By 2006, most of the steel mills in Youngstown, Ohio, had been gone for decades. The population was shrinking year after year. So the city launched a bold plan to redeem itself.

The plan: Quit trying to redeem itself….Youngstown walked away from the most fundamental assumption of economic development and city planning: The idea that a city needs to grow.

“We needed as a city to recognize that we’re a smaller city,” says Bill D’Avignon, head of Youngstown city planning. “We’re not going to grow; we’re never going to be the Youngstown we thought we were going to be.”

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More workers are pessimistic about their retirement future than at any time in the past two decades, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute 2011 Retirement Confidence Survey.

The percentage of workers who are not at all confident about saving enough money for a comfortable retirement reached 27% in 2011, compared with 22% last year. When combined with those who said they are not too confident, the total reaches 50% of workers.

“That is sobering,” says Greg Burrows, senior vice president of retirement and investor services at the Principal Financial Group, a partner with the EBRI survey. “Hopefully this will spur some action.”

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Possible interventions include not only a no-fly zone but also providing weapons to the rebels, offering inducements to Gaddafi loyalists to defect, jamming Libyan military radio transmissions or bombing Mr. Gaddafi’s tanks and artillery when they move east. Each option carries risks for the United States, and Mr. Obama’s caution is understandable.

On the other hand, Mr. Gaddafi’s military is weak, and many Libyans clearly are desperate for change. And a Gaddafi victory also carries risks for U.S. interests, as Mr. Obama himself has said. A sacking of Benghazi will be accompanied and followed by a horrific bloodbath. A revitalized dictator is likely to be distinctly unfriendly to Western interests. And other despots will conclude that Mr. Gaddafi’s brand of merciless revenge brings better results than the Tunisian and Egyptian models of accommodating people’s yearning for freedom ”” and that American threats to the contrary can be discounted.

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For centuries the words Church and culture were all but synonymous. This close linkage posted challenges for both culture and Church, but it gave artists the opportunity to ply their craft with the patronage of the Church, and to express their faith through their art. With the collapse of Christendom, these connections have frayed or broken. The disconnect has become so pervasive that many outside the Church, while not hostile, are unconcerned with faith in general or Christianity in particular. The Church has more recently wrestled the dragon of relevance: Do Christians still have anything to offer culture?

With its new St. George’s Institute of Church and Cultural Life, St. George’s Church, Nashville, aims to slay the dragon of relevance by equipping Christians to engage with culture in meaningful and lasting ways. The institute sponsored its first conference, “C3: Christ, Church and Culture,” Feb. 24-26 in Nashville. Far from being another in a long line of Christian quests for relevance, the conference explored deeper questions surrounding the interface of culture and faith.

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As the extent of the death and destruction from the massive disaster in Japan comes into focus, religious relief organizations are sending and supporting teams to assess the damage.

Groups such World Vision and Baptist World Aid have teams on the ground determining what kinds of experts and supplies will be needed in the recovery from the earthquake and tsunami that struck Friday (March 11).

Rachel Wolff, a spokeswoman for World Vision, said a relief manager who worked on the scenes of earthquakes in Haiti and Pakistan was stunned by the extent of the destruction.

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The Church of England has welcomed the analysis and policy proposals in the Ministry of Justice Green Paper Breaking the Cycle: Effective Punishment, Rehabilitation and Sentencing of Offenders, December 2010.

The analysis and policy proposals ‘represent an honest recognition of some of the fundamental weaknesses in our current methods of dealing with offenders, and offer bold and far-reaching suggestions for improvement,’ the Church’s Mission and Public Affairs Council says in its response to the Green Paper.

The Council endorses the Green Paper’s plans for more use of properly-designed community sentences, diversion of mentally ill people from prison and more intensive concentration on effective rehabilitation of offenders through integrated services provided by the voluntary sector in partnership with statutory organisations.

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Earlier attempts to use helicopters had to be abandoned due to radiation levels.

It’s been proclaimed from pulpits and blogs for years””Christians divorce as much as everyone else in America.

But some scholars and family activists are questioning the oft-cited statistics, saying Christians who attend church regularly are more likely to remain wed.

“It’s a useful myth,” said Bradley Wright, a University of Connecticut sociologist who recently wrote “Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites … and Other Lies You’ve Been Told.”

“Because if a pastor wants to preach about how Christians should take their marriages more seriously, he or she can trot out this statistic to get them to listen to him or her.”

