Firearms are the only means of suicide Makulec talks about because it is the most lethal and the most common. In Missouri, suicide is the second leading cause of death for ages 10 to 24, behind accidents of all kinds. Ninety-eight Missourians ages 24 and under died from firearm suicides in 2019, the most recent year data was available.

And the problem is getting worse: Missouri’s youth suicide rate is rising faster than all but four other states.

Suicide prevention advocates, mental health professionals and parents who lost children to gun suicide point to solutions: restricting teens’ access to guns and encouraging more informed conversations to end stigma and silence surrounding suicide and mental health, like the work done at KUTO.

“I’d like to think every day is my last day of work,” said Makulec, who serves as KUTO’s executive director. “But while we’ve made an impact, teens are still dying by suicide at an alarming rate in Missouri.”

Read it all.

With gun suicides on the rise, a rare hotline staffed by St. Louis teens saves lives https://t.co/9se2n1WhSg

— The Kansas City Star (@KCStar) March 7, 2021

Read it all.

O Eternal God, who hast taught us by thy holy Word that our bodies are temples of thy Spirit: Keep us, we most humbly beseech thee, temperate and holy in thought, word and deed, that at the last we, with all the pure in heart, may see thee and be made like unto thee in thy heavenly kingdom; through Christ our Lord.

Sunrise……..❤ more to follow 😊 pic.twitter.com/JNp2kAtrwf

— Jennifer Taylor (@FOXY3282) March 7, 2021

Thus says the Lord of hosts:
“Glean thoroughly as a vine
the remnant of Israel;
like a grape-gatherer pass your hand again
over its branches.”
To whom shall I speak and give warning,
that they may hear?
Behold, their ears are closed,
they cannot listen;
behold, the word of the Lord is to them an object of scorn,
they take no pleasure in it.
Therefore I am full of the wrath of the Lord;
I am weary of holding it in.
“Pour it out upon the children in the street,
and upon the gatherings of young men, also;
both husband and wife shall be taken,
the old folk and the very aged.
Their houses shall be turned over to others,
their fields and wives together;
for I will stretch out my hand
against the inhabitants of the land,”
says the Lord.
“For from the least to the greatest of them,
every one is greedy for unjust gain;
and from prophet to priest,
every one deals falsely.
They have healed the wound of my people lightly,
saying, ‘Peace, peace,’
when there is no peace.
Were they ashamed when they committed abomination?
No, they were not at all ashamed;
they did not know how to blush.
Therefore they shall fall among those who fall;
at the time that I punish them, they shall be overthrown,”
says the Lord.

–Jeremiah 6:9-15

Morning light #goodmorning #treescape #SundayMorning pic.twitter.com/sir2Vo96Yv

— Charlotte DeYesso (@OuttoPastureCTD) March 7, 2021

The robots are coming. Not to kill you with lasers, or beat you in chess, or even to ferry you around town in a driverless Uber.

These robots are here to merge purchase orders into columns J and K of next quarter’s revenue forecast, and transfer customer data from the invoicing software to the Oracle database. They are unassuming software programs with names like “Auxiliobits — DataTable To Json String,” and they are becoming the star employees at many American companies.

Some of these tools are simple apps, downloaded from online stores and installed by corporate I.T. departments, that do the dull-but-critical tasks that someone named Phil in Accounting used to do: reconciling bank statements, approving expense reports, reviewing tax forms. Others are expensive, custom-built software packages, armed with more sophisticated types of artificial intelligence, that are capable of doing the kinds of cognitive work that once required teams of highly-paid humans.

White-collar workers, armed with college degrees and specialized training, once felt relatively safe from automation. But recent advances in A.I. and machine learning have created algorithms capable of outperforming doctors, lawyers and bankers at certain parts of their jobs. And as bots learn to do higher-value tasks, they are climbing the corporate ladder.

Read it all.

I wrote a big essay for tomorrow’s NYT about robots, the pandemic and why AI poses an increasing threat to white-collar workers. The Zoom-from-home class is not safe! https://t.co/WrnaeJWkFK

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) March 6, 2021

Divine Physician, your Name is blessed for the work and witness of the Mayos and the Menningers, and the revolutionary developments that they brought to the practice of medicine. As Jesus went about healing the sick as a sign of the reign of God come near, bless and guide all those inspired to the work of healing by thy Holy Spirit, that they may follow his example for the sake of thy kingdom and the health of thy people; through the same Jesus Christ, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, now and for ever.

