Like so many other couples these days, the Toronto-area business executive and her husband put off having children for years as they built successful careers. Both parents were in their 40s ”” and their first son just over a year old ”” when this spring the woman became pregnant a second time. Seven weeks in, an ultrasound revealed the Burlington, Ont., resident was carrying twins. “It came as a complete shock,” said the mother, who asked not to be named. “We’re both career people. If we were going to have three children two years apart, someone else was going to be raising our kids. … All of a sudden our lives as we know them and as we like to lead them, are not going to happen.”

She soon discovered another option: Doctors could “reduce” the pregnancy from twins to a singleton through a little-known procedure that eliminates selected fetuses ”” and has become increasingly common in the past two decades amid a boom in the number of multiple pregnancies.
Selective reductions are typically carried out for women pregnant with triplets or greater, where the risk of harm or death climbs sharply with each additional fetus. The Ontario couple is part of what some experts say is a growing demand for reducing twins to one, fuelled more by socio-economic imperatives than medical need, and raising vexing new ethical questions.

Experts question whether parents should choose to terminate a fetus just because of the impact the child would have on their lives, and note that even more medically necessary reductions can trigger lifelong angst and even threaten marriages.

Read it all (Hat tip:DT).

Still in debt [after his first start-up company failed], Mr. Gerber considered his career options. His mother kept encouraging him to get a “real” job, the kind that comes with an office and a boss. But, using the last $700 in his bank account, he decided to start another company instead.

With the new company, called Sizzle It, Mr. Gerber vowed to find a niche, reduce overhead and generally be more frugal. The company, which specializes in short promotional videos, was profitable the first year, he says.

Mr. Gerber, now 27, isn’t a millionaire, but he’s paid off his loans and doesn’t have to live with his parents (he rents an apartment in Hoboken, N.J.). And he thinks his experience can help other young people who face a daunting unemployment rate.

In October, Mr. Gerber started the Young Entrepreneur Council “to create a shift from a résumé-driven society to one where people create their own jobs,” he says. “The jobs are going to come from the entrepreneurial level.”

Read it all.

As faculty in a seminary of the church, we are especially conscious of the importance of intentional spiritual formation for pastoral ministry, the diaconate, and other forms of church leadership. Seminary students must receive the encouragement, urging, and instruction they need in order to find a stable and enlivening pattern of spiritual practice capable of sustaining them over the long haul in life and ministry.

-The LTSS Faculty, “Spirituality and Spiritual Formation”

Here are four questions:

How will you be spiritually sustained during your years in seminary and over the long haul in public ministry?

What is the spiritual life?

Why does Southern Seminary emphasize intentional spiritual formation?

Where do you begin?

Check the link for the answers.

In these darkening days between Hanukkah and Christmas, here is a story to keep your spirits high ”” a story of cooperation between Jews and Christians, between people named Seinfeld and Samberg and people named Morgan and Lohan. A story of celebrities putting ethnic differences aside to raise money for charity.

By making fun of ”” or is that gently teasing? ”” Jews….

Read it all.

Founded in 1973, St. Bartholomew’s began as a group of worshippers under the guidance of the Rev. Harold Hopkins. For the first two years, St. Bart’s borrowed space in other local churches and schools. 1976, it had its first permanent home in a converted building on Route 1 in Yarmouth. From the beginning, St. Bart’s cultivated a hands-on, everyone-involved parish family. After the Rev. Hopkins left to become bishop of North Dakota, the congregation was ready for a full-time vicar and called the Rev. Gil Birney in 1983.

Under the Rev. Birney’s leadership, St. Bart’s flourished, eventually gaining parish status. In 1988, members built the timber-framed building — complete with a vaulted sanctuary ceiling — in a wooded setting along Gilman Road that remains their home.

In 2007, St. Bart’s welcomed its current rector, the Rev. Nina Pooley, previously associate chaplain of St. Paul’s School in Brooklandville, Md.

Read it all.

