Recent statistics have shown an increasing exodus of young people from churches, especially after they leave home and live on their own. In a 2007 study, Lifeway Research determined that 70% of young Protestant adults between 18-22 stop attending church regularly.

Statistics like these have created something of a mania in recent years, as baby-boomer evangelical leaders frantically assess what they have done wrong (why didn’t megachurches work to attract youth in the long term?) and scramble to figure out a plan to keep young members engaged in the life of the church.

Increasingly, the “plan” has taken the form of a total image overhaul, where efforts are made to rebrand Christianity as hip, countercultural, relevant. As a result, in the early 2000s, we got something called “the emerging church”””a sort of postmodern stab at an evangelical reform movement. Perhaps because it was too “let’s rethink everything” radical, it fizzled quickly. But the impulse behind it””to rehabilitate Christianity’s image and make it “cool”””remains.

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On days when faith and school collide, Sana Khan of Raleigh has learned to compromise.

Though the UNC-Chapel Hill senior would prefer no distractions on Eid al-Fitr, a Muslim holy day marking the end of Ramadan, a lecture or exam may beckon.

“You have to weigh the pros and cons of missing class,” said Khan, president of the campus Muslim Students Association. “We’ll go to prayer in the morning and back to class in the afternoon.”

A new state law may ease Khan’s predicament.

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The controversy over a planned Islamic mosque and cultural center near the site of the former World Trade Center has stirred a lot of impassioned voices in opposition to the facility, which some see as an affront to those who died in the 9/11 attacks.

But one organization that is not opposed to the new structure — at least not in principle — is the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Jewish human rights group based in Los Angeles.

The Wiesenthal Center is the organization behind the Museum of Tolerance, which has locations in L.A. and a new branch in New York. Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center, said in an interview that his organization is not going to oppose the Cordoba House, which is the name of the planned Islamic cultural facility.

“The families of the victims, they should have the dominant say in this,” said Hier.

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One problem that dogged Japan during its lost decade was a stop-and-go fiscal policy in which stimulus packages were administered in an “on again, off again” fashion and taxes were lowered and then raised. There is a risk that the U.S. could fall into this trap in an effort to strike a balance between short-term fiscal support and long-term budget integrity.

This strongly suggests that congressional leaders of both parties should embrace a pro-growth fiscal reform that would help to create long-run fiscal stability and foster certainty about future tax rates. With the 2001-2003 tax cuts set to expire at the end of 2010, the time is now to move ahead with broad-based reform.

A good starting point would be the bipartisan Wyden-Gregg tax reform bill. This bill is not incredibly bold, but is probably the best we could do in the current environment and is much better than the current tax code.

Wyden-Gregg would be revenue-neutral; it would simplify the tax code by reducing the number of personal income tax brackets to three from six and would do so without raising marginal income tax rates.

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Russia says it will begin to load fuel into the reactor at Iran’s first nuclear power plant on August 21.

A spokesman for the Russian nuclear agency made the announcement Friday, saying loading the reactor with fuel will be a key step toward starting the power plant in Bushehr. But he said the reactor will not be considered operational from that date.

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The summer months have seen no break in the Episcopal Church’s legal wars, with new lawsuits, appeals and victories for both sides in the litigation over parish and diocesan property.

On July 6, the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin filed suit against the rector, vestry and parish of St Paul’s Anglican Church in Visalia, California. A congregation of the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin, St. Paul’s along with a majority of the diocese withdrew from the Episcopal Church in 2007 and affiliated with the Province of the Southern Cone.

The St Paul’s litigation joins a growing list of parish lawsuits funded by the national Episcopal Church and initiated by loyalist faction in San Joaquin. Suits against lay leaders and parish corporations are pending against St Francis Anglican Church in Turlock; St Michael’s Anglican Church in Ridgecrest; St John’s Anglican Church in Porterville, James Anglican Church in Sonora; Holy Redeemer Anglican Church in Delano; and St Columba’s Anglican Church in Fresno.

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Our Lady’s body is not John Brown’s body: it had a higher vocation; there is no tradition, as there is with other saints, of relics: what happened? Historians have little to go on…..

Since Vatican II, it has proved a lesser obstacle than expected. True, Barthians do not like it. But John Macquarrie’s Mary for All Christians (1991) gave a positive C of E critique; and the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, in 2005, affirmed “the teaching that God has taken the Blessed Virgin Mary in the fullness of her person into his glory as consonant with Scripture, and only to be understood in the light of Scripture”. When Anglicans speak of unwarranted developments these days, they are more likely to be talking about disputes among themselves. Indeed, the charge of setting the bar too high for communion, levelled against Rome in 1950, has a topical ring to it….

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Across-the-board cuts in state spending are all but certain this year despite $540 million in federal aid approved by Congress earlier this week.

Gov. Chris Gregoire said Thursday that tax collections in June and July were about $125 million below projections.

And she expects the state revenue forecast next month will predict more declines ahead.

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The Simon Wiesenthal Center criticized Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Scotland’s Catholic leader, for condemning the U.S. system of justice as based on “vengeance and retribution” and a planned renewed investigation by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee of Scotland’s release of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. In defending the release of al-Megrahi, who allegedly had three months to live and who received a hero’s welcome when he arrived in Tripoli Libya last year, Cardinal O’ Brien praised Scotland’s “culture of compassion” where “justice is tempered with mercy.”

“It was misplaced compassion in the first place that led to this travesty of justice,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish Human rights NGO. “Now Cardinal O’Brien’s words only add to the suffering of the families of 270 innocent people blown out of the sky over Scotland.”

