Author Po Bronson believes that kids today hear too much praise ”” much of it unearned. A couple of years ago, he wrote an article for New York Magazine on the subject, detailing how praise does not, in fact, lead to self-esteem and achievement as many parents seem to believe.

“Children today hear so much praise that they have decoded its real meaning,” he explains to Robert Siegel. “When kids fail and all we do is praise them, there’s a lot of duplicity in that, and kids begin to hear ‘Nothing matters to my parents more than me doing great or me being smart,’ and failure becomes almost a taboo subject.”

Bronson expands on the subject of praise ”” and other child-rearing issues ”” in his new book NurtureShock, which he co-authored with Ashley Merryman.

I caught this one last night coming home from a doctor’s appointment–listen to it all.

While Californians are still feeling the sting of income and sales tax hikes signed into law earlier this year, now comes news that state tax authorities plan to take a little more from their pockets.

For only the second time in 30 years, the tax board is lowering the point where each tax bracket begins, bumping many people into a higher category. At the same time, officials are cutting back some deductions. Everyone will pay more, even people whose bracket or income doesn’t change.

The extra sums will total as much as $140 per family, on top of the increases previously enacted.

Read or listen to it all.

Scientists in Oregon have developed a technique that could be used to prevent certain genetic diseases. They’ve demonstrated it in monkeys and are anxious to try it in people. The technique raises ethical questions, however, because it makes a permanent genetic change not just in an individual, but in all generations that follow.

The technique involves an unusual set of genes in the human body. Most of our genes are in our chromosomes, which are in the cell’s inner sanctum, the nucleus. But 37 human genes are outside the nucleus. They are contained in tiny bodies called mitochondria, which float around in our cells. Mitochondria are the mini power plants for our cells. And mutations in the genes inside mitochondria can cause disease.

Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University are trying to figure out how to treat this class of rare genetic diseases. They’ve been working with the eggs of rhesus monkeys. If you fix a genetic problem in an egg, you will fix it in all the cells the egg grows into ”” the whole animal.

Read it all.

Dear Dr. Harmon:

……

I know that I greatly understate myself when I say that Anglicanism on this continent is currently quite complex and confusing, especially when it comes to predicting the future direction of our great tradition. I personally am strongly committed to ministering within the Anglican tradition in a way that upholds the orthodox faith, both in theology and polity. For this reason I am both encouraged and troubled by the recent formation of the ACNA. As has been expressed by many, most notably the Communion Partners and the Anglican Communion Institute, the ACNA does seem to be significantly compromising its ecclesiology in order to move beyond the tensions that have for so long plagued our Communion. As a current parishioner at an ACNA church and as someone looking towards ordination, I find this deeply troubling. At the same time, recent decisions in TEC provide little comfort or hope, reinforcing my belief that the possibility of finding in TEC a place to minister in faithfulness and integrity all but impossible.

As a faithful leader of our communion and someone who I know to be committed to the orthodox faith, both in belief and practice, I am writing to ask for your input into this complex situation. Do you still see the Communion Partners remaining in TEC long term, and therefore is there still hope for young ordinands to pursue Holy Orders through the traditional means? On the other hand, do you believe that as the ACNA develops there is hope for a strengthening of its ecclesiological foundation? To this end I am comforted by the involvement of the Rt. Rev. Jack Iker and the Rev. Dr. Robert Munday, as well as the ecumenical voice of Metropolitan Jonah.

With these two “tracks” (to employ recent Anglican terminology) to orthodoxy, is there any hope that the two might eventually partner together and become a unified voice? Closer to home, I think of the presence of the AMiA within the Diocese of South Carolina. I know very little of the relationship between the two, but do you see any hope for partnership in ministry and mission between the two?

I know I have asked more than can possibly be answered, so I would appreciate any thoughts or remarks that you may have on any part of the aforementioned topics.

I notice on the Diocese of Kentucky’s website, their new marketing slogan is “Engaging Christ; Embracing the world.”

Shouldn’t we be embracing Christ, and engaging the world?

In a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.

These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.

The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day””which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school””typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved””the process is often endless””they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.

Read it all.

Conservative Christian groups on Wednesday (Aug. 26) ramped up opposition to health care reform, saying the current system “has problems” but “it is working.”

Members of the newly formed Freedom Federation, comprised of some of the largest conservative religious groups in the country, say they oppose taxpayer-supported abortion, rationed health care for the elderly and government control of personal health decisions.

