so all shall have surprises. For the social conservatives, there is making room and welcome for gay Anglicans. For the revisionists, there would be the hard admission of the logic: blessings have promises, so blessings are marriages, and gay marriages are, from the foundations of creation, impossible. With that admission would come what Anglicans fear most, opprobrium in elite and progressive society. And, for the fed-up on both sides, there is the interminable putting up with one another in a very prolonged family argument. What if all that together is a part of what counter-cultural actually looks like? As with marriage itself, that would be the day when the glamour and romance had worn off, and reality sets in. Our fraying, individualist, gratification-oriented, impatient, balkanized society needs to see real marriages of man and woman, and it needs equally to see that real marriage which is the Church in its protracted unity-in-conflict. As is real marriage, of the no-no-fault kind Jesus describes in Mark 10, so is our counter-cultural witness, as a bound and avowed Body, to the costly, covenantal, enduring grace of God in Jesus Christ.

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The average price of gasoline in the U.S. hit $4 a gallon for the first time Sunday, the latest milestone in a run-up in fuel prices that is sapping consumer confidence and threatening to nudge the nation into recession.

The record nationwide average for regular-gasoline prices, announced by auto club AAA, follows Friday’s near-$11 surge in oil prices to a record $138.54 a barrel. Both are part of what, by some measures, is the worst energy-price shock Americans have faced for a generation, in terms of its toll on their pocketbooks.

In recent days, soaring fuel prices and disappointing employment data have reignited fears that the nation’s economy — which has taken a pounding over the past year from a housing downturn, credit crunch and weakening job market — will slip into recession, or pull back further if a recession is already under way. Rising fuel prices are straining household budgets, damping the spending that drives more than two-thirds of the nation’s economic activity.

“What we’re seeing here is a lot of additional pressure on a consumer sector that was soft to begin with,” said Alliance Bernstein economist Joseph Carson. “Is it a tipping point by itself? It’s close.”

Read it all from the front page of this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

They may earn only about £2,000 a year but they are 400 million-strong, scattered across the globe and have just bought themselves a fridge.

Meet Generation A, who soon could become the most important economic force on Earth.

Aged between 30 and 40, their per capita income is rising fast and their numbers are forecast to hit one billion within the next two decades. And it is a group whose consumerist aspirations (the “A”) are not about to stop with that fridge.

The emergence of Generation A coincides with a tipping-point reached this year, in which the world’s urban population equals its rural population for the first time. The concept of Generation A has been developed by analysts at Macquarie to explain and track many of the “mega trends” holding the global economy in their sway.

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Israel yesterday attempted to play down a warning from a senior government minister that an attack on Iran was “unavoidable” if Tehran continued to develop nuclear weapons. The transportation minister, Shaul Mofaz, a key figure in Israel’s dialogue with the US on Iran’s nuclear programme, raised the prospect of a unilateral Israeli attack against Tehran on Friday, adding that international sanctions had been ineffective.

The threat, which is at odds with Israel’s support so far for an international campaign to curtail and, if necessary, confront Iran’s uranium enrichment programme, contributed to frenzied buying in the financial markets, where oil prices soared to a record $139, and sparked an international furore.

Yesterday, Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said that “all options must remain on the table”, adding that “tangible steps by the international community” were needed to “put pressure on the regime in Tehran”.

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The first bishop married his gay partner in New Hampshire this weekend. The second bishop will be settling into a new house with his wife in a New Jersey suburb, chosen so that he can shuttle more easily between conservative churches opposed to the first one’s theology and lifestyle.

Bishop V. Gene Robinson of the Episcopal Church USA and Bishop Martyn Minns of the Anglican Church of Nigeria are the twin bookends of the current struggle within the worldwide Anglican Communion. Fallen bookends, one might add, insofar as they are the only two Anglican bishops so far to be dis-invited from the Communion’s once-a-decade Lambeth Conference this July by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

The tall, British-born Minns, 65, got the boot because he led a batch of U.S. Episcopal congregations, including the one where he was church rector, out of Episcopalianism and into the authority of the Anglican archdiocese of Nigeria ”” primarily out of dismay that Episcopalianism had elected the openly-gay Robinson to be the bishop of New Hampshire. And Robinson, 61, a chatty, gray-haired Kentuckian who once said he looked forward to being a “June bride,” was blackballed from Lambeth, (which will convene in Canterbury), because Williams felt that the Episcopal church in the U.S. had made him a bishop in the teeth of advice by the Anglican leadership not to engage in such a divisive move.