“The aim of medicine is to prevent disease and prolong life; the ideal of medicine is to eliminate the need of a physician.” This quote by Dr. William Mayo reflects the mission of the Cancer Research Foundation. “to raise funds to support innovative cancer research #CRFcharity pic.twitter.com/esm7DC16t3

— Cancer Research Foundation (@CRFcharity) September 15, 2020

Lord, make me conscious of Thy holiness and majesty: teach me to know and do Thy will: pour into my heart such love towards Thee, that, loving Thee above all things, I may obtain Thy gracious promises; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Robert W. Rodenmayer, ed., The Pastor’s Prayerbook: Selected and arranged for various occasions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960)

Declare this in the house of Jacob,
proclaim it in Judah:
“Hear this, O foolish and senseless people,
who have eyes, but see not,
who have ears, but hear not.
Do you not fear me? says the Lord;
Do you not tremble before me?
I placed the sand as the bound for the sea,
a perpetual barrier which it cannot pass;
though the waves toss, they cannot prevail,
though they roar, they cannot pass over it.
But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart;
they have turned aside and gone away.
They do not say in their hearts,
”˜Let us fear the Lord our God,
who gives the rain in its season,
the autumn rain and the spring rain,
and keeps for us
the weeks appointed for the harvest.’
Your iniquities have turned these away,
and your sins have kept good from you.
For wicked men are found among my people;
they lurk like fowlers lying in wait.
They set a trap;
they catch men.
Like a basket full of birds,
their houses are full of treachery;
therefore they have become great and rich,
they have grown fat and sleek.
They know no bounds in deeds of wickedness;
they judge not with justice
the cause of the fatherless, to make it prosper,
and they do not defend the rights of the needy.
Shall I not punish them for these things?
says the Lord,
and shall I not avenge myself
on a nation such as this?”

An appalling and horrible thing
has happened in the land:
the prophets prophesy falsely,
and the priests rule at their direction;
my people love to have it so,
but what will you do when the end comes?

–Jeremiah 5:20-31

St. Michael’s Launches PODZ: Parish Outreach Dedicated by Zip Code

The COVID-19 outbreak presented all leaders with far more than a problem to solve. It gave us a dilemma. You can’t really “solve” a dilemma but you can flip it. Bob Johansen, author of Leaders Make the Future defines dilemma flipping as reframing an unsolvable challenge as an opportunity. At St. Michael’s we reframed the COVID challenge with an opportunity for PODZ – Parish Outreach Dedicated by Zip Code.

Read it all.

The Latest Edition of the #Anglican Diocese of #Southarolina Enewsletter https://t.co/m89lgZZtuO] #parishministry #religion #anglican #pastoralcare #ministry #lowcountrylife #media pic.twitter.com/j43YoTFATc

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) March 5, 2021

When he was running for president, Joe Biden vowed to sign the Equality Act if elected. Now that both the House and the Senate are in the hands of Democrats, odds are that the Equality Act will pass. Why does this concern you?

First, thankfully, odds are still against the bill becoming law. If the legislative filibuster remains, the Equality Act goes nowhere in the Senate. If they somehow convince Senator Manchin to vote to remove the legislative filibuster, then we’re in a different situation. The question would then be whether Senator McConnell can keep all 50 republicans opposed (and early signs are good as Senator Collins has said she now opposes the Equality Act). That would then leave a 50-50 split with VP Harris casting the deciding vote—unless, of course, Senator Manchin broke ranks and opposed the bill.

Second, why is the Equality Act so disconcerting? My most recent short treatment can be found last week in the New York Post. But I’ve been writing about the harms of the Equality Act, and its predecessor the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, since 2013. In books, law review articles, essays, op-eds, white papers, etc. etc. my basic argument has been that it gets the nature of the human person wrong, and by enshrining a false anthropology into law it’ll cause serious harms. (Basic idea being straight from MLK, who was building on Aquinas and Augustine, that for man-made law to be just, it needs to embody the natural law and the eternal law.)

The equality act would take a just law—the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which banned discrimination on the basis of race, and then add “sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity” everywhere that race is protected. It expands the number of private businesses that would now be classified as public accommodations. And it explicitly exempts itself from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). And it’s important to point out that because “sex” isn’t currently a protected class in Title II (public accommodations) or Title VI (federal funding recipients), by adding “sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity” to those titles the only religious liberty protections the Equality Act allows for would be those available to racists.