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Locke was neither an extreme libertarian nor a proponent of a Christian government. He could advocate religious liberty and insist on morals legislation because he believed that all citizens had access to moral truths through the natural law, and thus could be held accountable regardless of religious beliefs. One may or may not find natural law plausible, but it occupies a respected place within Western””and Christian””political thought and Locke was hardly out of the ordinary in his reliance on it. Indeed, it is hard to know how [David] Gushee could avoid relying on something similar if he believes, as I’m sure he does, that non-Christians should abide by secular laws forbidding theft or sexual assault. One can, I note in passing, offer reasons as to the wrongness of theft, or even same-sex marriage, without relying on scripture.

Gushee has discovered a “Locke” that John Locke himself would not recognize. Founding-era Americans would not recognize Gushee’s Locke either. Gushee describes Locke’s views as emerging victorious over Christendom in 1791, though in fact Locke was much more influential in the events leading up to 1776 than he was in the constructive task of establishing a new constitution. Needless to say, Locke’s views, were they truly to sanction the sort of public license that Gushee claims, would never have enjoyed the acclaim they did amidst a founding generation that had rather robust views about public morality and the government’s role in protecting it.

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Téa Obreht is just 25, and “The Tiger’s Wife” is her first book. It is also the first book ever sold by her agent, Seth Fishman, who is 30, and the second book bought by her editor, Noah Eaker, who was 26 when he acquired it and, strictly speaking, still an editorial assistant.

“We were all very new,” Ms. Obreht said recently, “and we were excited to find each other.” They might want to consider retirement, quitting while they’re ahead, because the kind of good fortune they are enjoying right now may never come their way again.

Ms. Obreht was included in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list of young fiction authors last summer and “The Tiger’s Wife” was subsequently excerpted in the magazine. On Sunday, the book made the cover of The New York Times Book Review. Just about everywhere, it has received the sort of reviews that many writers wait an entire career for. In The Times on Friday, Michiko Kakutani called it ”˜“hugely ambitious, audaciously written.”

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While Americans have been obsessing lately about Charlie Sheen and his live-in porn film stars, Germany has been consumed by improprieties over a doctoral thesis.

All the German talk shows, the front pages of the country’s newspapers and magazines, its political pundits and comedians, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets or to the pages of Facebook, have had a field day indulging in very German-style hand-wringing and paroxysms of self-loathing over the moral, political and social ramifications of the case.

A German author, Peter Schneider, even gravely linked the whole mess to Bill Clinton’s impeachment drama, since they both entailed what he called “the same question of honesty.” Leave it to a German intellectual to discern a deep connection between an American president dissembling about oral sex with an intern in the Oval Office and a doctoral student at Bayreuth University cribbing passages in a 475-page dissertation about contrasting constitutional developments.

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World leaders on Tuesday refused all forms of military intervention in Libya, abandoning Col Muammar Gaddafi’s fleeing opposition to its fate.

France and Britain failed to persuade other world powers meeting in Paris to impose a no-fly zone over the country, where pro-Gaddafi forces claimed to have taken the last major town before the rebel capital, Benghazi.

The no-fly proposal was absent from the G8 foreign ministers’ closing statement in Paris, following resistance from Russia, Germany and the US. China, a United Nations security council veto-holder, is also opposed.

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Almighty God, spirit of peace and of grace, whose salvation is never far from penitent hearts: We confess the sins that have estranged us from thee, dimmed our vision of heavenly things, and brought upon us many troubles and sorrows. O merciful Father, grant unto us who humble ourselves before thee the remission of all our sins, and the assurance of thy pardon and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Prayers for the Christian Year

Take care, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

The Diocese of Sendai includes the areas hardest-hit in the disaster, reported the Asian church news agency UCA News.

Father Peter Shiro Komatsu, diocesan chancellor, said March 14 that Bishop Martin Tetsuo Hiraga of Sendai was unharmed but had not received complete reports on the damage because telecommunications remained disrupted.

The priest said diocesan officials did not know about what had happened to several churches along the coast. He said one church in Fukushima was totally damaged and eight churches in Sendai were either unaffected or only slightly damaged.

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At least 750 workers were evacuated on Tuesday morning after a separate explosion ruptured the inner containment building at Reactor No. 2 at the Daiichi plant, which was crippled by Friday’s earthquake and tsunami. The explosion released a surge of radiation 800 times more intense than the recommended hourly exposure limit in Japan.

