A useful resource I think.

“I’d say that the new black voices are much more organic than those of the past. They don’t need to emanate from the pulpit in order to be heard, or to inform, or to galvanize people from across the nation,” said Avis Jones-DeWeever, director of the National Council of Negro Women’s Research, Public Policy and Information Center. “These voices epitomize the next evolution of black political activism.”

There’s a difference in the types of stories that black and mainstream media cover, McCauley said. While some in the mainstream might analyze the influence of large media corporations on the Internet, black bloggers might focus on shows produced by Viacom-owned TV networks like VH1’s “Flavor of Love” and question the cartoonish depiction of African Americans.

And when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton mentioned Robert F. Kennedy’s June 1968 assassination while defending her decision to continue her presidential campaign, “a lot of the mainstream media covered it as a statement unto itself,” said Hicks. “But in the black community it was part of a pattern.” He, like others, noted that Clinton made her statement four days after the Roswell (Ga.) Beacon put a photo of Obama on its front page with the crosshairs of a rifle scope over him, and former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee made a joke about somebody aiming a gun at Obama during a speech to the National Rifle Association.

“The mainstream media had a reason to look at black voices in the media because of the Obama campaign,” Hicks said. “But these voices have always been out there.”

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The U.S. military on Saturday announced the death of a Marine in Anbar province, as May ended with what could be the lowest monthly toll since American-led forces invaded five years ago.

If no additional deaths are reported, the U.S. military toll for the month will be 19, according to the independent website icasualties.org. The next-lowest toll was in February 2004, when 20 service members were killed. At least 4,084 U.S. personnel have died since the start of the war.

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“It was like, ”˜Build it and they will come’…Except they didn’t come.”

—Lewis Tillman, who, with his wife Tara, owns Westchester Realty in the Greensboro, North Carolina area in today’s New York Times

Gas prices rose another cent on Saturday to $3.96 a gallon nationwide. The high prices are already prompting thousands of SUV owners to try and dump their gas guzzlers. Andrew Leonard, who writes the “How the World Works” blog for Salon.com, talks with Guy Raz about all the things that affect prices at the pump.

Listen to it all from NPR.

Visual artists today tend to use the wall in practical ways. They hang paintings on it or cast moving images upon its white surface. Often, artists apply an explanatory plaque or sticker beneath or beside their work.

Sculptors place their objects in the exhibit space using the walls of the room as a kind of framing device, for our perception of objects is partly determined by the way they relate to their surroundings.

Mass and shape define sculpture and, to a lesser extent, framed paintings, for these are objects with which the viewer interacts within a defined space. It is this interaction that influences what we think and how we feel about the art on display.

The wall, then, is typically a means to an end, a little-noticed support system.

Read it all from the Faith and Values section of the local paper.

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Southern Baptists, as a rule, do not drink. But once a month, young congregants of the Journey, a Baptist church here, and their friends get together in the back room of a sprawling brew pub called the Schlafly Bottleworks to talk about the big questions: President Bush, faith and war, the meaning of life, and “what’s wrong with religion.”

“That’s where people are having their conversations about things that matter,” the Rev. Darrin Patrick, senior pastor and founder of the Journey, said about the talks in the bar. “We go where people are because we feel like Jesus went to the people.”

The Journey, a megachurch of mostly younger evangelicals, is representative of a new generation that refuses to put politics at the center of its faith and rejects identification with the religious right.

They say they are tired of the culture wars. They say they do not want the test of their faith to be the fight against gay rights. They say they want to broaden the traditional evangelical anti-abortion agenda to include care for the poor, the environment, immigrants and people with H.I.V., according to experts on younger evangelicals and the young people themselves.

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I’m glad that the bishops will get together in a group. I’m not certain — as I was uncertain months ago when this was announced — what possible good would occur for a parish to “enter” the Communion Partners grouping, other than very moderate parishes who wish to convince their traditional laity that they are “doing something” but do not wish to actually “do something strategic.” As has been pointed out before — there’s a reason why conservative parishes in hostile revisionist dioceses haven’t requested an “Episcopal Visitor” and a fellowship group for bishops will not make that change.

I further have commented that I think that these good bishops are misreading entirely parishes and clergy who are in distress in TEC. These parishes aren’t concerned about having “a visible link to the Anglican Communion” — after all, all parishes and clergy in TEC have a “visible link to the Anglican Communion” by virtue of their bishops going to Lambeth and by virtue of TEC being the Anglican Communion franchise in the U.S. The parishes and clergy who are in severe distress in TEC are parishes who no longer wish to be connected with an undisciplined and corrupt TEC. And being linked up to a fellowship group for conservative bishops will not help that, although I am confident that the conversation will be richer and deeper. I expect, too, that conservative laypeople in parishes in hostile dioceses in TEC will point all of this out with clarity and vigor to clergy who hope that entrance into the Communion Partners group will assuage their concerns. And that moderate parishes who enter the Communion Partners group will be just fine either way.

I’m going to continue to maintain that those who are within TEC will need to — within their own diocese and region — figure out how to sufficiently differentiate themselves from the ruling zeitgeist of TEC. They can do it — as individuals, groups of individuals, parishes, groups of parishes, and even dioceses — but it’s hard work.