So where does that leave the two antagonists this summer? In each case, the present is about family and the near future about religious politicking. Robinson got hitched Saturday to his partner of 20 years, Mark Andrew, at St. Paul’s Episcopal church in Concord, N.H. in a civil union presided over by a justice of the peace, according to the Concord Monitor. In a recent essay he says he regretted the June bride remark, noting that he should have made a more sober statement about the longing of gays and lesbians to celebrate their own “faithful, monogamous, lifelong-intentioned, holy vows,” the kind of sentiment he also expressed in his recent book In the Eye of the Storm: Pulled to the Center by God.

Minns, meanwhile, is spending his weekend in Morristown, N.J, where he moved last month.

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Unfortunately, instead of hiking the price ourselves by means of a gasoline tax that could be instantly refunded to the American people in the form of lower payroll taxes, we let the Saudis, Venezuelans, Russians and Iranians do the taxing for us ”” and pocket the money that the tax would have recycled back to the American worker.

This is insanity. For 25 years and with utter futility (starting with “The Oil-Bust Panic,” The New Republic, February 1983), I have been advocating the cure: a U.S. energy tax as a way to curtail consumption and keep the money at home. In this space in May 2004 (and again in November 2005), I called for “the government ”” through a tax ”” to establish a new floor for gasoline,” by fully taxing any drop in price below a certain benchmark. The point was to suppress demand and to keep the savings (from any subsequent world price drop) at home in the U.S. Treasury rather than going abroad. At the time, oil was $41 a barrel. It is now $123.

But instead of doing the obvious ”” tax the damn thing ”” we go through spasms of destructive alternatives, such as efficiency standards, ethanol mandates, and now a crazy carbon cap-and-trade system the Senate debated last week. These are infinitely complex mandates for inefficiency and invitations to corruption. But they have a singular virtue: They hide the cost to the American consumer.

Want to wean us off oil? Be open and honest. The British are paying $8 a gallon for petrol. Goldman Sachs is predicting we will be paying $6 by next year. Why have the extra $2 (above the current $4) go abroad? Have it go to the U.S. Treasury as a gasoline tax and be recycled back into lower payroll taxes.

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Lucy Dillon is baking cookies when the doorbell rings.

It is two weeks before Christmas in 2006, and her son Matthew and all his Marine Corps buddies want snacks for the holidays. As usual, they’ve turned to her.

Matt asked for the cookies and a fruitcake on one of his frequent calls home the day before. He is in Iraq serving his second tour of duty but sounds so casual he could be phoning from down the street. For some reason Lucy doesn’t understand, those boys over there love fruitcake. Maybe it reminds them of home.

Lucy and her husband, Neal, hear the bell, ask each other “Who could that be?” Neal guesses it is the UPS man. Matt said he sent a Marine Corps flag for the new flagpole in the front yard and that it should arrive any day. Maybe 7:30 p.m. was late for UPS but not out of the question.

Neal is so sure the flag has come that he doesn’t even look up when he opens the door, expecting to find a package from Matt on the front porch.

Instead, he sees two pairs of black patent leather shoes. Two Marines stand at attention on his stoop.

Neal is a veteran, all his boys have served, and he knows what this means. Before the soldiers can speak, Neal quietly asks, “Is my boy dead?”

Before the sergeants can finish ”” “We regret to inform you …” ”” Neal Dillon’s knees buckle and he falls. The Marines can do nothing but catch him.

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Churches are known for Sunday potlucks and feeding the homeless. But an increasing number of congregations — from small, neighborhood houses of worship to mega-churches — are returning to the timeless tradition of using shared meals as a form of outreach for new members among the unaffiliated and recent arrivals.

Every Wednesday night there is a free dinner for prospective members at First Baptist Church of Orlando, featuring sandwiches, homemade cookies and sodas. Although the fare is simple, great care is taken in the preparation and presentation.

“If it’s a fantastic meal, and then you have a gospel message presentation, it all goes together in creating an environment where someone feels comfortable making a decision for Christ,” said Marcus White, the congregation’s director of food services. “We believe we’re a ministry in itself.”

Using food and fellowship harks back to the earliest days of Christianity. In the first century, the shared meal was a primary method of outreach, fellowship and evangelization following the crucifixion of Jesus.

“A strategy for evangelism based on table fellowship is very much at home in the Christian tradition,” said David Steinmetz of the Duke Divinity School. “There’s nothing new about the importance of food and drink for a genuinely religious life.”