Mathew Staver, who heads the legal group Liberty Counsel and is dean at Liberty University’s law school, said the group agrees on certain core values.

Read it all.

A Muslim woman on Wednesday sued a Michigan judge for telling her to remove her headscarf in his courtroom, claiming he violated her First Amendment right to practice her religion.

Raneen Albaghdady, 32, says she felt humiliated when Wayne County Circuit Judge William Callahan ordered her to remove her hijab at a June 16 hearing in his Detroit courtroom. The headscarf, which does not cover the face, is worn by many Muslims in the U.S.

“This is the country and the land of freedom, and we’re not supposed to be treated like this for the scarf,” the Dearborn Heights woman said at a news conference Wednesday at the Southfield headquarters of the Council on American-Islamic Relation’s Michigan chapter, which joined in the federal lawsuit against Callahan and Wayne County.

Read it all.

US-based International Christian Concern (ICC) is reporting that an 18-year-old Christian has been accused of blasphemy, beaten, and imprisoned in Gujranwala, Pakistan. ICC says the man has been falsely accused.

The young man, Safian Masih, lived in a mixed neighbourhood of both Christians and Muslims. On August 8, the young daughter of one of his Muslim neighbours demanded that Safian bring her items from the grocery store. Safian refused, and she slapped him. Safian slapped her back, and the argument escalated to include both families.

Read it all.

Two priests in the Diocese of Minnesota have agreed to stand for possible nomination by petition as their diocese seeks its ninth bishop.

The Rev. Doyle Turner, rector of Trinity Church, Park Rapids, and the Rev. Doug Sparks, rector of St. Luke’s, Rochester, will undergo background checks before the standing committee decides whether to certify them as nominees by petition.

Read it all.

Two Florida school officials will be in court next month to answer charges that they violated a court order when they prayed in public after a school secretary was cleared on similar charges.

The case, which defense attorneys say is an unprecedented display of government intrusion into the right of personal religious expression, pits the American Civil Liberties Union against two Christian school employees.

Principal Frank Lay and Athletic Director Robert Freeman of Santa Rosa County, in northern Florida, agreed to a settlement last January after the ACLU filed suit on behalf of two students who alleged improper proselytizing.

Read it all.

As parishioners approached St. Timothy Lutheran Church on Sunday morning, something unusual was apparent.

On the signs outside the church, the word “Lutheran” was draped in black. Only the words “St. Timothy” remained visible.

“I asked that be done because I’m ashamed,” the church’s pastor, Richard Mahan, told the congregation later Sunday morning. “I’m ashamed of what the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has done to a church I’ve loved for 40 years.”

Read it all.

Williams and Wright both acknowledge that progress is not being made in the controversy over homosexuality, but blame TEC for this failure. Williams writes: ‘a realistic assessment of what Convention has resolved does not suggest that it will repair the broken bridges into the life of other Anglican provinces… The repeated request for moratoria on the election of partnered gay clergy as bishops and on liturgical recognition of same-sex partnerships has clearly not found universal favour.’

Wright puts his case more bluntly and reveals his impatience: ‘the Communion is indeed already broken… the breach has already occurred. We are not, then, looking now at TEC choosing for the first time to “walk apart”, but at the recognition that they did so some time ago and have done nothing to indicate a willingness to rejoin the larger Communion’ (3).

Thus Wright declares with characteristic bluntness that authoritarianism which Williams shares but prefers not to advertise. Both insist there is an Anglican consensus that homosexuality is immoral, and on that basis blame the Americans for acting contrary to it. Outside the higher echelons of church bureaucracies this seems a bizarre claim: in normal English usage ‘consensus’ means ‘general agreement (of opinion, testimony, etc.)’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary) or ‘general or widespread agreement among all the members of a group’ (Encarta Dictionary). The current controversy is precisely about whether homosexuality is indeed immoral, and as long as debate continues nothing could be clearer than the fact that there is no consensus.

What Williams and Wright mean by ‘consensus’ is not in fact consensus at all; they make no attempt to appeal to a general agreement. They appeal instead to a few central authorities, chiefly Lambeth 1998, primates’ meetings and the Windsor Report, plus what they claim the church has always taught. Far from being consensus this is better described as ‘a principle, tenet or system’, or perhaps ‘a belief or set of beliefs that a religion holds to be true’. The word being defined here (Concise Oxford Dictionary and Encarta respectively) is ‘dogma’.