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The ten year average for POF is 2638. We have surpassed the ten year average over the past two years. Among most Conferences, the goal is simply to slow the decline. North Alabama has dared to pray for more. And it is deeply gratifying to see visible evidence of the Holy Spirit moving among us. Behind every one of these numbers is a family reached, a person saved, a soul that is welcomed and included into the family of faith. And behind every number is a congregation and a pastor who is not threatened by our Wesleyan ethos of accountability and growth but is excited that we are focused on “the main thing” ”“ salvation of the world in Jesus Christ.

“You only count what is important and whatever you count becomes important,” says one of our slogans. By counting every week the new life that God gives us, we are making that new life the engine that is driving our church life. Not content to care for the needs of who is already there, our churches are reaching out to those who are not.

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Thousands of Catholic Church employees in Wisconsin are now eligible for birth control coverage through their health insurance plans, under the budget bill passed by the Legislature last year.

But because the church considers artificial contraception “gravely immoral,” at least some of those workers – including non-Catholics – could face sanctions, even termination, if they use it, one church official said Wednesday.

“Our employees know what church teaching is. And we trust them to use their conscience and do the right thing,” said Brent King, spokesman for the Madison Diocese, which began covering prescription contraception Aug. 1.

Reproductive health advocates, including the Washington-based Catholics for Choice, criticized the stand, calling birth control “basic health care.”

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In 1984, Marvel Comics created a new nemesis for Spider-Man. The character would be a symbiote, inspired by what parasitologists call the weaker of two organisms inhabiting the same space. The weaker organism can draw life from the stronger, and in the most dramatic cases it siphons off its host’s nutrients before the host realizes what’s happening. The symbiote survives, but the host is seriously weakened.

Once Marvel Comics had a new symbiotic character, that character needed a host. It struck a bargain with another character named Eddie Brock: the symbiote would give Brock its power in return for Brock’s life energy. But of course symbiotes from outer space cannot be trusted. Once the symbiote had inhabited Brock, it absorbed his life energy and morphed into the evil Venom.

Has something similar happened in American Christianity? Has a symbiote taken up residence without our knowledge? Yes, say Christian Smith and Melinda Denton, who are principal investigators for the National Study of Youth and Religion (a study of congregations in seven denominations). They’re seeing an alternative faith in American teenagers, one that “feeds on and gradually co-opts if not devours” established religious traditions.

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I have just touched down in America for a week, and am immediately reminded about the extraordinary manners of the Americans. In the loos at Atlanta Airport, a man pulled at the door of an occupied stall, only to find it was locked. “Excuse me, sir,” he immediately said.

A middle-aged blonde lady, also in Atlanta Airport, bumped into a young man, and said with a laugh, “Oh, I’m sorry, I was drifting off there.”

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O God, whose days are without end, and whose mercies cannot be numbered: Make us, we beseech thee, like thy servant Jeremy Taylor, deeply sensible of the shortness and uncertainty of human life; and let thy Holy Spirit lead us in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to’another due,
Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me,’untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine. And at Caper’na-um there was an official whose son was ill. When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went and begged him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. Jesus therefore said to him, “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” The official said to him, “Sir, come down before my child dies.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your son will live.” The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went his way.

–John 4:46-50

Same-sex marriage proponents have some reason for optimism. Kennedy wrote both of the Court’s most important gay rights decisions””Romer v. Evans, (1996) which struck down a California referendum that barred adoption of laws banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation; and Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which overturned a Texas law making sodomy between same-sex partners a crime.

But there is also ground for anxiety. Justice Kennedy went out of his way in Lawrence to stress that whether a state could limit marriage to opposite-sex couples remained an open question. He is, generally speaking, a conservative judge, appointed by President Reagan, and while he has been a strong defender of First Amendment rights, he sides with his more conservative colleagues much more often than he votes with the Court’s more liberal faction.

As a result, gay rights groups had been consciously pursuing a strategy of challenging same-sex marriage bans only in state courts, using only state constitutional arguments, as a way of building precedent and avoiding a Supreme Court loss.

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An attack on a Christian aid group in Afghanistan that left 10 medical workers dead a week ago underscores the perils of faith-based organizations that operate in Muslim nations and the perception that they are promoting a Western agenda.

Six Americans, two Afghans, a German and a Briton working for the International Assistance Mission were gunned down in northern Badakhshan province in what Afghan officials say is the worst such attack in the country’s history. The Taliban claimed responsibility, saying the medical workers were trying to convert Muslims and were carrying Bibles written in Dari, one of the country’s two main languages.

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Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has told priests that the Vatican has rejected the resignations of his two auxiliary bishops following their reported involvement in the Roman Catholic Church’s cover-up of child abuse.

The Vatican’s rebuff deals a blow to Martin, a veteran Vatican diplomat who was appointed in 2004 to lead Ireland’s most populous diocese through a growing storm of child-abuse scandals. From the start he has clashed with predecessors who suppressed reports of child molestation and transferred abusive priests to new parishes in Ireland, Britain and the United States.

“Following the presentation of their resignations to Pope Benedict, it has been decided that Bishop Eamonn Walsh and Bishop Raymond Field will remain as auxiliary bishops,” Martin said in a letter sent this week to priests and other Dublin church officials.

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An Anglican judicial panel has disagreed with Sydney’s Synod on the introduction of diaconal administration of the Lord’s Supper.

The Diocese of Sydney Synod in 2008 overwhelmingly agreed there was no impediment to persons other than a presbyter administering Holy Communion.

The national church’s Appellate Tribunal – consisting of three bishops and four senior lawyers – has given an advisory opinion both on lay administration, which is not sanctioned in the Diocese of Sydney and on administration by deacons, which is practised.

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