Martin Marty of the University of Chicago agreed — in part.

“We know that the earliest Christians did not have ‘Evangelism Committees’ with sub-committees on ‘How to attract converts with food,’ ” he said. “They had something better: hospitality as a way of life.”

Read the whole article.

“I think we could have done better,” shrugged computer science major Kevin Bombino. He says Rowling lacks the gravitas a Harvard commencement speaker should have.

“You know, we’re Harvard. We’re like the most prominent national institution. And I think we should be entitled to ”¦ we should be able to get anyone. And in my opinion, we’re settling here.”

Rowling was chosen by Harvard’s alumni. University President Drew Gilpin Faust applauded her selection, saying, “No one in our time has done more to inspire young people to ”¦ read.”

Rowling follows a long line of heavies who’ve spoken at Harvard’s commencement. In 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall used the platform to detail his “Marshall Plan” to rebuild Europe after World War II.

Since then, speakers have included such luminaries as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, other heads of state, Nobel Prize winners, and scholars.

“It’s definitely the ‘A’ list, and I wouldn’t ever associate J.K. Rowling with the people on that list,” says senior Andy Vaz.

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So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

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Lawyers for the Episcopal Church were in court last week challenging the constitutionality of a Civil War era Virginia law that permits congregations to secede from their parent churches with their parish properties in the event of a denomination wide schism.

At a hearing on May 28, lawyers for the national church sought to overturn the 141 year old law, Virginia Statute 59-7, arguing was an intrusion by the state into the internal life of a religious group, and also discriminated against “hierarchical” churches.

In April, Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Randy Bellows ruled that a schism had occurred within the Episcopal Church under the terms of the Virginia law. However, he granted the Episcopal Church leave to appeal the legality of the law before the full case went to trial.

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Energy ministers of advanced nations expressed “serious concerns” about soaring oil prices and urged producers to lift production through greater investment and provide more transparency on oil supply data.

A joint communiqué by the Group of Eight ministers, also signed by China, India and South Korea, stopped short of the tough language demanded by Kevin Rudd, Australia’s prime minister. He urged G8 leaders to “apply the blowtorch to Opec”, which he blamed for the rise in crude oil prices to a record $138.54, after a $10.75 jump on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Friday.

Ministers meeting in Aomori, northern Japan, said: “Current high oil prices are unprecedented and against the interest of either consuming or producing nations.”

The producers among the G8 said they would seek to raise production and called on “other producing countries to increase investment to keep markets well supplied”.

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Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson was united in a civil union ceremony with longtime partner Mark Andrew yesterday afternoon at St. Paul’s Church in Concord. Attorney Ronna Wise, a justice of the peace, performed the private ceremony before about 120 friends and family.

The day marked the five-year anniversary of the New Hampshire election that, once ratified, made Robinson the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican church.

Robinson had made public his intent to get a civil union but had purposely kept the date and the details quiet. He did so, said spokesman Mike Barwell, out of respect for next month’s worldwide Anglican church conference in England. Although there were undercover police officers at the ceremony, Barwell said, there were no problems or protesters.

Robinson has been excluded from the Lambeth Conference because of the divide his sexuality has caused in the church. But he will make the trip to England and host his own events. Barwell said Robinson didn’t want to inflame the controversy by making his civil union a public event.

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THE CHURCH of England has been thrown in to turmoil following the leak of a restricted Ministry Division report finding that clergy are not up to the job.

While the Archbishop of Canterbury’s spokesman insisted that they were not aware of many complaints, shortly after The Sunday Telegraph revealed the findings of the report, Quality and Quantity Issues in Ministry, ecclesiastical blogs filled with bitter remarks illustrating the betrayal and hypocrisy observed by clergy.

In a response to concerns expressed by bishops over the standard of clergy, the report surveyed the opinions of 37 diocesan bishops, about 90 per cent of the House of Bishops. A third of those replied that half of the stipendiary priests in their diocese were unable to meet the challenges of ministry. Only one bishop replied that he was very confident that the newly ordained have the gifts and abilities to meet those challenges.

In response to the furoré, the Ministry Division issued a press statement which said: “One insight not reported was that more than eight in ten bishops expressed confidence that our newly ordained clergy have the gifts and abilities to meet such challenges and opportunities.”

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Interviewed at New York’s General Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in 1973, Robinson was asked to identify the most common misstatement made about him. “The most persistent and hurtful one is that I abandoned my wife and children to move in with my lover.” It was an amicable divorce, he said.