Consider the options in reverse order. To begin with, perhaps the writers and poets whom Brooks questions have actually noticed something that the rest of us are ignoring or covering up. This is what Nietzsche himself thought. “I have come too early,” he wrote. “God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.” On this account there really is no agreement in the culture about what constitutes a well-lived life; God is dead in this particular sense. But many people carry on in God’s shadow nevertheless; they take the life at which they are aiming to be one that is justifiable universally. In this case the happiness that Brooks identifies in the suburbs is not genuine happiness but self-deceit.
What would such a self-deceiving life look like? It would be a matter not only of finding meaning in one’s everyday engagements, but of clinging to the meanings those engagements offer as if they were universal and absolute. Take the case of religion, for example. One can imagine a happy suburban member of a religious congregation who, in addition to finding fulfillment for herself in her lofty and ennobling religious pursuits, experiences the aspiration to this kind of fulfillment as one demanded of all other human beings as well. Indeed, one can imagine that the kind of fulfillment she experiences through her own religious commitments depends upon her experiencing those commitments as universal, and therefore depends upon her experiencing those people not living in the fold of her church as somehow living depleted or unfulfilled lives. I suppose this is not an impossible case. But if this is the kind of fulfillment one achieves through one’s happy suburban religious pursuit, then in our culture today it is self-deception at best and fanaticism at worst. For it stands in constant tension with the demand in the culture to recognize that those who don’t share your religious commitments might nevertheless be living admirable lives. There is therefore a kind of happiness in a suburban life like this. But its continuation depends upon deceiving oneself about the role that any kind of religious commitment can now play in grounding the meanings for a life.

But there is another option available. Perhaps Nietzsche was wrong about how long it would take for the news of God’s death to reach the ears of men. Perhaps he was wrong, in other words, about how long it would take before the happiness to which we can imagine aspiring would no longer need to aim at universal validity in order for us to feel satisfied by it. In this case the happiness of the suburbs would be consistent with the death of God, but it would be a radically different kind of happiness from that which the Judeo-Christian epoch of Western history sustained.

Read it all.

Nearing 40 and nearly broke, ousted from his last job as an English professor, a folklore buff named Robert Winslow Gordon set out in the spring of 1926 from his temporary home on the Georgia seacoast, lugging a hand-cranked cylinder recorder and searching for songs in the nearby black hamlets.

One particular day, Mr. Gordon captured the sound of someone identified only as H. Wylie, singing a lilting, swaying spiritual in the key of A. The lyrics told of people in despair and in trouble, calling on heaven for help, and beseeching God in the refrain, “Come by here.”

With that wax cylinder, the oldest known recording of a spiritual titled for its recurring plea, Mr. Gordon set into motion a strange and revealing process of cultural appropriation, popularization and desecration. “Come By Here,” a song deeply rooted in black Christianity’s vision of a God who intercedes to deliver both solace and justice, by the 1960s became the pallid pop-folk sing-along “Kumbaya.” And “Kumbaya,” in turn, has lately been transformed into snarky shorthand for ridiculing a certain kind of idealism, a quest for common ground.

Read it all (another from the long line of should-have-already-been-posted–KSH).

The father of the Academic Magnet High School student who set himself on fire near the school’s front entrance this week said his son “was struck with a despair so dark that he could not see beyond it, in spite of the love, support and counseling he received.”

Trace Williams appeared briefly before news media Friday to explain his son Aaron’s death. Reading from a prepared statement, and citing a letter written by the 16-year-old before his death, Williams said the self- immolation was an attempt “to reach out to as many hearts as possible and to emphasize the importance of living lives of love and compassion.”

He said his son’s lifelong ambition was to be a doctor and help others….

Read it all.

The current economic crisis and the ignorance of some Western scholars are fueling prejudices against Islam, participants said at a conference in Poland Friday.

The daylong conference in the western Polish city of Wroclaw considered the media portrayal of Islam, attitudes toward Muslim immigrants in France and the perception of Muslims in the former Soviet Union.

