The number of women giving birth in the U.S. declined for the second year in a row as more women delayed motherhood during the worst recession since the 1930s.

The number of births dropped 2.6 percent to 4.14 million in 2009, even as the U.S. population rose slightly, according to the annual report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The national birthrate declined to 13.5 for every 1,000 people, from 14.3 in 2007, when the collapse of subprime loans led to falling home prices and the loss of more than 8 million jobs.

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Is hearing or the failure to hear a matter of responsibility and culpability, or is it not? Maybe another family story will help sort this out. Eight years ago, I suffered an ear infection that led to a puncturing of the eardrum. A doctor wanted to test how much damage had been done, so I was ushered into a sound-proof booth and administered a number of tests. When we were finished, I asked the technician about the results. She replied that, for a 45-year-old man, my hearing was slightly above average.

“Well, isn’t that interesting,” I said. “Now I have medico-scientific proof that my wife and daughter are wrong. They think I’m getting hard of hearing.” The technician didn’t miss a beat. “There is a difference between hearing and listening,” she said.

So there you have it: there is a distinction between hearing and listening. We may have functioning hearing organs and still fail to listen to what others are saying. Put differently, hearing is a matter of physical endowment, but listening is a skill at which we can work to become better, more adept.

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“Vainly does the preacher utter the Word of God exteriorly unless he listens to it interiorly.”

–Saint Augustine, Sermon 179, I

O Lord God, who art the light of the minds that know thee, the life of the souls that love thee, and the strength of the hearts that serve thee: Help us, following the example of thy servant Augustine of Hippo, so to know thee that we may truly love thee, and so to love thee that we may fully serve thee, whom to serve is perfect freedom; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Some boast of chariots, and some of horses; but we boast of the name of the LORD our God. They will collapse and fall; but we shall rise and stand upright. Give victory to the king, O LORD; answer us when we call.

–Psalm 20:7-9

Herewith the BBC lead in write up:

The retiring Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright, has called for a renewed focus on social mobility in the light of “the long failure of the enlightenment project”. Speaking to James Naughtie, he said that in an “increasingly religious age” we needed to find new ways of dealing with the way “human beings mess things up”.

Listen to it all (about 6 3/4 minutes).

It is conventionally assumed that Greene’s faith, after flaming sky-high in The End of the Affair (a novel in which God Himself figures as an adulterous third party), burned lower in later life. In the 1968 BBC interview, Greene says that he no longer communicates or takes confession.

[Michael] Brennan modifies this received view. He teases out a persistent, subtle and often contrarian engagement with Catholicism in Greene’s thinking, even before the conversion. Greene was, he argues, idiosyncratically Manichean in his early life and was later drawn to a Liberation theology which fused his theological and Marxist impulses. Hell, Greene once said, “doesn’t make sense to me” ”“ yet he was forever looking for it in the Congo (A Burnt-Out Case), Haiti (The Comedians) and, closer to home, the English seaside (Brighton Rock).

Catholicism, Brennan argues, supplied not so much a doctrine as the “intellectual scepticism” that drives Greene and his fiction. It manifests itself as a fascination with theological paradox ”“ for example, that without Judas, the traitor, there would be no crucifixion and no salvation. Is he not, then, the best of the disciples?

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Certainly Catholic theologians have not been shy about addressing the questions that evolution raises for doctrines like original sin and the immateriality of the soul. In the 1960s, Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner re-interpreted Genesis in light of evolution, arguing that the story of Adam and Eve needed to be read metaphorically.

John Haught at Georgetown writes that the new cosmology of the expanding universe and the evolution of life require a more dynamic sense of God’s role in a world that is still not complete, a work in progress. Father Denis Edwards at Flinders University in Australia treats the second person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, as a more active partner in the development of the evolving cosmos.

Whether the arguments of the theologians will move a future pope to broaden the Catholic Church’s acceptance of evolution remains to be seen. So far, Pope Benedict XVI has not shown the same interest in evolution as his predecessor.

But on this 60th anniversary of “Humani Generis”, Pius XII deserves credit for having the foresight to openly address the science when so many other denominations were either in deep denial or not interested in the challenge evolution poses for Christianity.

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Harvard University announced last Friday that its Standing Committee on Professional Conduct had found Marc Hauser, one of the school’s most prominent scholars, guilty of multiple counts of “scientific misconduct.” The revelation came after a three-year inquiry into allegations that the professor had fudged data in his research on monkey cognition. Since the studies were funded, in part, by government grants, the university has sent the evidence to the Feds.

The professor has not admitted wrongdoing, but he did issue a statement apologizing for making “significant mistakes.” And beyond his own immediate career difficulties, Mr. Hauser’s difficulties spell trouble for one of the trendiest fields in academia””evolutionary psychology.

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Charges the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) has abandoned the historic episcopate by receiving a bishop from the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches (CEEC) without re-consecrating him are unfounded, the traditionalist province-in-waiting tells The Church of England Newspaper.

