As I considered the controversy surrounding my visit here, I was reminded of an encounter I had during my Senate campaign, one that I describe in a book I wrote called “The Audacity of Hope.” A few days after I won the Democratic nomination, I received an e-mail from a doctor who told me that while he voted for me in the Illinois primary, he had a serious concern that might prevent him from voting for me in the general election. He described himself as a Christian who was strongly pro-life — but that was not what was preventing him potentially from voting for me.

What bothered the doctor was an entry that my campaign staff had posted on my website — an entry that said I would fight “right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.” The doctor said he had assumed I was a reasonable person, he supported my policy initiatives to help the poor and to lift up our educational system, but that if I truly believed that every pro-life individual was simply an ideologue who wanted to inflict suffering on women, then I was not very reasonable. He wrote, “I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.” Fair-minded words.

After I read the doctor’s letter, I wrote back to him and I thanked him. And I didn’t change my underlying position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my website. And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that — when we open up our hearts and our minds to those who may not think precisely like we do or believe precisely what we believe — that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.

That’s when we begin to say, “Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this heart-wrenching decision for any woman is not made casually, it has both moral and spiritual dimensions.

Read it all.

I believe that both history and theology offer warrants for respecting the belief and practice of Jews rather than seeking their conversion to Christianity. Yes, I know in John’s Gospel Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (xiv, 6). I know that in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus mandates, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit . . .” (xxviii, 19). But we should not read these texts without attentiveness to how we have used them against Jews (and others as well). In the nearly 2,000 years since the evangelists wrote these texts, Christians have vilified Judaism and persecuted Jews as “Christ killers”. Ours is a shameful history: denigration of a people, compulsory baptisms, the crusades and Inquisition, confining Jews in ghettos and attacking them in pogroms. Particularly after the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered in the most barbaric ways, we must not use our sacred texts in ways that would mean the end of Judaism. Yet to seek conversion of Jews to Christianity is ultimately to seek Judaism’s demise.

It is fundamental to Christianity that God entered into covenant with the Jewish people ”” a covenant that, as Pope John Paul II said many times, was “never revoked”. God is faithful to covenants, and, therefore, the way of Judaism is salvific for Jews. Torah is a path to holiness.

Read it all.

As Lou Gehrig’s disease sapped Joshua Thompson of his ability to move and speak last fall, he consistently summoned one question from within the prison of his own body. “Iplex,” he asked, in a whisper that pierced his mother’s heart. “When?”

Iplex had never been tested in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the formal name for the fatal disease that had struck Joshua, 34, in late 2006. Developed for a different condition and banished from the market by a patent dispute, it was not for sale to the public anywhere in the world.

But Kathy Thompson had vowed to get it for her son. On the Internet, she had found enthusiastic reviews from A.L.S. patients who had finagled a prescription for Iplex when it was available, along with speculation by leading researchers as to why it might slow the progressive paralysis that marks the disease. And for months, as she begged and bullied biotechnology companies, members of Congress, Italian doctors and federal drug regulators, she answered Joshua the same way:

“Soon,” she said. “Soon.”

Read it all.

I am at Lake George visiting my Father.

Update: There is still more there.

Lake George is without comparison the most beautiful water I ever saw. Its water is limpid as crystal and the mountainsides are covered with rich groves of fir, pine, aspen, and birch down to the waters edge.

–Thomas Jefferson

But listening aloud, valuable as it is, isn’t the same as reading aloud. Both require a great deal of attention. Both are good ways to learn something important about the rhythms of language. But one of the most basic tests of comprehension is to ask someone to read aloud from a book. It reveals far more than whether the reader understands the words. It reveals how far into the words ”” and the pattern of the words ”” the reader really sees.

Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words. To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body, which is why there is always a curious tenderness, almost an erotic quality, in those 18th- and 19th-century literary scenes where a book is being read aloud in mixed company. The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading.

Read it all. The whole time I was reading this I was thinking this is one of the things Anglican worship has right; and, what a vital ministry lay reading is! Do you know that the word for the reading of Scripture in the New Testament means to read it loud?

Technology in all of its forms – social networks, smartphones, the Web, instant messaging, on-line gaming – is a net loss for today’s young people. At least according to one group of Silicon Valley 8th graders.

“It’s bad for us, but it sure is fun,” says Eric Bautista, 13, one of the students in Sister Jolene Schmitz’s junior high school class at Resurrection School in Sunnyvale, California.

