The teen pregnancy rate in the USA rose 3% in 2006, the first increase in more than a decade, according to data out today. The data also show higher rates of births and abortions among girls 15-19.

The numbers, calculated by the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit group that studies reproductive and sexual health, show a clear reversal from the downward trend that began in the 1990s.

About 7% of teen girls got pregnant in 2006, a rate of 71.5 pregnancies per 1,000 teens. That’s up slightly from 69.5 in 2005, Guttmacher says. In 1990, when rates peaked, about 12% got pregnant.

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These recent events demonstrate how quickly the nation’s escalating cyberbattles have outpaced the rush to find a deterrent, something equivalent to the cold-war-era strategy of threatening nuclear retaliation.

So far, despite millions of dollars spent on studies, that quest has failed. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made the most comprehensive effort yet to warn potential adversaries that cyberattacks would not be ignored, drawing on the language of nuclear deterrence.

“States, terrorists and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks,” she declared in a speech on Thursday that drew an angry response from Beijing. “Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society.”

But Mrs. Clinton did not say how the United States would respond, beyond suggesting that countries that knowingly permit cyberattacks to be launched from their territories would suffer damage to their reputations, and could be frozen out of the global economy.

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Watch it all–wonderful stuff.

“What do you want to do?” her mom responded. “Sell our house?”

Warning! Never suggest a grand gesture to an idealistic teenager. Hannah seized upon the idea of selling the luxurious family home and donating half the proceeds to charity, while using the other half to buy a more modest replacement home.

Eventually, that’s what the family did. The project ”” crazy, impetuous and utterly inspiring ”” is chronicled in a book by father and daughter scheduled to be published next month: “The Power of Half.” It’s a book that, frankly, I’d be nervous about leaving around where my own teenage kids might find it. An impressionable child reads this, and the next thing you know your whole family is out on the street.

At a time of enormous needs in Haiti and elsewhere, when so many Americans are trying to help Haitians by sending everything from text messages to shoes, the Salwens offer an example of a family that came together to make a difference ”” for themselves as much as the people they were trying to help.

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The future of religious broadcasting, a topic that will be discussed at synod in a few weeks time, is something that affects more than just the BBC. Attending “religion in the media” dos it becomes plain that pretty much all religious voices feel poorly represented by what they call the media. I want to take that perception with a huge pinch of salt, because in an open society it isn’t the function of professional journos to represent any religious leader’s point of view accurately so they won’t have to, but to report on what’s going on clearly and accurately. In a media environment with no middle men, religious leaders should learn to speak up clearly for themselves, and take the consequences. They shouldn’t expect the BBC to do this for them, because it can’t and shouldn’t. Yet, the fact that a whole range of religious leaders representing every major tradition in the UK feel chronically misunderstood must mean something. No smoke without fire.

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Jeiel Ballard and his girlfriend, both 16, are dressed up in their best attire, ready for a night of dancing and fun.

But there will be no close embraces or risque moves to test chaperones on the dance floor. The “purity ball” sponsored by their Seventh-day Adventist Church will feature a vow to abstain from sex until marriage and offer tips on “appropriate” touching between the sexes.

“It’s tough, but when you have sex at an early age it can become addictive,” Ballard said. “And when you get addicted … it can lead you down the wrong path.”

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The Archbishop…[said]: “There are, I know, those who struggle with the concept of allowing any exemptions provision for religious organisations in relation to discrimination in the field of employment. But the argument is a very simple one: religious organisations, like all organisations, need to be able to impose genuine occupational requirements in relation to those who serve them.

“Successive legislation over the past 35 years has always recognised the principle that religious organisations need the freedom to impose requirements in relation to belief and conduct which go beyond what a secular employer should be able to require.

“Noble Lords may believe that the Roman Catholic Church should allow priests to be married, they may think that the Church of England should hurry up with allowing women to become bishops. They may feel that many Churches and other religious organisations are wrong on matters of sexual ethics. But, if religious freedom means anything it must mean that those are matters for the churches and other religious organisations to determine for themselves in accordance with their own convictions. They are not matters for the law to impose. Start down that road and you will put law and conscience into inevitable collision. That way lies ruin.

“As Edmund Burke said: ‘Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.’ The onus is on Her Majesty’s Government to demonstrate why any narrowing of the provisions in existing legislation under the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Sexual Orientation Regulations 2003 needs to be made. There is absolutely no doubt that paragraph 2 of Schedule 9 to the Bill as introduced would constitute a significant narrowing of the present law for the reasons that I set out at the Second Reading. The Government’s Amendment 99A goes some way but does not go far enough to meeting these objections.