On July 31, American church commentator Robin Jordan charged the ACNA with having abandoned the historic episcopate when its Provincial Council of Bishops voted on June 9 to receive the Rt. Rev. Derek Jones as a bishop in good standing. Formed in 1995, the CEEC is an American Protestant denomination that has found a niche blending charismatic worship with liturgies drawn from the Book of Common Prayer, and is not normally numbered among the Anglican breakaway churches in the United States.

However, a review of Bishop Jones’ episcopal antecedents by the CEN finds that while a number of his consecrating bishops would not be recognized by Anglicans, his descent from a Brazilian bishop whose episcopal orders were recognized by Pope John XXIII places him within the apostolic tradition.

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Dr Williams, who is in the country for the All Africa Bishops’ Conference, described his visit to the paediatric ward as “inspirational”.

But he was told that the unit, which has cared for thousands of the country’s sickest children over the years, faces imminent closure as Mildmay International, the British NGO that runs it, cannot afford to do so for much longer. The 33-bed specialist HIV paediatric unit – known as Elizabeth Ward – is expected to close down in just 37 days when the existing funds run out.

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Bishops from Singapore, Southeast Asia and Africa told Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in closed-door sessions Tuesday and Wednesday that there should be no more diplomacy on homosexuality, an issue that has split the Anglican communion.

Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi, head of Uganda’s Anglican church and the host of the week-long All Africa Bishops Conference, said the Archbishop of Canterbury (pictured administering communion at the conference) faces a complicated task in trying to reunite the church.

“He (Williams) spoke what was on his mind and we also spoke. We impressed it on him that he had totally gone in a different direction and he has to sort it out,” Orombi told journalists after their closed-door meeting on Wednesday.

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The crucial issue [on the economy] is getting the fundamentals right. The Germans are doing better because during the past decade, they took care of their fundamentals and the Americans didn’t.

The situation can be expressed this way: German policy makers inherited a certain consensus-based economic model. That model has advantages. It fosters gradual innovation (of the sort useful in metallurgy). It also has disadvantages. It sometimes leads to rigidity and high unemployment.

Over the past few years, the Germans have built on their advantages. They effectively support basic research and worker training. They have also taken brave measures to minimize their disadvantages. As an editorial from the superb online think tank e21 reminds us, the Germans have recently reduced labor market regulation, increased wage flexibility and taken strong measures to balance budgets.

In the U.S., policy makers inherited a different economic model, one that also has certain advantages. It fosters disruptive innovation (of the sort useful in Silicon Valley). It also has certain disadvantages ”” a penchant for over-consumption and short term thinking.

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“The economy is going to limp along for the next few months,” said Gus Faucher, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. There’s even a one in three chance it could slip back into recession, he said.

Many temporary factors that boosted the economy earlier this year are fading. Companies built up their inventories after cutting them sharply in the recession to match slower sales. The increase provided a boost to manufacturers, but now many companies’ stockpiles are in line with sales and don’t need to grow as much. In addition, the impact of the government’s $862 billion fiscal stimulus program is lessening. That leaves the private sector to pick up the slack. But businesses are cutting back on their spending on machines, computers and software, according to a government report earlier this week. And the housing sector is slumping again after a popular home buyer’s tax credit expired in April.

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A draft UN report says crimes by the Rwandan army and allied rebels in Democratic Republic of Congo could be classified as genocide.

The report, seen by the BBC, details the investigation into the conflict in DR Congo from 1993 to 2003.

It says tens of thousands of ethnic Hutus, including women, children and the elderly, were killed by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan army.

Rwanda’s justice minister has dismissed the claims as “rubbish”.

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Across the world, the bruising struggle over an Islamic center near ground zero has elicited some unexpected reactions.

For many in Europe, where much more bitter struggles have taken place over bans on facial veils in France and minarets in Switzerland, America’s fight over Park51 seems small fry, essentially a zoning spat in a culture war.

But others, especially in countries with nothing similar to the constitutional separation of church and state, find it puzzling that there is any controversy at all. In most Muslim nations, the state not only determines where mosques are built, but what the clerics inside can say.

The one constant expressed, regardless of geography, is that even though many in the United States have framed the future of the community center as a pivotal referendum on the core issues of religion, tolerance and free speech, those outside its borders see the debate as a confirmation of their pre-existing feelings about the country, whether good or bad.

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Six years ago, all of Africa’s Anglican bishops met in Lagos, Nigeria, and complained that the Archbishop of Canterbury had not accepted their invitation. They are meeting in Uganda this week, with Dr Williams present, but ”” given the events of the intervening years ”” not all of them are happy that he is here.

Although every Anglican pro vince is represented, the majority of bishops here ”” as in Africa as a whole ”” are from Nigeria and Uganda, where there has been the most public dissocia tion from the Anglican Com munion, including the 2008 Lambeth Conference, and es pecially from the actions of the Episcopal Church in the United States.