Admittedly, this informal survey offers, at best, only anecdotal evidence. Still, it is pretty shocking that a group of young teenagers, all of them technologically very astute, and living in the very heart of Silicon Valley, would come to such a conclusion.

These kids, born about the time the Internet became widely adopted, live within blocks of where the Intel microprocessor, the Apple computer and the Atari video game were all invented. They spend their days (and nights) surfing the web, playing on-line games and instant messaging. Most have cell phones in their backpacks. And many have at least one parent who works in the electronics industry.

Read it all.

Watch it all–she is an inspiration.

The golden rule of journalism decrees that reporters take nothing on faith, back up every story with hard evidence, and question everything. NPR’s religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty kept that rule in mind when she decided to explore the science of spirituality. She was searching for answers to the questions: Is spiritual experience real or a delusion? What happens when we pray? And does consciousness depend on the brain, or can it operate when the brain doesn’t.

Weekend Edition Sunday host Liane Hansen talks with Hagerty about her research and what she discovered while writing her new book, Fingerprints of God.

Listen to it all.

The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles on Friday lost its bid to recover attorneys fees and court costs from the church and some of its members who voted to break away from the Episcopal church in 2004.

The split led to a bitter legal battle over St. James’ Via Lido Campus.

“The local church is free of the specter of attorneys fees and the diocese suffered a significant defeat,” said attorney Daniel Lula, who represents St. James.

Read it all.

Check it out (18 page pdf).

Pope Benedict XVI said that he wanted to walk in Jesus’ footsteps and experience the Holy Land first hand. So photographers waited eagerly by a turgid pool in the Jordan River for the pope to peer from a wooden promontory to a central spot in Christianity, where Christ is believed to have been baptized.

But Benedict declined to get out of the golf cart that brought him there.

Certainly an 82-year-old pope is entitled to remain seated if he likes. Yet the drive-by pilgrimage seemed to sum up his eight-day trip to Jordan, Israel and the West Bank ”” and indeed his entire papacy so far.

Read it all.

Astronauts from the space shuttle Atlantis went on their third space walk Saturday to repair the Hubble space telescope’s camera and install new equipment. Guest host Rebecca Roberts talks about how the Hubble has impacted the world of astronomy with astronomer Dave Rodrigues, also known as the AstroWizard.

Listen to it all from NPR.

The NBC Evening News had this on Friday–I just stared and stared. What a picture. Check it out.

Once reserved for cases in which the life of the baby or mother was in danger, the cesarean is now routine. The most common operation in the U.S., it is performed in 31% of births, up from 4.5% in 1965.

With that surge has come an explosion in medical bills, an increase in complications — and a reconsideration of the cesarean as a sometimes unnecessary risk.

It is a big reason childbirth often is held up in healthcare reform debates as an example of how the intensive and expensive U.S. brand of medicine has failed to deliver better results and may, in fact, be doing more harm than good.

“We’re going in the wrong direction,” said Dr. Roger A. Rosenblatt, a University of Washington professor of family medicine who has written about what he calls the “perinatal paradox,” in which more intervention, such as cesareans, is linked with declining outcomes, such as neonatal intensive care admissions. Maternity care, he said, “is a microcosm of the entire medical enterprise.”

Read it all.

Two movements began that day. Northwestern began playing for Jaclyn, and soon after it started winning national championships, four in a row. The team is 20-0 this season and three victories from its fifth straight title. Northwestern will host Princeton in an N.C.A.A. quarterfinal game Saturday afternoon.

The players say they are just as excited about what they helped create off the field during their championship run. The team’s support of Jaclyn was a catalyst for her father, Denis, to start a charity that pairs pediatric brain tumor patients with college teams. Nearly 100 children have been “adopted” by teams like St. Bonaventure and Southern Mississippi. Three hundred teams are on a waiting list to adopt such children.

“Disney couldn’t make up some of the stuff that’s happened,” Denis Murphy said.

Jaclyn and Denis Murphy said the bond the Northwestern team formed with Jaclyn helped save her life. She is now a healthy 14-year-old freshman at Arlington High School in LaGrangeville, N.Y., where she plays junior varsity lacrosse.

I caught this one last night on the plane. Simply fabulous. Read it all.

Father THOMAS REESE (Senior Fellow, Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University): I don’t think it’s a scandal. Universities should be places where we have discussion, debate, where people of different views come together to argue, and when the bishops get involved in trying to censure people, ban speakers ”” I think it’s not helpful.