So the short answer is that the Equality Act treats people and institutions that believe we are created male and female, and that male and female are created for each other, as the legal equivalent of racists. And then all of the negative consequences for privacy and safety in single-sex facilities, for equality and fairness for athletics, for medicine when it comes to gender dysphoria (and abortion, see my NYPost op-ed) follow from that. If you get human nature wrong in law, there are consequences.

Because the vast majority of those consequences are not simply about “religious liberty,” the so-called Fairness for All alternative to the Equality Act isn’t actually fair, at all.

Read it all.

Rod Dreher interviews Ryan Anderson, the new president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

"Ryan Anderson Was Made for This Moment" by Rod Dreherhttps://t.co/6SFtsWtHSU

— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) March 3, 2021

Whither the ACNA? Much will depend on its ability to keep the theological and the pastoral together.

First, we should avoid blaming our Christian heritage or the contemporary church for singling out the sin of homosexuality. Such self-blame is understandable: It is a way of dealing with the emotional hardship caused by same-sex attraction. But this introspection is, for the most part, unwarranted. Traditional Christian morality does not single out homosexuality, whereas making it part of one’s identity does. Besides, power roles have reversed: In today’s therapeutic culture, insisting on one’s gay identity mostly gets applauded, while it requires great courage to speak and write biblically about homosexuality. And while greed, adultery, etc. are all wrong, Scripture hardly supports the notion that all sins are of equal weight.

Third, we should keep in mind that the primary pastoral context of sin is alienation from God. If disordered sexual desires lead us away from a right relationship with God, then that is the key pastoral issue that we must address. The primary pastoral context, then, is not the feeling of exclusion from fellow believers as a result of sexual identity. It’s not that the latter doesn’t powerfully function; it obviously does. But it does so because of the way we have wedded sexual desire to human identity—a unique characteristic of today’s Western therapeutic culture. Carl Trueman’s recent book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, is a must-read to untangle the cultural web that we have spun for ourselves and a welcome antidote to the inexorable drift toward acceptance of disordered desire.

Please note, I am not encouraging us to ignore the pastoral. Quite the opposite: I am convinced we’re often not pastoral enough.

Read it all.

Hans Boersma chimes in on the ACNA debate: "Traditional Christian morality does not single out homosexuality, whereas making it part of one’s identity does." https://t.co/jGTCEgtLzY

— Matt Kennedy (@lambeth981) March 5, 2021

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Nearly half of all U.S. adults who took pay cuts during the Covid-19 pandemic still have not returned to their previous incomes, according to a Pew Research Center report released Friday, indicating the pandemic’s lasting impact on many Americans’ finances.

Some 44% of American adults told Pew in a late January poll that somebody in their household has either lost a job or endured a pay cut since February 2020.

Among Americans who took a pay cut in the last year, 49% say they still make less money than they did prior to the pandemic, compared to 34% who earn roughly the same amount as before and 16% whose pay has increased.

Read it all.

Nearly half of all U.S. adults who took pay cuts during the Covid-19 pandemic still have not returned to their previous incomes https://t.co/ueF4udG2nO pic.twitter.com/4pZJ5c5u7y

— Forbes (@Forbes) March 5, 2021

Artificial intelligence built by Facebook has learned to classify images from 1 billion Instagram photos. The AI used a different learning technique to many other similar algorithms, relying less on input from humans. The team behind it says the AI learns in a more common sense way.

Conventionally, computer vision systems are trained to identify specific things, such as a cat or a dog. They achieve this by learning from a large collection of images that have been annotated to describe what is in them. After doing this enough, the AI can then identify the same things in new images, for example, spotting a dog in an image it has never seen before.

This process is effective, but must be done afresh with every new thing the AI needs to identify, otherwise performance can drop.

By contrast, the approach used by Facebook is a technique called self-supervised learning, in which the images don’t come with annotations. Instead, the AI first learns just to identify differences between images. Once it is able to do this, it sees a small number of annotated images to match the names with the characteristics it has already identified.

Read it all.

"Artificial intelligence built by Facebook has learned to classify images from 1 billion Instagram photos. The AI used a different learning technique to many other similar algorithms, relying less on input from humans."