Read it all.

It is rarely good to be female anywhere in the developing world today, but in India and China the situation is dire: in those countries, more than 1.5 million fewer girls are born each year than demographics would predict, and more girls die before they turn 5 than would be expected. (In China in 2007, there were 17.3 million births ”” and a million missing girls.) Millions more grow up stunted, physically and intellectually, because they are denied the health care and the education that their brothers receive.

Among policymakers, the conventional wisdom is that such selective brutality toward girls can be mitigated by two factors. One is development: surely the wealthier the home, the more educated the parents, the more plugged in to the modern economy, the more a family will invest in its girls. The other is focusing aid on women. The idea is that a mother who has more money, knowledge and authority in the family will direct her resources toward all her children’s health and education. She will fight for her girls.

Yet these strategies ”” though invaluable ”” underestimate the complexity of the situation in certain countries.

Read it all.

…the salvation, which is announced universally, is exclusively accomplished and applied through the work of the Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Both the Psalm citation and Moses and Jesus bear witness to this exclusivity. I believe Rabbi Wilson was referring to Psalm 119:99, which reads, “I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.” Taken as a whole, this verse points in an exclusive, not an inclusive, direction. At the very heart of Moses’ articulation of covenant obligations is exclusivity. Note the first two commandments: “No other gods before me” and “No carved idols” (Exodus 20:3-4).

In the Christian New Testament, Jesus and his followers taught exclusivity in terms of salvation accomplished and applied, though again they did assert it should be offered to all. The Jesus who said to make disciples of all nations and ethnic groups and to teach them all that he had commanded them had as part of his teaching: “I am the way the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6-7; see also Matthew 28:18-30 and other instances of this radical claim of Jesus ”” John 7:28, 8:19, 55 and 15:21).

Rabbi Wilson calls for dialogue. I wonder if the inclusivism approach to dialogue that Rabbi Wilson espouses is broad enough to encompass a person like me ”” an exclusivist, who would dialogue for better understanding as well as for an opportunity to “speak to truth in love” about the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ alone.

Read it all.

From here:

I read a recent letter referring to the turmoil in our Episcopal Church and respect the writer’s sincere thoughts and knowledge of our heritage. However, it seems we’ve gone around this block before, and as we all know, the whole world is in turmoil.

We as a church have turned our back on our basic foundational teaching, such as the 39 articles of religion. We have been called to change the world, but it appears the world has changed us.

We in the Diocese of South Carolina have a brilliant, devoted bishop who is calling all of us to pray for our church. The Rt. Rev. Mark Lawrence, bishop of South Carolina, has as much spiritual maturity as most leaders in the Anglican Communion. I urge all Episcopalians to take his lead and pray for the future of our church. As believers we should pray daily for President Barack Obama and the future of America.

JACK CRANWELL
Gin House Court
Charleston

In the glare of intense media scrutiny, a call by the lieutentant governor to resign and pending impeachment talks by House Republicans, Gov. Mark Sanford delivered a message Wednesday to reporters and his political enemies: back off.

While everyday South Carolinians have moved on since he admitted to an extramarital affair about two months ago, the governor said, the media are trying to rewrite history and his political enemies are scavenging for payback ammunition.

Sanford said that if his record is stacked against the records of past governors and other politicians, he’ll come out looking “incredibly good.”

Read it all.

Quite the graphic.

[Walter] Altmann touched on a variety of events marking milestones this year and next, including the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the upcoming centennial of the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh.

He tied those episodes to some challenges of the present, including the shift of Christianity’s “centre of gravity” to the global south, the need for the WCC’s constituency to be more representative, the problems of poverty and “climate injustice” and the openness to change required for radical discipleship.

Read it all and follow the link at the bottom for more.

The editorial [in the Tablet] has value for several reasons. First, it proves once again that people don’t need to actually live in the United States to have unhelpful and badly informed opinions about our domestic issues. Second, some of the same pious voices that once criticized U.S. Catholics for supporting a previous president now sound very much like acolytes of a new president. Third, abortion is not, and has never been, a “specifically Catholic issue,” and the editors know it. And fourth, the growing misuse of Catholic “common ground” and “common good” language in the current health-care debate can only stem from one of two sources: ignorance or cynicism.