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[Interviewer]This is an appalling tragedy, the UN are saying that it may well be the biggest natural disaster in history. How do we reconcile our faith with this terrible tragedy on this scale?

ABY: I think it is not an easy thing to reconcile, the heart of it because it is just so so awful and the people suffering terribly. We tend to look for answers actually where there are sometimes no answers.

I think the reconciliation for me comes in my understanding of God as I see him in Jesus Christ. A God who is almighty and powerful is born like a little baby, grows up and is crucified, doing for us that which we can not do for ourselves. On the cross you hear him say “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” But that’s not the end. He rises from death, conquering evil and death and pointing out to us that actually in the end it is life in God which matters. So a God who has becomes like one of us, dies, rises, sends his Spirit, that we may be forgiven for the wrongs we have done in the past, and given new life in the present and hope for the future.

That kind of a God is neither to be seen as the sort of grand puppet master who just pulls pulleys nor is he a Dr Who, or a Wonderwoman or Superman but actually a God who is there with us. Rabbi Hugo Gryn was a survivor of the Holocaust and was asked the same question “Where was God when the Jews were being gassed? Why did he allow it to happen?” and Rabbi Hugo Gryn said “God in those gas chambers was being violated and blasphemed”. That God is always around us, with us, suffering with us and giving us the hope that in tragedy and death and things we can’t explain – in the end these things are not the end.

Read the whole thing (or use the audio link at the bottom).

A short while ago, I had a conversation with a friend who is going through ”˜Continuing Ministerial Education’ ””what use to be called Post-Ordination Training, or ”˜Potty’ by some wit. He had phoned me to express his concern at what seemed to be the message coming from diocesan management about the future of Anglican ministry, which envisaged significant changes in the nature and deployment of clergy.

That conversation has left me musing on what the church might look like in a decade or two, but also on the whole approach of the church’s ”˜managers’ ””its leaders and policy makers ””to issues which affect ministry at the ”˜grass roots’.

Behind this current thinking is a recent diocesan report which confronts the declining numbers of stipendiary clergy with proposals for a decreasing deployment of full-time clergy in the parishes. (This, of course, is not being driven by money ””it is simply a lack of people coming forward, let the reader understand.)

The clergyperson of the future will thus need to be, above all, a team leader, since he or she will be in no position to do personally the work that used to be presumed of clergy in the past. Only such team players will be affordable as stipendiary clergy. The individual ”˜specialists’, apparently, will have to work on a self-supporting basis.

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Some surprises started unfolding when a team of Calvin Theological Seminary professors and graduate students recently launched the Post-Reformation Digital Library.

Chief eye-openers included successfully tracking down rare Reformed theologians’ manuscripts once thought lost.

Another revelation: 16th-18th century theologians and philosophers were brutally honest about their doctrinal positions and emotions, including the well-known Reformer John Calvin, who pushed the boundaries of good taste in a sermon about rowdy adolescents.

“We’ve got things coming out of the woodwork that (were) lost for centuries,” said Todd Rester, a doctoral student who served on the project’s six-member editorial board.

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But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) 12 he entered once for all into the Holy Place, taking not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.

–Hebrews 9: 11,12

Just and merciful God, who in every generation hast raised up prophets, teachers and witnesses to summon the world to honor and praise thy holy Name: We give thanks for the calling of Timothy, Titus and Silas, whose gifts built up thy Church in the power of the Holy Spirit. Grant that we, too, may be living stones built upon the foundation of Jesus Christ our Savior; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God now and for ever. Amen.

Robert Gagnon, an associate professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and author of The Bible and Homosexual Practice, addressed the argument that St. Paul condemned only exploitative or pederastic homosexual behavior and he knew nothing of homosexual orientation or partnerships among peers. Dr. Gagnon argued that both were well- known in ancient Greece and Rome, and ”” while tolerated ”” were often condemned even by pagan writers.

Edith Humphrey, the William F. Orr professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, critiqued the writings of three theologians: Carter Heyward, Sarah Coakley and Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. Dr. Humphrey was especially critical of Dr. Rogers’ comparing human sexual intimacy to the relationship among the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The Rev. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, recently retired bishop of the Church of England’s Diocese of Rochester, spoke on theological differences between Christianity and Islam. The bishop cited Yale scholar Lamin Sanneh, a convert from Islam, who argues that the Bible, in contrast to the Quran, has an innate “translatability,” and therefore impels believers to shape their own cultures. The Bible’s very plasticity invites engagement with each new culture rather than retreat.