But 50 workers stayed behind, a crew no larger than would be stationed at the plant on a quiet spring day. Taking shelter when possible in the reactor’s control room, which is heavily shielded from radiation, they struggled through the morning and afternoon to keep hundreds of gallons of seawater a minute flowing through temporary fire pumps into the three stricken reactors, Nos. 1, 2 and 3, where overheated fuel rods continued to boil away the water at a brisk pace.

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But if any single African country has attracted American ire, it is Uganda. Is this because of a spate of anti-gay attacks? When a tiny college newspaper organized an egregious hate campaign last October against prominent gay activists, including Kato, a Ugandan court issued a permanent injunction against the publication. And David Kato’s death is among only a handful of documented instances in which homosexuals have been killed in Uganda in recent years, with police now claiming that Kato was murdered by an acquaintance for reasons unrelated to homophobia. Despite Rachel Maddow’s running commentary on Uganda””under the headline “Uganda Be Kidding Me!”””more Ugandans consider homosexual behavior morally acceptable or neutral””almost one in five””than people in any other major African country, including sexually tolerant South Africa, according to a 2010 Pew Forum survey.

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A parish shaken by the departure of its vicar following his defection to the Catholic Church has been told to rally round and pray by the Bishop of Plymouth.

Parishioners filing into the Parish Church of St Mary The Virgin in St Marychurch were visited by the Right Rev Canon John Ford…a week after vicar David Lashbrooke told his congregation he was unhappy with the way the Anglican Church was going and he had decided to convert to the Catholic faith, taking part of the congregation with him.

Bishop John, who conducted the parish mass on Sunday, told the congregation that despite the ‘hurt, incomprehension, and shifting plates of the Church’, it was best to ‘pray and reflect’ rather than become angry.

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That’s the task of ministry: using words, frail things really, to make sense of the incarnate God who’s beyond our sense.

Seminaries, at their best, are strong ecologies of reading and writing. They’re about setting students on a course for a ministry of abundant life for the sake of the church’s flourishing. They’re about helping students and their future flocks inch slightly higher in love of God and neighbor. Saint Basil the Great in the fourth century situated this mission in the context of reading and writing, and he put it really well. In Basil’s day, people were arguing over how exactly to describe the relationship between Jesus and the One who sent him, between the Father and the Son””are they the same, different, or sort of both? And there were of course the naysayers, the people who said it didn’t matter, who argued that we should be out there helping the poor instead of poring over this esoteric academic nonsense. Basil had an answer:

Those who are idle in the pursuit of righteousness count theological terminology as secondary, together with attempts to search out the hidden meaning in this phrase or that syllable, but those conscious of the goal of our calling realize that we are to become like God, as far as this is possible for human nature. But we cannot become like God unless we have knowledge of God, and without lessons there will be no knowledge. Instruction begins with the proper use of speech, and syllables and words are the elements of speech. Therefore to scrutinize syllables is not a superfluous task.

Sure, Basil says, those who don’t care about holiness don’t care about language. But those who want to love God know that our only way to do that is to love language””as theologians, future pastors, and educators, as writers, all we have is words from God to give out to other people. And words are enough.

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In a sermon entitled “Praise, One of the Chief Employments of Heaven,” Jonathan Edwards explained, “Let it be considered that the church on earth is the same society with those saints who are praising God in heaven. There is not one church of Christ in heaven and another here upon earth.” This means that when the church gathers for worship, it engages in a heavenly activity. The worshiping church does not merely imitate what goes on in heaven. It participates in heaven’s worship. Like one who walks into the church sanctuary after the service has started, those who worship on earth move into something that is already in progress. We take up a theme that was begun by others before the throne of God, adding our voices to theirs.

Consequently, the worshiping church is part of a much larger congregation. It is one that includes patriarchs and prophets, saints and angels. No wonder Edwards called worship “the work of heaven” and observed, “If we begin now to exercise ourselves in the work of heaven, it will be the way to have foretastes of the enjoyments of heaven.”

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Christians in Japan are looking for survivors and assessing damage to church buildings after Friday’s (March 11) devastating earthquake and tsunami.
The National Police Agency announced that as of Monday about 1,800 people have died and 2,400 are missing. The death toll may eventually reach more than 10,000, according to police.