No system that allows or helps fund””no matter how subtly or indirectly””the killing of unborn children, or discrimination against the elderly and persons with special needs, can bill itself as “common ground.” Doing so is a lie.

Read it all.

The six candidates for Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia will be at the Church of the Good Shepherd, 2230 Walton Way, from 6 to 9:30 p.m. Friday.

The meeting is one of several held across the Diocese this week to introduce candidates to replace Georgia’s ninth Bishop Henry Louttit, who is retiring.

Read it all.

You don’t think there are enough hours in the day for laypeople? Try being a parish pastor.

There’s all the spiritual and sacramental ministry the position entails, plus the work that goes along with being, quite often, the only priest in a sizable suburban parish with plenty of staff and even more demands.

How does a pastor handle it all? This summer, in an effort to help answer that question, the International Institute for Clergy Formation at Seton Hall University in New Jersey joined with the Washington-based National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management to offer a “best practices” seminar to 28 parish priests — most of them from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which constitute Region III of the U.S. bishops’ conference, but also from West Virginia, Florida and Louisiana.

The idea to conduct such a seminar had been in the mind of Father Paul Holmes, a Newark, N.J., archdiocesan priest, since 2000, when he taught at the Pontifical North American College in Rome. But different assignments — and his own “busy-ness” — kept him from actively pursuing the idea for several years.

Read it all.

It was my joy and privilege on Saturday, Aug. 22, to share in the consecration of the Rt. Rev. William H. Ilgenfritz, the first new bishop for the Anglican Church in North America. Archbishop Robert W. Duncan was the chief consecrator, and the other co-consecrators were Bishop Keith Ackerman, Bishop Edward MacBurney, and Bishop William Wantland, who also preached at the service. Thirteen bishops participated in the apostolic laying on of hands in the historic ceremony. Bishop Ilgenfritz continues to serve as Rector of St. Mary’s Anglican Church in Charleroi, Pa., in the Diocese of Pittsburgh. The service took place at the local Roman Catholic parish a few blocks away, called Mary, Mother of the Church. The new bishop previously served here in the Diocese of Fort Worth as Rector of St. John’s Church in Brownwood from 1990 to 1994.

It is important to recognize that this first consecration was of a Forward in Faith Bishop and that it creates a new diocese for FIF congregations across the country. This new Missionary Diocese of All Saints begins with about 13 congregations and is charged with planting new churches for traditional anglo-catholics in the United States and Canada. Bishop Ilgenfritz continues to serve as Vice-president of Forward in Faith, North America.

This consecration fulfills the vision of the Episcopal Synod of America, formed in 1989 here in Fort Worth, to create a non-geographic diocese or province for congregations upholding the faith and practice of the historic catholic church, including the tradition of an all-male priesthood. It secures a continuing line of apostolic succession for traditional anglo-catholics, which is no longer possible in The Episcopal Church in the United States.

Please continue to pray for Bishop Ilgenfritz and this new missionary diocese.

The Rt. Rev. Jack Leo Iker
Bishop of Fort Worth
Aug. 25, 2009

Let me first say that one of my closest friends lost two of his closest friends in the Pan Am jet and I remember vividly the anguished phone calls as he dashed up to Lockerbie to help identify bodies and property. I am not about to minimize the horror and appalling criminality of the bombing.

I haven’t fully made up my mind about the release of the man convicted but I sense that the reaction in America may not fully understand how many people here see things.

What people in America may not realize is this.

1. There is a widespread opinion in the UK that the man in question was put up as a fall guy for various reasons and actually had nothing to do with the Pan Am flight. This opinion is not based on hearsay or guesswork but on the continued strong representations which have been made from various quarters about evidence that wasn’t presented, and about various factors which led up to the finger being pointed at Libya rather than, say, Syria or other sources of terrorism. I know the decision to send the man home wasn’t based on a retrial or the consideration of such evidence, but we have had that put forward by serious reporters over quite a long time, creating a climate in which many, perhaps the majority in the UK, really do believe that the conviction was, at best, not proven. There was quite a shrewd article in our of our papers today saying that the real shame about his sending back is that there should have been a retrial with the new evidence and he might have been cleared.

2. Many people in the UK see the reaction in the U.S. as being typical U.S. anti-Arab and particularly anti-Libya reaction. Because we are conditioned to be a bit worried about U.S. knee-jerk pro-Israel attitudes we tend to distance ourselves from that kind of position….