Imam Ali Abi Issa, of Wroclaw’s mosque, said some Western scholars are fueling Islamophobia by studying Islamic texts without looking at historical or cultural contexts.

Read it all.

UN talks in Cancun have reached a deal to curb climate change, including a fund to help developing countries.

Nations endorsed compromise texts drawn up by the Mexican hosts, despite objections from Bolivia.

The draft documents say deeper cuts in carbon emissions are needed, but do not establish a mechanism for achieving the pledges countries have made.

Read it all.

The financial crisis has been hard on just about everyone. But for older folks, the pain is proving particularly deep and lasting ”” a problem that could put a drag on the economy for many years to come.

People approaching retirement age are suffering on all fronts. Even with the Dow above 11,000, their stock holdings are worth less than they were back in 2006. Fixed-income investments hardly provide any income. Home prices remain depressed.

As a result, more older people are trying to make up lost ground by staying at work longer or rejoining the labor force ”“ precisely at a time when finding a job is exceedingly difficult.

Read it all.

Elizabeth and I went to see this movie last night. Intriguing to watch how they do a motion picture without the access to normal “motion” in terms of the story line. James Franco was fantastic–KSH.

Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition, when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

–C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory” sermon preached on June 8, 1942

Gracious God, who didst call thy monk Thomas Merton to proclaim thy justice out of silence, and moved him in his contemplative writings to perceive and value Christ at work in the faiths of others: Keep us, like him, steadfast in the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ; who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Make us, we beseech thee, O Lord our God, watchful and heedful in awaiting the coming of thy Son Christ our Lord; that when he shall come and knock, he shall find us not sleeping in sin, but awake and rejoicing in his praises; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Gelasian Sacramentary

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren.”

–Luke 22:31-32

The British ambassador to the Vatican warned that Pope Benedict XVI’s invitation to Anglican opponents of female priests to convert en masse to Catholicism was so inflammatory that it might lead to discrimination and even violence against Catholics in Britain, according to a secret US diplomatic cable.

Talking to an American diplomat after the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, met the pope in November 2009, Francis Campbell said the surprise Vatican move had placed Williams “in an impossible situation” and “Anglican-Vatican relations were facing their worst crisis in 150 years as a result of the pope’s decision”.

Read it all.

The congregation of St. John’s the Evangelist in Calgary voted in late November to enter into serious discussions with the Roman Catholic Church about becoming a part of its Anglican Ordinariate in Canada. It is the first parish of the Anglican Church of Canada to move toward becoming a part of the Catholic Church since Pope Benedict XVI announced the creation of the ordinariate just over a year ago.

The news was announced in a letter from Anglican Bishop Derek Hoskin of the diocese of Calgary to clergy in the diocese: “This is a step in a spiritual journey which St. John’s has been on for a number of years and is in response to the announcement on Nov. 4, 2009 of the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus by Pope Benedict XVI.”

Bishop Hoskin said that he and the St. John’s clergy have agreed not to comment further before the ordinariate is in place, those wishing to join have received an invitation, and parishioners and clergy have individually decided what they will do.

Read it all.

Along with jobs and 401(k)s, a major casualty of the Great Recession has been charitable giving. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, America’s charities report an 11% drop in contributions in the past year alone. There’s one big exception: Charitable contributions to religious groups dropped by only 0.1% from 2007 to 2009.

Americans are generous people. In 2006, as detailed in our recent book, “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us,” 80% of all Americans reported having made a charitable contribution in the previous year. But some””the religious””contributed more than others.

Of the most secular fifth of Americans, two-thirds said they gave money to charity in the previous year. That’s an impressive number, but it pales next to the 94% of the most religious fifth who reported making a charitable donation.

Read it all.

Christmas will no longer be on credit for many shoppers, despite tempting offers from retailers and credit card companies trying to coax the plastic out of consumers’ wallets.

The lowest percentage of shoppers in the 27-year-history of a national survey said they used credit cards over the Thanksgiving weekend, while the use of general credit cards like Visa and MasterCard fell 11 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, according to the credit bureau TransUnion.