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Archbishop Valentino L. Mokiwa of Tanzania has agreed to serve as one of three “Communion Partner Primates,” said a group of 13 diocesan bishops who have been working on a modified version of the Episcopal Visitors concept first announced by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori at the House of Bishops meeting in New Orleans.

“Many within our dioceses and in congregations in other dioceses seek to be assured of their connection to the Anglican Communion,” said Bishop D. Bruce MacPherson of Western Louisiana, a partnership spokesperson. “Traditionally this has been understood in terms of bishop-to-bishop relationships. Communion Partners fleshes out this connection in a significant and symbolic way.”

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Communion Partners is intended to

Ӣ provide for those concerned a visible link to the Anglican Communion
Many within our dioceses and in congregations in other dioceses seek to be assured of their connection to the Anglican Communion. Traditionally, this has been understood in terms of bishop-to-bishop relationships. Communion Partners fleshes out this connection in a significant and symbolic way.
Ӣ provide fellowship, support and a forum for mutual concerns between bishops.
The Communion Partner bishops share many concerns about the Anglican Communion and its future and look to work together with Primates and Bishops from the wider Communion. In addition, we believe we all have need of mutual encouragement, prayer, and reassurance. The Communion Partners will be a forum for these kinds of relationships.
Ӣ provide a partnership to work toward the Anglican Covenant and according to Windsor Principles
The Communion Partner bishops will work together according to the principles outlined in the Windsor Report and seek a comprehensive Anglican Covenant at the Lambeth Conference and beyond.

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“I have no future here to stay.”

Written in broken English but with perfect clarity, the message is a stark and plaintive assessment from one of the last Jews of Babylon.

The community of Jews in Baghdad is now all but vanished in a land where their heritage recedes back to Abraham of Ur, to Jonah’s prophesying to Nineveh, and to Nebuchadnezzar’s sending Jews into exile here more than 2,500 years ago.

Just over half a century ago, Iraq’s Jews numbered more than 130,000. But now, in the city that was once the community’s heart, they cannot muster even a minyan, the 10 Jewish men required to perform some of the most important rituals of their faith. They are scared even to publicize their exact number, which was recently estimated at seven by the Jewish Agency for Israel, and at eight by one Christian cleric. That is not enough to read the Torah in public, if there were anywhere in public they would dare to read it, and too few to recite a proper Kaddish for the dead.

Read it all from the front page of this morning’s New York Times.

Proponents of sex education programs that focus on encouraging abstinence are launching a nationwide campaign aimed at enlisting 1 million parents to support the controversial approach.

The National Abstinence Education Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, said that it sent e-mails last week to about 30,000 supporters, practitioners and parents to try to recruit participants and plans to e-mail 100,000 this week as part of the first phase of the $1 million campaign.

The e-mail is promoting the Parents for Truth campaign, which the group hopes will eventually involve 1 million parents nationwide to lobby local schools to adopt sex education programs focusing on abstinence and to work to elect local, state and national officials who support the approach.

“There are powerful special interest groups who can far outspend what parents can in terms of promoting their agenda. But we recognize that parents more than make up for that by their determination and motivation to protect their own children,” said Valerie Huber, the group’s executive director.

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Facing financial difficulties, the 100-year-old institution recently laid off 33 people, including clergy — its first layoff in decades — as it struggles to balance its budget. It is suspending programs, asking some remaining staffers to double up on duties and closing its popular greenhouse, a move that has stirred community anger.

“We’re in a phase of significant tightening,” said the Very Rev. Samuel Lloyd III, who took the helm of the Episcopal cathedral as dean in 2005. He said the severity of the budget shortfall caught leaders by surprise. “We didn’t expect that we would have to do what we have done.”

Soon-to-be former employees say they are devastated. “It came out of nowhere,” said greenhouse employee Patricia Downey, her voice wobbly with emotion. “It’s been hard.”

Read it all and watch the accompanying video.

With music, South Indian dance, swooping streamers and the laying of hands, the eight-county Episcopal Diocese of Rochester consecrated the Rt. Rev. Prince G. Singh as their new bishop today at the Eastman Theatre.

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Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign confirmed Saturday that he has resigned from the church where controversial sermons by his former pastor and other ministers created repeated political headaches for the Democratic frontrunner.

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If you’re not welcome at church, where are you welcome? Once just a rhetorical question, it has taken on new import in the wake of the recent events in Bertha, Minn., where the Roman Catholic Church got a restraining order to keep a teenager with autism from disrupting its masses.

In fact, disruptions are not at all unusual during services, especially at downtown Minneapolis churches, where clergy deal with everything from people trying to give their own sermons to a man who recently marched down the main aisle of Central Lutheran Church carrying a suspicious-looking aluminum briefcase.

But the clergy, who feel that it’s part of their mission to embrace the local communities, take it all in stride.

“We’re an open campus that serves a community with a lot of street people,” said the Rev. D. Foy Christopherson of Central Lutheran Church, 333 S. 12th St. “And we welcome them with open arms.”