Some Primates, including the Archbishop of Cape Town, the Most Revd Thabo Makgoba, are conspicuous by their absence. But seated very publicly among the Primates is the former Bishop of Pittsburgh (News, 26 Septem ber 2008), the Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America, the Most Revd Bob Duncan.

Read it all (there are two articles; this is the one at the bottom, but both should be perused–KSH).

Check it out, noting the diocesan profile and the survey.

O loving God, who willest that everyone should come to thee and be saved: We bless thy Holy Name for thy servants Thomas Gallaudet and Henry Winter Syle, whose labors with and for those who are deaf we commemorate today; and we pray that thou wouldst continually move thy Church to respond in love to the needs of all people; through Jesus Christ, who opened the ears of the deaf, and who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

I thank you, my heavenly Father through Jesus Christ, your dear son, that you have kept me this night from all harm and danger; and I pray that you would keep me this day also from sin and every evil, that all my doings and life may please You. For into your hands I commend myself, my body and soul and all things. Let they holy angel be with me, that the evil foe may have no power over me. Amen

I keep the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also dwells secure. For thou dost not give me up to Sheol, or let thy godly one see the Pit. Thou dost show me the path of life; in thy presence there is fulness of joy, in thy right hand are pleasures for evermore.

Three Canadians arrested in an alleged terrorist conspiracy had bomb parts and plans and posed a “real and serious threat”, Canadian police have said.

The trio, arrested this week, were charged with supporting terrorism.

Hiva Alizadeh and Misbahuddin Ahmed were jailed following a court appearance on Thursday.

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California insurance regulators cleared the way Wednesday for Anthem Blue Cross to implement scaled-back rate hikes after a previous increase was canceled amid an uproar over its size.

Anthem said it intends to put the new rates ”” averaging 14% and as high as 20% ”” into effect Oct. 1 for nearly 800,000 individual California policyholders.

Regulators also allowed one of Anthem’s nonprofit competitors, Blue Shield of California, to move ahead with rate increases ”” averaging 19% and as high as 29% ”” for 250,000 individual policyholders.

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The number of Americans who are missing payments and falling into foreclosure has followed the upward trend in unemployment. The jobless rate has remained near double digits all year.

“Ultimately, the housing story, whether it is delinquencies, homes sales or housing starts, is an employment story,” Jay Brinkmann, the Mortgage Bankers Association’s top economist, said in a statement. “Only when we see a consistent increase in employment will we see an increase in sales and starts, and a sustained improvement in the delinquency numbers.”

More than 2.3 million homes have been repossessed by lenders since the recession began in December 2007, according to foreclosure listing service RealtyTrac Inc. Economists expect the number of foreclosures to grow well into next year.

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The wake-up call comes after a series of police-involved shootings since early July that have left four men dead and a community asking hard questions.

On July 5, a rookie police officer shot and killed DeCarlos Moore in Overtown as Moore disobeyed an order and returned to his car. He had no weapon.

The most recent case involved Tarnorris Tyrell Gaye, 19, who was shot and killed last Friday by the same officer who shot and killed a man during a sting-gone-bad nine days earlier.

That day, police say, 16-year-old Joell Lee Johnson was killed during an undercover police operation involving holdups of fast-food deliverers after the teen pointed a gun at the officer.

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Concerns that the Anglican Consultative Council will be subject to UK and EU equality laws following its formation as a British imited company are misplaced, the London-based instrument of communion’s legal advisor, John Rees, reported on August 11.

“I share the unease of many religious people about the impact of this British [equality] legislation,” Canon Rees said in a statement released by the Anglican Communion News Service, “but it is not right to say that the restructuring of the ACC will have altered its position” under the legislation.

Critics of the transformation of the ACC from a British charity to a limited corporation have voiced concerns over the ratification process and the powers given to the ACC Standing Committee by the new constitution. In a paper released last month, the conservative-leaning Anglican Communion Institute (ACI) offered a lengthy critique of the newly formed corporate entity, and noted that whether by accident or design, the ACC
was now subjecting itself to UK and EU equality laws on homosexuality.

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Check it out for a lot of good material–I really liked the slide show. (Earlier in the week the site was down due to bandwith exceeded issues because of the degree of interest in the meeting).

The continent of Africa is facing a future in which climate change will kill more people than traditional causes such as malaria and HIV, according to a Ugandan environmental expert. Dr Rose Mwebaza warned Anglican bishops from Africa in Entebbe that lakes across the continent are shrinking and drying up, crops are failing, deforestation is leading to terrible flooding and, as a result, people are fighting and killing each other over resources. “Africa is facing several [environmental] challenges,” said Dr Mwebaza, a senior legal advisor on environmental security at Nairobi’s Institute of Security Studies. These include increased droughts and reduced availability of water; desertification – one factor in major flooding – and increased incidents of diseases in previously unaffected areas. “Lake Chad in 1973 covered several countries,” she said. “It is reduced to a shadow of its former self. It is vanishing from the continent right in front of our eyes.”

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