“Cash is the route I’m taking this year, from past experiences with credit cards and being in debt and trying to pay it off for so many years,” said Liz Gonzalez, a community-college employee in Signal Hill, Calif. Her debt problems started two Christmases ago, when she charged the gifts that turned into the bills that sent her life into disarray. Ms. Gonzalez, 40, still owes $2,200 from that Christmas, and said her recent divorce had been caused in part by the stress of debt.

Read it all.

Three dioceses in Yorkshire ”” Brad­ford, Ripon & Leeds, and Wakefield ”” should be abolished and replaced by a single, larger diocese, a report from the Dioceses Commission sug­gests.

The Commission began a review of the dioceses of Bradford, Ripon & Leeds, Sheffield, and Wakefield, and their boundaries with the diocese of York, last year. Its report, published yesterday, concludes “that the exist­ing configuration of the dioceses in West Yorkshire is no longer appro­priate for the Church’s mission and not sustainable into the future”.

It recommends, however, that the “distinct community” of South York­shire continue to have its own dio­cese of Sheffield.

Read it all.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has travelled to Rome and Athens, holding private meetings with Pope Benedict XVI and the Archbishop Hieronymus II, the primate of the Church of Greece.

On Nov 17, Dr. Rowan Williams delivered a lecture commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. He joined Cardinal Walter Kasper, Cardinal-designate Kurt Koch and Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon in addressing the evening service at the Sala San Pio V in Rome.

The lectures were part of the council’s Nov 15-19 plenary session focusing on the theme: “Towards a new stage of ecumenical dialogue.” The speakers noted the weakening spirit of ecumenism, but underscored the importance of continued church relations.

Read it all.

In yesterday’s post, I talked about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s walk across the lunar surface back in 1969 and wondered, how come they walked such a modest distance? Less than a hundred yards from their lander?

Today Neil Armstrong wrote in to say, here are the reasons:

* It was really, really hot on the moon, 200 degrees Fahrenheit. We needed protection.

* We were wearing new-fangled, water-cooled uniforms and didn’t know how long the coolant would last.

* We didn’t know how far we could go in our space suits.

* NASA wanted us to conduct our experiments in front of a fixed camera.

* We [meaning Neil] cheated just a little, and very briefly bounded off to take pictures of some interesting bedrock.

Read it all.

From here:

From officiating at a wedding ceremony to eulogizing at a funeral, it’s clear that the job of a clergy member is complex but crucial. Whether you’re a priest, minister, vicar, rabbi, or bishop, it’s typically your job to provide religious and spiritual guidance to members of your congregation. While you will most likely rely on the authority of a particular religious text””the Bible, the Koran, or the Torah, for example””you will encounter challenging spiritual questions and earthly events that require your own interpretation of those texts and rely on your own knowledge, understanding, and faith experiences. Much of your work can be administrative””managing the day-to-day operations and staff of a religious center or place of worship””and very time consuming. It can also be highly social, whether you’re visiting congregation members in the hospital, attending a community event, or counseling a couple on the brink of divorce. It will be your responsibility to grow your congregation, find reliable lay leaders to run workshops or handle finances, and even oversee the repair of old lighting fixtures and damaged organ pipes. Keep in mind, too, that not all clerics have congregations, but may serve in other capacities….

There would seem to be no shortage of clergy in this country. There were about 670,000 jobs held by clergy in 2008, and the Labor Department expects that number to climb by 13 percent over the next decade or so. Note that opportunities are often the most numerous in smaller congregations, although pay tends to be lower.

Read the rest and check out the whole list at the link.

This is a dark hour. The Kyoto Protocol will end in 2012. With every failed summit, the likelihood grows that there will be no new treaty to replace it. Kyoto was far from perfect. The nations covered by the protocol’s targets account for less than a quarter of global emissions. And it did not cover shipping or aviation. But Kyoto did represent a global recognition of the need to tackle climate change. And if the treaty lapses without a replacement the small successes it has delivered, such as finance for developing nations that protect their rainforests, could unravel.