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Yet, many Anglicans will not be embracing the offer.

“The Episcopal Church will be only mildly impacted,” said Father Douglas Grandon, a former Anglican pastor who was ordained a Catholic priest in May 2008 and serves as associate pastor at Sacred Heart in Moline, Ill. “Most of those clergy and bishops have already left who had any Catholic sense. In the U.S., the primary ones who will consider this would be the Anglo-Catholics.”

Some Episcopal pastors and parishes upset with the direction of the national Episcopal Church (it has elected two bishops who are openly homosexual and has given the nod to blessing same-sex unions) have placed themselves under the leadership of more conservative bishops in the U.S., Africa or the Americas. For example, approximately 20 Episcopal parishes in California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Texas and Canada have left the Episcopal Church to join the Southern Cone of the Americas, an Anglican province in South America.

For those seeking to accept the Vatican’s offer, examples do exist of communities that have already done something similar. Since the implementation of the Pastoral Provision in 1980 ”” which allowed for the Catholic ordination of married Episcopal priests and authorized the establishment of personal Catholic parishes that retained certain Anglican liturgical elements ”” several Anglican-use communities have been created in the United States.

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I was speaking at a Methodist clergy gathering when a pastor told me that at first the hotel had not been excited about hosting the group, since its members weren’t going to run up any kind of bar bill. But then the hotel manager noted that they had more than made that up in how much was spent on dessert. The Methodists were welcome there anytime.

In my own denomination, the United Church of Christ, the clergy do their best not to leave those poor bartenders disappointed. It’s not that we like to drink, of course. It’s an economic justice issue. And we order dessert, too. Anything for the Lord.

Someone once said that when the Baptists come to town, the bars are empty but the liquor stores do very well. When the Episcopalians come to town, I suspect they’re both happy. Though maybe not the dessert makers: Episcopal clergy seem to be skinnier than the rest of us, and much better dressed in their clergy shirts and clerical collars. Plus, black is slimming….

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It was a blessing for me to encounter the theologian Austin Farrer a year before his sudden death. With him, I was one handshake away from his friends Tolkien, Lewis, and Sayers. In reflecting on natural disasters and God’s action in the world, he said with stark realism that in an earthquake, God’s will is that the elements of the Earth’s crust should behave in accordance with their nature. He was speaking of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, which killed about the same number of people counted so far in devastated Haiti. Most were killed in churches on All Saints Day, which gave license to rationalists of the “Enlightenment” to mock the doctrine of a good God. Atheists can suddenly pretend to be theologians puzzled by the contradictory behavior of a benevolent God. On the other extreme, doltish TV evangelists summon a half-baked Calvinism to say that people who get hit hard deserve it.

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Faced with continuing double-digit unemployment and public unease over his handling of the economy, Mr. Obama is expected to zero in on economic issues during Wednesday’s State of the Union and ahead of November’s midterm congressional elections. The proposals he unveiled Monday will be included in the administration’s fiscal 2011 budget proposal, set for release in a week.

“Joe and I are going to keep on fighting for what matters to middle-class families,” Mr. Obama said at the White House. “None of these steps alone will solve all the challenges facing the middle class… but hopefully some of these steps will reestablish some of the security that’s slipped away in recent years.”

Under its proposal, the White House says all eligible families making under $115,000 a year would see a bigger dependent-care-tax credit. Families could claim up to $3,000 in expenses for one child or $6,000 for two children. Families making less than $80,000 annually could claim a maximum credit of $2,100, up $900 from current law.

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The Government has lost in the House of Lords over its attempt in the Equality Bill to alter the law on who churches and other faith-based groups can employ.

Peers voted 216 to 178 in favour of Lady O’Cathain’s amendment to keep the current law unchanged.

Then in an extraordinary move the Government broke with House of Lords convention in a bid to damage Lady O’Cathain’s victory.

But in two further votes Lady O’Cathain won by 195 votes to 174 and by 177 votes to 172.

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The Anglican Archbishop of Jos has called for Muslims to hand back the bodies of any Christians shot in last week’s riots that he says could have been taken to the mosque in error.

The Most Rev Ben Kwashi said that Christians had been made the scapegoats for sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims that left nearly 500 people dead in the central Nigerian city. Those who took part in killings that nearly wiped out a village on the outskirts of Jos have yet to be found.