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Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign on Thursday was forced to again apologize for the remarks of a Chicago pastor and friend backing his candidacy who spoke from the pulpit of Obama’s longtime South Side church.

In an Internet video recorded Sunday, Rev. Michael Pfleger, an outspoken activist Catholic priest, is seen mocking Sen. Hillary Clinton from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

“When Hillary was crying, and people said that was put on, I really don’t believe it was put on,” Pfleger said. “I really believe that she just always thought this is mine. I’m Bill’s wife, I’m white and this is mine. I just gotta get up and step into the plate and then out of nowhere came, ‘Hey, I’m Barack Obama,’ and she said, ‘Oh, damn. Where did you come from? I’m white. I’m entitled. There’s a black man stealing my show.’ ”

Obama expressed disappointment.

“As I have traveled this country, I’ve been impressed not by what divides us, but by all that unites us,” Obama said in a statement. “That is why I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger’s divisive, backward-looking rhetoric.”

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BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: The Vatican reported this week that the number of Catholics in religious orders around the world continued to decline. In the latest figures for 2006, there were just over 945,000 monks and nuns, down about 7,000 from the year before. The overwhelming majority, 753,000, about 80 percent, were women. Around the U.S. the number of nuns has also been going down, and their average age rising. But there are a few places where the reverse is true. Betty Rollin found a Dominican teaching order in Nashville fairly bursting with dedicated young nuns.

BETTY ROLLIN: They are the Dominican Sisters of Saint Cecilia in Nashville, Tennessee, a traditional order that began in 1860. Their day begins at 5 a.m. with meditation followed by a Mass. Meals are held in silence. Their vocation is to teach. The sisters here have come from different states and different backgrounds, most of them raised Catholic, some not. In 1965, there were about 180,000 nuns in America. By 2007, that number dropped to 63,000 with an average age of 70. The average age of the Dominican sisters is 36. Their numbers have increased so steadily in the past 15 years that they have had to build a 100,000 square-foot addition to the property. The sisters here — the first year postulants, the second year novices, and those who, after seven years, have taken their final vows all say they have been called by God and that they are in love.

Sister KATHERINE WILEY: When you’re a little girl, you’re planning your wedding, you’re playing bride. But just to allow the Lord to transform my heart to see that I would still be a bride, but I would be his bride.

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A chapter of Minneapolis church history closed this week, a story soon to be repeated in St. Paul.

St. Thomas Episcopal Church, 4400 4th Av. S., one of the first black Episcopal churches in the state, held a deconsecration service Tuesday evening. A similar fate awaits St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in St. Paul, another one of the state’s first primarily black churches, which will close by the end of June.

The two congregations, both of which date to the early 1900s, are forming a new church, the location and name of which is still to be determined. And while the birth of the new church is considered a bright spot for many of the members, the atmosphere at St. Thomas was somber.

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According to a preservation group called PreserveCW, the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee, unless convinced otherwise, may sell an ecologically diverse camp property in Waushara County to commercial developers. Consideration of a sale has begun just five months after ceasing operation of Camp Webb at the Wautoma, Wisconsin property. Camp Webb had been a religiously-based camping program there since 1961. The camp property of 135 acres contains a diverse mixture of deciduous woods, pine woods, beachfront, swampland, grasslands and prairie fields.

The diocese’s Executive Council discussed the possibility of sale in early May after receiving a report from diocesan officials who had met with a commercial developer to discuss potential development of condominiums. A formal vote to put the camp up for sale is the first agenda item for June 5th Executive Council meeting. After learning of the situation, PreserveCW, a group formed to preserve the camp, asked supporters to contact Bishop Steven Miller and Executive Council members to ask that they seriously consider non-commercial options for the camp before considering sale to commercial interests.

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Both Barack Obama and John McCain have faced controversy because of sermons and statements by clergy who endorsed their candidacies for president. RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY managing editor Kim Lawton talks about the responsibilities of pastors and politicians with Ambassador Tony Hall, a Democrat from Ohio who served in the House of Representatives for nearly 25 years. Hall says candidates should not be held accountable for everything that clergy who have endorsed them have said and done. He also praises his party for improving its faith-based outreach.

Watch and listen to it all.

Writing in the first edition of the current affairs magazine, Standpoint, Dr Nazir-Ali said the decline of Christianity produced a lack of “transcendental principles” which has left the door open for the “comprehensive” claims of radical Islam.

The bishop, who was born in Pakistan of Christian parents, said Christianity had knitted together a “rabble of mutually hostile tribes” to create British identity.

But Dr Nazir-Ali said the loss of what he called the Christian consensus had led to the breakdown of the family, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and a loss of respect for other people.

He said the marginalisation of Christianity had happened just as large numbers of people of other faiths arrived in Britain.

Read it all as well as Bishop Nazir-Ali’s whole article linked in the first sentence above.

Scott Simon talks with Mickey Rapkin about his new book, “Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory,” which weaves together the drama of three groups trying to claim glory without instruments.

As someone who sang in such a group in secondary school and College, I loved it. Listen to it all.