“I did not meet the person who has been my partner for 20 years until two months after my wife was remarried,” he said. “My daughters could not be more devoted to me; one was with me at the 2003 Episcopal General Convention, and my former wife was one of my presenters at my consecration.”

He and his wife “went back to church to end the marriage,” he said. “We asked for each other’s forgiveness, pledged our joint raising of our children, and gave our wedding rings back to each other” in the context of a Eucharist. “It was one of the most feeling and wonderful moments of my life.”

Robinson said he hopes that readers of his book will find out “how theologically conservative I am.” Many conservative Episcopalians, he said, have told him they see the church’s relaxed stance on gay and lesbian people “as a precursor to the deconstruction of virtually everything that we believe.”

Some critics, he said, may be thinking of John Shelby Spong, the former bishop of Newark, New Jersey, an early advocate of gay and lesbian inclusion in church life. “Either he evolved, or devolved, depending on your perspective, into serious questioning of the bodily resurrection, the virgin birth and the divinity of Christ,” Robinson said.

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Most of the people I know are embarrassed by what they can’t do. They see it as a sign of weakness and consequently walk around with burdened hearts. For my generation, the notion that success equals fulfillment has been pounded into our brains as if it were the truth. My generation is being told that if you can’t do something alone, if you’re not smart enough or capable enough, then you’ve failed.

So far, the turning points in my life have not been the times I succeeded at something, but the times I’ve whispered, “I’m lost,” or, “Help me,” or, “I need a friend.” In becoming helpless, I’ve allowed myself to be shaped and supported by those who love me ”” which makes helplessness a gift.

And I have my bosses to thank for it. We’ve discovered the joy of helping and being helped. I believe sometimes our vulnerability is our strength.

Read or listen to it all.

The Church of England feels itself to be marginalised, excluded and neglected. This message, gathered from every diocese in the country, including dozens of bishops, members of Parliament, peers and academics, is relentlessly consistent.

It comes in a landmark report, to be published next Monday, which marks the most damning critique by the Church of a serving Government since the 1980s.

While Muslim communities are courted, funded and feted, the country’s majority Christian communities are barely given a second thought when it comes to Government focus on “faith”, the report says.

The report, called Moral, Without a Compass, says the attitude of ministers is particularly galling for the Church, which, the authors of the report say, has spent centuries pioneering welfare provision, in particular in health, education and care for the poor and marginalised of society.

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Toss a barrel of $139 oil into the economy and the ripples will swamp some of the boats trying to stay afloat in the current sea of economic troubles. And planes. Airlines are grounding their least fuel-efficient planes in an attempt to cut costs. So fewer budget-priced seats will be available to holidaymakers. Businessmen, too, are beginning to respond to the rising cost of company meetings by discovering the virtues of teleconferencing. Of course, home-bound consumers and desk-bound businessmen could drive, but petrol prices being what they are, that, too, is expensive.

All of which adds to the pressure on politicians to do something. Not for them Ronald Reagan’s famous plea to his officials: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” Some sensible new policies are badly needed but that is not on the cards, since the inclination of politicians is to do the opposite of what needs doing.

In their never-ending hunt for the quick fix, politicians in America and Britain want to ease the pain at the pumps by lowering petrol taxes. Never mind that prices would soon rise so that the net effect would be to lower the tax receipts of the US and UK Treasuries and increase those of the House of Saud, Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin and others not kindly disposed to western democracies. Even if prices did fall, the result would be to encourage greater use of petrol, and to discourage the development of alternatives to the use of oil-based products.

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Bishop Charles E. Bennison Jr., 64, still wears a purple vest, a pectoral cross, and an engraved gold ring – symbols of his stature as leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania.

But tomorrow morning this white-haired and controversial prelate, suspended from office in the fall, will step off an elevator at the Philadelphia Marriott Hotel and into a Court for the Trial of a Bishop.

There, nine judges from around the country will consider whether Bennison improperly concealed his brother John’s sexual abuse of a minor decades ago, and decide if he may continue as head of the five-county, 55,000-member diocese.

“The allegations are sensational,” his lawyer, James Pabarue, said in a lengthy interview Thursday. But they are “half-truths,” he added, concocted by parties in the diocese eager for Bennison’s ouster.