The Archbishop spoke to The Times as another Anglican bishop in Nigeria, the Right Rev Peter Imasuen of Benin City in southern Edo state, was ambushed and kidnapped shortly after arriving home from Sunday eucharist.

Read the whole thing.

The Anglican bishop of the Diocese of Benin, Church of Nigeria, was abducted at gunpoint from his home Jan. 24 after returning from a service of Holy Eucharist at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in the nation’s southern state of Edo, according to news reports.

Read it all and please keep him in your prayers.

While churches in England have, for the most part, modernised their services in an attempt to attract bigger crowds ”” some of them becoming painfully evangelical and happy clappy ”” the Episcopal church in the US still uses the older, traditional liturgies, the ones that I remember nostalgically. It was these superficial trappings that appealed to us originally. My husband, who writes music for a living, is a sucker for a choir ”” but it is the values that we found there that has really kept us coming back.

At our church, it is not unusual to see children with two mums or two dads, sitting next to Koreans, African-Americans, Hispanics, as well as many white middle-class families. There are monied people from Beverly Hills, rubbing shoulders with artists from downtown. Gay people next to straight. It’s jolly, social and somehow has a relevance to everyone’s life. It reflects an acceptance of all, the kind of value I’d like my children to have. And it is a community. Spirituality, I believe, comes from acknowledging that we are part of something greater than just ourselves.

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For teenagers, the effects of a drunken night out may linger long after the hangover wears off.

A recent study led by neuroscientist Susan Tapert of the University of California, San Diego compared the brain scans of teens who drink heavily with the scans of teens who don’t.

Tapert’s team found damaged nerve tissue in the brains of the teens who drank. The researchers believe this damage negatively affects attention span in boys, and girls’ ability to comprehend and interpret visual information.

“First of all, the adolescent brain is still undergoing several maturational processes that render it more vulnerable to some of the effects of substances,” Tapert says.

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Mary Hunt, of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual, has remarked of Daly’s legacy, “Even those who disagreed with her are in her debt for the challenges she offered.”

This fact might be nowhere more evident than in an assessment of Daly’s importance to contemporary Christianity, from a most unlikely source. Writing in his Crosswalk.com blog, Albert Mohler, president of the conservative Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, observed of Daly: “She must be given credit for her honesty in accusing theological liberals of lacking the courage of their convictions. … She saw the entire structure as hopelessly patriarchal and called for a complete break with Christianity and theism. … Many of today’s liberal denominations and seminaries have absorbed and accepted her basic critique of Christianity, but lack her boldness and intellectual honesty.”

All too true, alas. But thanks to Daly’s life and work, there is no turning back from the realization that the connection between the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man has never been good for us, and has always worked against the interests of women. We will never talk about God in quite the same old ways, because of the Spark (another of her favorite words, and always capital S) she brought both to American Christian theology and to the women’s movement. That is her prophetic legacy.

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Morality aside, there are other factors deterring “strategic defaults,” whether in recourse or nonrecourse states. These include the economic and emotional costs of giving up one’s home and moving, the perceived social stigma of defaulting, and a serious hit to a borrower’s credit rating. Still, if they added up these costs, many households might find them to be far less than the cost of paying off an underwater mortgage.

An important implication is that we could be facing another wave of foreclosures, spurred less by spells of unemployment and more by strategic thinking. Research shows that bankruptcies and foreclosures are “contagious.” People are less likely to think it’s immoral to walk away from their home if they know others who have done so. And if enough people do it, the stigma begins to erode.

A spurt of strategic defaults in a neighborhood might also reduce some other psychic costs. For example, defaulting is more attractive if I can rent a nearby house that is much like mine (whose owner has also defaulted) without taking my children away from their friends and their school.

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Though not even two decades have passed since the Soviet state collapsed in 1991, the Orthodox Russians who came to France to flee communism say they’re starting to view Moscow with mistrust again. The reason: the recent move by Russia to take control of a dazzling Orthodox cathedral built in Nice during the reign of Czar Nicholas II, which some opponents say is part a wider, nationalistic power play by Moscow to regain symbols of Russia’s historical, cultural and religious grandeur abroad.

The tussle centers on the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas ”” a breathtaking church topped with spires and domes that was built in 1912 on land that Nicolas’ grandfather, Alexander II, had purchased a half century earlier. Initially intended as a place of worship for the Russian aristocrats and industrialists who flocked to the Côte d’Azur before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the cathedral became a spiritual and cultural focal point for the mass of exiles who fled to Nice during the Soviet era. Since the fall of communism nearly 19 years ago, the so-called “white Russian” community and its offspring has been joined by Russian jet-setters who’ve grown extremely wealthy under the country’s current leadership and bought pricey mansions in Nice to use as their second homes. (See a brief history of Russians and vodka.)