Churches and Christians in northeastern Japan, the most heavily affected area, are still out of contact days after the disaster.

Studies estimate that 2 percent of Japanese are Christian, with the vast majority practicing Buddhism and the indigenous Shinto religion.

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The earthquake/tsunami affected areas include the dioceses of Tohoku and Kita Kanto, and a very small area of the Diocese of Yokohama in Chiba prefecture.

The Diocese of Tohoku covers the prefectures of Aomori, Akita, Miyagi, Yamagata, and Fukushima, and the last three have been hit hard, particularly Miyagi prefecture. Membership of diocese of Tohoku is about 1,500 people and there are 29 churches, chapels and missionary stations. Its Cathedral is in Sendai, Miyagi prefecture.

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When two congregations with declining membership and attendance merge, the resulting church must make changes, says a member of the rebirth team for a merged church in Winona, Minn.

Corwin Osterloh believes the two churches have much more work to do.

“Two congregations with declining membership are still going down the same path,” said Osterloh, a member of Central United Methodist Church, which merged in July 2010 with McKinley United Methodist Church.

“We really started talking about the fact that what we were doing wasn’t working.”

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The construction of a 4,000 seater All Saints’ Cathedral in Kampala has commenced and it is set to be complete by December 2012, to coincide with the All Saints’ Church centennial celebrations.
The construction of the cathedral is expected to cost Shs26 billion. A fundraising drive was launched in 2009.

While launching the project yesterday, the Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, Henry Luke Orombi, encouraged Christians to continue contributing towards the project generously reminding them that it is going towards construction of a church which is a house of prayer.

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Last June, writer and political scientist Peter Beinart launched a broadside at the American Jewish community, accusing it of forsaking its own liberal democratic values in blind support of Israel’s rightward lurch, and in the process creating a generation of young Jews who feel no attachment to the Jewish state.

“The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” published in the New York Review of Books, made a lot of waves and fueled a wider argument about when, and whether, American Jews should speak out against Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The discussion will continue 7 p.m. Thursday [in the Pittsburgh area]…His topic: “Is the love affair over? Young American Jews and Israel.”

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Voluntary euthanasia is in the news again.

At last week’s state election health forum, organised by The Sydney Morning Herald, we heard how 61-year-old Loredana Alessio-Mulhall, suffering from MS, intends flying to the Netherlands to end her life. This, of course, is illegal in Australia. Indeed, next month a man named David Mathers goes on trial in Sydney for the alleged murder of an old, sick friend. I cannot discuss that case for legal reasons, but there are a few facts about voluntary euthanasia worth putting on the record.

More than 80 per cent of Australians in opinion polls say they’d like to see voluntary euthanasia legalised. This issue is nearly unique because a majority of politicians, normally so keen to follow public opinion, refuse to change the law. One of the biggest arguments they use is that to do so would lead to a “slippery slope”. {But is the argument valid?]

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I am a Texan, which has its own problems, but it is the South which has left its mark on me. I am all too well aware of the perversities of the so-called “local church.” But you do not avoid the perversities of place by escaping to some alleged universal. You can only avoid the perversities of place by being the church of Jesus Christ which, as I now hope to show, the Church of England has by God’s good grace done.

In Conflict and the Practice of Christian Faith: The Anglican Experiment, Bruce Kaye provides a fascinating account of Anglicanism that puts flesh on [Rowan] Williams’s suggestive comments about the relation of Christology and locality by focusing on the Anglican Communion.

Kaye’s title rightly suggests that he does not mean to restrict his analysis only to the Anglican Communion, but rather he uses the Anglican Communion to illumine what he takes to be the essential character of the church catholic. That character is determined by our belief that Jesus of Nazareth is the incarnate Son of God making possible and necessary the invitation to all humanity, without distinction of race or circumstance, to respond to the gospel.

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The nuclear power industry had been experiencing something of a rebirth in the United States, following decades of doubt. That’s been put at risk by the crisis unfolding at a nuclear power plant in Japan in the wake of a devastating quake and tsunami there.

With that situation still in flux, attention should remain focused on dealing with the immediate safety issues in Japan, says Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, an association of electric utility companies.

“There will be plenty of time later on for a, hopefully, thoughtful dialogue,” Owen says.

But officials in Owen’s industry recognize that problems in Japan are bound to have repercussions when it comes to nuclear policy in the U.S.

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