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The big question is how much money both sides are spending on this debacle. Today, the Rev. John Yates, rector of the Falls Church, the largest of the 11 congregations at 2,500 members, will ask congregants for a “one-time special sacrificial gift” – his words – to make up for a $300,000 shortfall in contributions.

The church recently slashed its $6 million budget by 5.4 percent.

Judge Bellows’ decision to allow some 250 years worth of records to be reviewed for the case “puts a burden on us we had hoped to avoid,” he wrote. “The costs of defending our church are great.”

The ADV folks say they have raised and spent $2.1 million; $1.3 million of which has come from the Falls Church, $1 million from Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, $400,000 from Church of the Apostles in Fairfax and the rest from the remaining eight churches.

Neal Brown, the rector of St. Margaret’s Anglican Church in Woodbridge – formerly St. Margaret’s Episcopal – said his congregation of 170 souls eked out $40,000 from their operating budget for legal fees.

“Things are so bad, we can’t make any color copies on our copy machine,” he told me.

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FAW: Indeed, for some, like Eva Finelle, the decision to take such a test is easy.

Ms. FINNELLE: I want to know. I want to know. I don’t want my family, my children to go through what I’ve gone though. It would give me preparation time to do what I want to do, to say what I want to say, to get my affairs in order, so to speak, for when I can’t think for myself.

FAW: For others, though, like Susan Davis, almost as old now as her father was when he started showing signs of the disease, the prospect of such a test is agonizing.

Ms. DAVIS: Hit the music”¦

FAW: Now a successful producer at North Carolina Public Radio and the mother of two, Susan Davis says that learning she might develop Alzheimer’s would not be a source of comfort but alarm.

Ms. DAVIS: I could find this out, and it really means nothing. It means nothing until they know what it means or until they can do something.

FAW (to Ms. Davis): Knowing that you might get it — it wouldn’t be helpful?

Ms. DAVIS: You know what this would do? This might drive me crazy.

FAW: Most of all, says Davis, if she learned she’ll develop Alzheimer’s that would be a cruel ethical dilemma: wait for the disease or take her life?

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Worth the time.

A mother who decided to abort her son because he may have inherited a life-threatening kidney condition is overjoyed that he survived the procedure.

Jodie Percival of Nottinghamshire, England, said she and her fiancee made the decision to abort baby Finley when she was eight weeks pregnant.

Percival’s first son Thane died of multicystic dysplastic kidneys ”” which causes cysts to grow on the kidneys of an unborn baby ”” and her second child Lewis was born with serious kidney damage and currently has just one kidney, the Daily Mail reported.

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The choice will be starkest over Iraq. Mr McCain backed the war in the first place, and he proposes to stay the course there no matter how long it takes. Mr Obama opposed the “dumb” war from the start and has pledged to withdraw all combat troops within 16 months, though he has lately wriggled a little on this commitment. Although most Americans now think the war was a mistake, polls suggest that Mr McCain’s determination to see it through may stand him in better stead with voters than Mr Obama’s determination to pull out whatever the consequences, especially since the tide of war seems at last to have shifted firmly in America’s favour. In general, Mr McCain will offer a much more robust approach to security issues than Mr Obama””and that may help him.

That said, the war is clearly receding as a political issue, just as concerns about recession are growing. America no longer has a Hummer economy (General Motors is considering selling off the gas guzzler). And there are clear choices about how to fix it. Mr McCain offers orthodox supply-side solutions, stressing deregulation, free trade, competitiveness and the use of market mechanisms to cure the problems in everything from health care to education to pensions. The trouble for him is that America is already a pretty deregulated place, and many voters feel that globalisation has brought them much less than was promised (and bankers a lot more). Mr Obama offers a very different vision: more spending on education and training, an expensive expansion of health care to (almost) all Americans and better benefits for the unemployed. His problem will be convincing sceptics that his sums add up, though it may well be that voters, battered by falling house prices and rising oil prices prefer not to worry too much about that.

Both candidates have their flaws and their admirable points; the doughty but sometimes cranky old warrior makes a fine contrast with the inspirational but sometimes vaporous young visionary. Voters now have those five months to study them before making up their minds (and The Economist will be doing the same). But, on the face of it, this is the most impressive choice America has had for a very long time.

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The [theological] schools doing well “tend to be the ones that take their academic mission seriously. … Institutions that meet real challenges with a real commitment of resources will do better than ones that say ‘It’s not that bad.’ A great many institutions don’t seem to realize that actually knowing stuff about the Bible and theological tradition makes for better pastors.”

—Dr. A.K.M. Adam