To the Russian diaspora, as well as the 85,000 paying tourists who visit the church every year, the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas has represented a slice of Mother Russia on the shores of the Mediterranean. And that’s exactly the logic the Russian government used to win a court case in France on Jan. 20 that recognized Moscow’s ownership of the church. The Nice Russian Orthodox Cultural Association (ACOR), which managed the church under a 99-year lease it signed with the czarist regime in 1909, had maintained that it effectively inherited the cathedral when Russia’s royal family was executed during the revolution. But the court upheld the Russian government’s position that since the czarists had bought the land and built the church using state money, the cathedral remains the property of the Russian government, meaning that Moscow could legally reclaim it now that ACOR’s lease has expired. Decades of Soviet uninterest in the property, the court decided, did not undermine Russia’s entitlement to it today.

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Ted Cox worked as an electrician for 27 years before losing his job last April when his employer filed for bankruptcy.

Cox was earning $19 an hour but now makes ends meet on $351 in weekly unemployment benefits. He also receives $113 monthly in food stamps.

“There’s nobody hiring,” Cox said.

Two daughters, ages 13 and 17, live with him. His children qualify for Medicaid. He has no medical insurance. “God help me if I go out there and break my leg,” he said.

Read the whole article.

Obama should launch his own moon shot. What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. We need to make 2010 what Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “Start-Up America.”

Obama should make the centerpiece of his presidency mobilizing a million new start-up companies that won’t just give us temporary highway jobs, but lasting good jobs that keep America on the cutting edge. The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. Without inventing more new products and services that make people more productive, healthier or entertained ”” that we can sell around the world ”” we’ll never be able to afford the health care our people need, let alone pay off our debts.

Obama should bring together the country’s leading innovators and ask them: “What legislation, what tax incentives, do we need right now to replicate you all a million times over” ”” and make that his No. 1 priority. Inspiring, reviving and empowering Start-up America is his moon shot.

And to reignite his youth movement, he should make sure every American kid knows about two programs that he has already endorsed: The first is National Lab Day. Introduced last November by a coalition of educators and science and engineering associations, Lab Day aims to inspire a wave of future innovators, by pairing veteran scientists and engineers with students in grades K-12 to inspire thousands of hands-on science projects around the country.

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Banks earn billions in overdraft fees, money that helps pay for free checking.

A chunk of that revenue will disappear when some consumers elect not to sign up for the opportunity to spend more than they have. This week, Bank of America said that $160 million in overdraft fee revenue had already disappeared, because of changes it made in its policies ahead of the new federal rules.

When that money evaporates as other banks comply with the regulations, they’re going to try to make it up some other way, particularly if they’re paying more taxes to the federal government and have fewer ways to trade their way to outsize profits.

So might banks try to do away with free checking entirely?….

Ok, a morning quiz. Fill in the blank: the average customer paid ___ overdraft or other insufficient-fund charges in 2009. What number do you think? Guess before looking and read it all–KSH.

The only people who would seem to have the right to invoke God at the moment are the Haitians themselves, who beseech his help amidst dreadful pain. They, too, alas, appear to wander the wasteland of theodicy. News reports have described some Haitians giving voice to a worldview uncomfortably close to Pat Robertson’s, in which a vengeful God has been meting out justified retribution: “I blame man. God gave us nature, and we Haitians, and our governments, abused the land. You cannot get away without consequences,” one man told The Times last week.

Others sound like a more frankly theological President Obama: a 27-year-old survivor, Mondésir Raymone, was quoted thus: “We have survived by the grace of God.” Bishop Éric Toussaint, standing near his damaged cathedral, said something similar: “Why give thanks to God? Because we are here. What happened is the will of God. We are in the hands of God now.” A survivor’s gratitude is combined with theological fatalism. This response is entirely understandable, uttered in a ruined landscape beyond the experience of most of us, and a likely source of pastoral comfort to the bishop’s desperate flock. But that should not obscure the fact that it is little more than a piece of helpless mystification, a contradictory cry of optimistic despair.

Terrible catastrophes inevitably encourage appeals to God. We who are, at present, unfairly luckier, whether believers or not, might reflect on the almost invariably uncharitable history of theodicy, and on the reality that in this context no invocation of God beyond a desperate appeal for help makes much theological sense. For either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.

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