Read it all.

Boeing Co. said it will apply for a building permit to add a 787 Dreamliner facility in South Carolina in a “procedural” move as the company considers its first commercial assembly line outside of Washington state.

The planemaker plans to notify South Carolina officials today that it’s filing for permits, Russ Young, a spokesman at Boeing’s commercial-aircraft headquarters near Seattle, said in an interview yesterday.

“This does not mean we’ve decided to locate the second line there,” Young said. “It’s strictly a procedural step. The process is comprehensive and requires significant lead time.”

Boeing is considering Everett, Washington; Charleston, South Carolina; and “other locations” for a Dreamliner assembly line….

Read it all.

Consider the following health insurance plan.

It refuses to pay for certain medical care and then doesn’t offer a clear explanation. It does pay for unhelpful care that ends up raising premiums. Its customer service can be hard to reach or unhelpful. And the people who are covered by this insurer have no choice but to remain with it ”” or, at best, to choose from one or two other insurers that are about as bad.

In all likelihood, I have just described your insurance plan.

Health insurers often act like monopolies ”” like a cable company or the Department of Motor Vehicles ”” because they resemble monopolies. Consumers, instead of being able to choose freely among insurers, are restricted to the plans their employer offers. So insurers are spared the rigors of true competition, and they end up with high costs and spotty service.

Read it all

Mr. [Bill] Sullivan, a former ELCA pastor, is national coordinator for the Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC), a collection of 226 congregations founded in March 2001 with 25 charter member churches dissatisfied with the denomination’s liberal drift.

Now the trickle has turned into a flood.

“It’s been going nonstop,” he said of his phone.

On Friday alone, he scheduled three visits to ELCA churches in Buffalo, N.Y. Sioux City, Iowa and Jacksonville, Fla., for later this fall. They are thinking of leaving, as were the 15 people who had stopped by the hotel suite that day. Twenty-five inquiries had come in that week alone, and that was before all the vote tallies were in down the street at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

He glanced at his e-mail.

“The train wreck is just about over,” he said, reading from a post sent by a delegate on the convention floor. “The first responders need to be ready.”

Read it all.

Lutherans are no strangers to discord and divisiveness. The Lutheran church was born under such conditions. Yet we also know the path to concord, expressed in these rather straight forward words in The Formula of Concord, written during a notable time of doctrinal controversy and discord in the church. Hear these words from the Kolb-Wengert translation:

“For these controversies are not merely misunderstandings or semantic arguments, where someone might think that one group had not sufficiently grasped what the other group was trying to say or that the tensions were based upon only a few specific words of relatively little consequence. Rather, these controversies deal with important and significant matters, and they are of such a nature that the positions of the erring party neither could nor should be tolerated in the church of God, much less be excused or defended.

“Therefore, necessity demands explanation of these disputed articles on the basis of God’s Word and reliable writings, so that those with a proper Christian understanding could recognize which position regarding the points under dispute is in accord with God’s Word and the Christian Augsburg Confession and which is not, and so that Christians of good will, who are concerned about the truth, might protect and guard themselves from the errors and corruptions that have appeared among us.”

The writers of this Formula pledged themselves, and I quote, “to the prophetic and apostolic writings of the Old and New Testaments, as to the pure, clear fountain of Israel, which alone is the one true guiding principle, according to which all teachers and teachings are to be judged and evaluated.” Discord can become concord when Christian individuals and Christian church bodies are faithful to the Holy Scriptures, which reveal the Gospel of God’s grace, forgiveness, and salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

Read it carefully and read it all.

Yes, we have avoided a depression. But let us count the costs.

Financial firms that made irresponsible and imprudent decisions have been rescued, propped up and bailed out.

AIG has received about $180 billion. That is almost $2,000 for every American household. That money has gone to sustain the bonuses of AIG and the financial health of its counterparties, such as Goldman Sachs. This is an obscene travesty.

The Fed currently holds $600 billion worth of Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie mortgage-backed securities. I am not optimistic about how that will turn out.

The Fed has injected hundreds of billions of reserves into member banks. This will fuel future inflation unless Bernanke is willing to raise interest rates when the recovery begins. There will be tremendous political pressure on him not to do so. So inflation is likely to come along with any recovery.

Read it all.