Archbishop BURKE: This is a Catholic institution which is bound by ”” its title is Catholic, its identity is Catholic ”” to uphold the moral law, and that’s the source of the scandal.

Read it all.

Of all the scientific mysteries, this is probably the greatest one of all ”“ how did life on Earth begin? We are not talking about how it evolved into the diversity of lifeforms we see today. We are talking about how it originated in the first place.

For all his immense insight into evolution, Charles Darwin himself was stumped. He suggested that whatever the mechanism was that had led to the first replicating lifeforms, it most probably arose in some “warm little pond”, a primordial soup of pre-biotic ingredients where the seed of life first germinated on the early Earth.

Now scientists have developed an experiment demonstrating how the very first self-replicating molecules may have formed about 4 billion years ago when the Earth was like any other lifeless planet that had yet to experience the radical transformation of living, breathing creatures.

Read it all.

Read it all.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be prepared to endorse a peace process leading to an independent Palestinian state, his defence minister has said.

Ehud Barak, a long-time rival now part of Israel’s governing coalition, spoke ahead of Mr Netanyahu’s first meeting with US President Obama in Washington.

He told Israeli TV a regional deal could be struck within three years.

Read it all.

The Rev. Duke Tufty, pastor, Unity Temple on the Plaza, Kansas City: I don’t believe the church or its clergy should dictate or even take a position on such a deeply personal matter as assisted suicide. Rabbis, ministers and priests aren’t qualified to determine when one should go on living and when one can be set free. That can be decided only by the person who possesses the life.

Personally, I believe if a person is facing psychological challenges that have left him or her in a deep state of despair and depression but are not life-threatening, assisted suicide should not be an available option. If a person is facing physical challenges that cannot be healed, has less than six months to live, and the illness is going to be a continual source of suffering, there should be a process where the person can meet with a panel of three physicians to decide if assisted suicide is the best option, taking all things into consideration.

Read it all.

In the serene hills of rural upstate New York, Kathie Breault is hunkering down for doomsday. It’s not an all-out Armageddon that the 51-year-old grandmother is convinced of, but an imminent economic apocalypse.

A few years ago, Breault began reading about what happens when the world surpasses “peak oil” — a point where we will use more oil than we can produce.

“I was afraid that any day that oil would disappear, that gas would start to disappear, that I wouldn’t be able to get to work, I wouldn’t have money, I wouldn’t have food that I needed,” she said. “It was frightening — the picture that was painted.”

Read it all or if you prefer watch the video report here.

Ten years ago, Facebook didn’t exist. Ten years before that, we didn’t have the Web. So who knows what jobs will be born a decade from now? Though unemployment is at a 25”‘year high, work will eventually return. But it won’t look the same. No one is going to pay you just to show up. We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world. It will be run by a generation with new values ”” and women will increasingly be at the controls. Here are 10 ways your job will change. In fact, it already has.

Check out the whole thing.

Once a month the news gods have delivered these parables to us, gifts in a gold box reminding us where value lies. It’s so much better to discover that Superman could be anyone; that everywhere you look, there are hidden reserves of majesty and honor and genius and luck. The stories wouldn’t have worked if Susan Boyle had been a yuppie barrister or Phillips a SEAL himself. Their normality gives them wings.

The qualities these stories celebrate are telling. Competence–as manifested in a pilot with a perfect feel for his machine. Sacrifice–in a captain who would trade himself for the sake of his crew. Persistence–in the singer who knew from adolescence that this was what she wanted and would allow no humiliation to deter her. These are, not by accident, the qualities Barack Obama, national life coach, regularly exalts. He commends the public for its patience, which convinces me that he has read the parenting books that instruct us to pre-emptively praise our children for the qualities we want them to develop. Any real recovery will require an “extraordinary sense of responsibility,” he says, which just means we roll up our sleeves and clean up after ourselves.

This epoch rejects the glamour virtues: it calls for modesty, patience, perseverance, proficiency. We crave the company of ordinary heroes, especially now, when we’re all on our own, thankful for small distractions from all the big threats we face. It’s a karaoke moment: we can’t afford a band, but we’ll gladly sing of normal nobility all night long.

Read it all.