Optimists point out that Spain and India have made constructive moves over the past fortnight. But Japan, Canada and Russia have grown more recalcitrant. And the election of a host of new climate sceptic Republican members to Congress in last month’s mid-term US elections has tied President Barack Obama’s hands. China, meanwhile, remains the roadblock that it was in Copenhagen.

It is tempting to argue that the search for a binding global deal should now be abandoned and to recommend that governments focus on national emission reductions, bilateral deals where possible or even adaptation to a hotter planet. Yet if nations go their own way, we will likely descend into a beggar-thy-neighbour world, in which countries with laxer emissions controls poach manufacturing capacity from states that take a lead. It is hard to see even the most modest national emission reduction efforts surviving under such circumstances.

Read it all.

Attending religious services regularly and having close friends in the congregation are key to having a happier, more satisfying life, a study finds.

Even attending services irregularly ”” just several times a year ”” increases a sense of well-being, so long as there is a circle of friendships within the community and a strong, shared religious identity.

That’s the key finding of a study released today in the December issue of the American Sociological Review.

Read it all.

In order rightly to appreciate the position of those…Branches of the Church, of which we are severally members, it will be necessary that you should fully understand the principles upon which the great work of the Reformation was conducted, and what it really effected. This is far too wide a subject for me to do more than just glance at; but I would wish you carefully to note that it was not a work completed at once, or by one generation of men; and that it resulted in two inestimable blessings, which we now possess as our inheritance, which have preserved to us “the truth once delivered to the saints,” and which, I trust, we shall faithfully hand down to those that come after.

The first and greatest of these blessings was The Bible, which now once more received its due reverence and regard; and, having been translated into the language known and used by the people, was placed by command in all churches and places of public worship, that it might be read by all for their guidance and comfort, and be referred to by all who, respecting any matters of faith or doctrine, wished to “search the Scriptures to see whether these things were so.” [Acts xvii. 11.] And it is the great excellence of the Church, to which we belong, that, in all her formularies and articles, she shrinks from no inquiry, and fears no comparison with the written Word; and teaches expressly, in her Sixth Article, that “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation, so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.”

The other blessing I refer to is “the Book of Common Prayer,” which serves not only as our guide and assistant in public worship, and in most simple and spiritual language leads us with one mind and one voice to praise and worship God; but it also provides us with Confessions of Faith, and standards of doctrinal truth, by means of which the maintenance of a full and pure system of Christian belief is always preserved, and the Gospel-message necessarily set forth before men.

The weakness of man is so extreme, the temptation to evil so great, and false doctrine so agreeable to our natural inclination, that we may truly bless God that we have not been left, each of us to search out for himself, without such a guide to help us, the great and essential truths contained in the Word of God.

Read it all.

Almighty God, source of justice beyond human knowledge: We offer thanks that thou didst inspire Karl Barth to resist tyranny and exalt thy saving grace, without which we cannot apprehend thy will. Teach us, like him, to live by faith, and even in chaotic and perilous times to perceive the light of thy eternal glory, Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, throughout all ages. Amen.

O Gracious God and most merciful Father, who has vouchsafed us the rich and precious jewel of thy holy Word: Assist us with thy Spirit that it may be written in our hearts to our everlasting comfort, to reform us, to renew us according to thine own image, to build us up into the perfect building of thy Christ, and to increase us in all heavenly virtues. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for the same Jesus Christ’s sake.

–Geneva Bible

In thee, O LORD, do I seek refuge; let me never be put to shame; in thy righteousness deliver me! Incline thy ear to me, rescue me speedily! Be thou a rock of refuge for me, a strong fortress to save me! Yea, thou art my rock and my fortress; for thy name’s sake lead me and guide me, take me out of the net which is hidden for me, for thou art my refuge. Into thy hand I commit my spirit; thou hast redeemed me, O LORD, faithful God.

–Psalm 31:1-5