To understand the personal baggage that Pope Benedict XVI brought to the Holy Land this week, it is worth looking at his most accessible book, “Jesus of Nazareth”, published two years ago. With a mixture of intense piety and arcane scholarship, he reflects on the Jewish origins of Christianity’s dogmas and rites in a way that shows deep interest in the religion of ancient Israel–yet total conviction that the older faith’s true meaning is to be found only in Christ. Both in its rigour and in its devotion, the pope’s writing reflects the enclosed places in which he has spent most of his 82 years. First, the formal atmosphere of German academia, where charisma is a dirty word; and then the upper echelons of the Vatican, a world whose ethos, reasoning and vocabulary are utterly remote from the lives of most lay Catholics, let alone everyone else.

No surprise, then, that he lacked the street sense to send the right signals on a trip to the front line: the Middle Eastern confrontation zone of the three monotheistic faiths, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, a region that tests the skills of the savviest statesman. In the event, he deeply upset his Israeli hosts, and to a much milder extent his Palestinian ones too, both mainly through sins of omission.

Read it all.

When Kathryne Smith was young, her dad told her she was going to college. But to her, college was nothing but an abstract idea — like trying to visualize something while reading a book with no illustrations.

The word found its meaning when her family moved to Pittsburgh from Philadelphia in the 1930s.

When the family passed the University of Pittsburgh someone said, ‘That’s college.’ And I said ‘Oh, that’s where my father wanted me to go.’ ”

Now, at 88, Mrs. Smith tomorrow will be the oldest student ever to graduate from the Community College of Allegheny County.

Read it all (i love the picture!).

The first time Norma Freeman strayed from her Catholic faith, it was for love.

The second time, she was seeking new spiritual experiences.

Both times, Freeman came back. Now she’s 80 and volunteers her time to reach out to lapsed Catholics.

She’s one of the laypeople involved with the Catholics Returning Home program at St. Patrick Church in London in Madison County.

Read it all.

In a move cheered by conservatives, the Internal Revenue Service has ruled that ministers and pastors do not risk losing their tax-exempt status for engaging in political acts on behalf of issues such as traditional-values advocacy.

The IRS said in a letter to the Niemoller Foundation that the Houston-based nonprofit organization did not violate its tax-exempt status when it brought together pastors and politicians to champion moral issues during Republican Gov. Rick Perry’s 2006 re-election campaign.

Short of endorsing a particular candidate or spending substantial portions of their nonprofit budgets on legislative lobbying, ministers and their churches are free to engage in political acts on behalf of moral values, the IRS said. Clergy are also free to encourage their congregations’ members to get out the vote based on those issues and values.

Read it all.

Watch it all from NBC (difficult content which may not be appropriate for some younger blog readers).

All that confidence had been shattered by the time …[Lynette Sparks] spoke on Romans two months ago, as an impending graduate of Colgate Rochester Crozer. The Friday before that Sunday, the Dow had lost 122 points, sinking to 7,278. Unemployment was on its way to 8.5 percent for the month, and home foreclosures were rising by one-fifth from an already abysmal February.

So Ms. Sparks was engaging in both homiletics and autobiography when she called transition a “wilderness place, a place of wandering, a place of suspended animation, a place that appears dry and lifeless.” Her husband, Brad, who works in the auto-parts industry, had barely escaped three rounds of layoffs. And the ministry, her chosen profession, was suffering from a recession of its own at the very time she was going into the job market.

“Suddenly, for me, it’s economic, and it had never been economic before,” Ms. Sparks, 47, said in an interview. “Our plan had always been that I wouldn’t look for anything full time till our kids got out of high school in about five years. Now, with survival at stake, my assumption is that I can’t afford to take a part-time call. And my husband and I are asking how wide a net we need to cast.

Read it all.

For all their manifold disagreements, Christians and Muslims are both “people of the Book”, and have an obligation to get those holy books into the hands of as many people as they can. Spreading the Word is hard. The Bible is 800,000 words long and littered with tedious passages about “begatting.” Many have claimed that the Koran, though only around a tenth of the length of the Bible, is an even more difficult read. Edward Gibbon complained about its “endless incoherent rhapsody of fable and precept”. Scholars who spend their lives studying them still argue over their ambiguities, literary allusions and obscure references.

Yet there are more Bibles and Korans available in more languages than at any time in history. More than 100 million copies of the Bible are sold or given away every year. The Koran is ubiquitous in the Muslim world. Whole chapters of the book are used to decorate mosques. The faithful transcribe phrases and put them around their necks in amulets, use them on bumper stickers or as letterheads.

This mountain of holy books is a giant refutation of the secularisation thesis.

Read it all.