Read more: https://t.co/jk1QKJF25G

— Money Miles (@niftydunk) March 4, 2021

This biography hints at some possible reasons for Longfellow’s fascination with the hidden and obscured, such as his commitment to translation, and it also reveals a number of other ways in which his printed poems worked like icebergs: small blocks of text that emerged from the blank space of the page while hinting at much larger concerns under the surface. These include Longfellow’s methods of composition, which created paper trails of notes and drafts, and also the role played by his second wife Frances in helping him assemble works like The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845), the first anthology of its kind to be published in America and further evidence of Longfellow’s conviction that lines of poetry should be viewed as bridges rather than barriers, forever reaching out for new human connections.

But as the title of this biography suggests, not every poem could find what it was looking for. In 1861, Longfellow’s wife died shortly after a horrible household accident in which her dress caught fire, and he was unable to smother the flames in time to save her. His own hands and face were so badly burned he was unable to attend her funeral, and the trademark bushy beard he later grew was partly an attempt to hide his visible scars. Yet the memory of his wife remained an open wound, and in a sonnet entitled “The Cross of Snow”, found among his papers after his death, he tried to put it into words. The inspiration for this poem was probably a comment from a mourner who expressed the hope that after his bereavement Longfellow would be able to “bear his cross”. His brother Samuel reported Longfellow’s response: “Bear the cross, yes; but what if one is stretched upon it!” Written eighteen years later, “The Cross of Snow” gave this feeling a permanent literary shape:

There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

In his Table-Talk (1857), Longfellow had pointed out that “Some sorrows are but footprints in the snow, which the genial sun effaces”, but in this unpublished poem he offered a chastening alternative. Some sorrows were as deep and lasting as permafrost.

Read it all (subscription).

'Often his verse resembles a well-mannered imitation of something far more powerful, like karaoke Tennyson' https://t.co/oBgGGxKlnC

— The TLS (@TheTLS) March 5, 2021

Save us, O God, from the false piety that parades itself in the eyes of men and is not genuine in thy sight; and so sanctify us by thy Spirit that both in heart and life we may serve thee acceptably, to the honour of thy holy name; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Sunrise at Pirin Mountains, #Bulgaria

📷 Nikolay Stoilov pic.twitter.com/wWCMLrGolv

— Sydney Park (@SydneyPark18) March 5, 2021

Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, look and take note! Search her squares to see if you can find a man, one who does justice and seeks truth; that I may pardon her. Though they say, “As the LORD lives,” yet they swear falsely.

–Jeremiah 5:1-2

What a blessing to start the day seeing this magical sunrise over our city. Happy weekend to you! 🌇 🤗❤ pic.twitter.com/88jgz9lDFH

— Ulrich Janse van Vuuren (@UlrichJvV) March 5, 2021

number of clergy in the Episcopal Diocese of Albany are preparing to join the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) according to officials with the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word (ADLW).

The announcement made February 21 is in response to clergy requests for canonical residency under ADLW Bishop Julian Dobbs. It would be the first public movement of clergy in New York’s Capital District since the resignation of Bishop William H. Love earlier this winter.

According to officials with the ACNA diocese, the Albany clergy “have formally applied and are being licensed to minister within the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word.” They are to comprise a regional ministry network that will “place a strong emphasis on church planting and ministries in the [Capital] Region and surrounding areas of New York.”

“We are confident that as these men and women boldly proclaim the authentic Gospel of Christ, many souls will be saved, and new disciples will be transformed into the likeness of Jesus Christ,” the ADLW statement reads. “We ask that you join us in praying for these clergy and the congregations committed to their care.”

Read it all.

This should come as no surprise following the resignation of Bishop Bill Love, but clergy in the #Episcopal Diocese of Albany are applying for canonical residency in at least one ACNA diocese – likely the first of many. #anglican https://t.co/nCOzx7dY1T

— Jeff Walton (@jeffreyhwalton) March 2, 2021

The congregation was in the middle of an online service when a longtime churchgoer in her 60s texted her pastor to complain that his prayer lamenting the riot at the U.S. Capitol in January was “too political.”

The woman later unloaded a barrage of conspiracy theories. The election of Joe Biden was a fraud. The insurrection was instigated by Black Lives Matter and antifa activists disguised as Donald Trump supporters. The FBI was in on it all. The day would soon come, she said, “when all the evil, the corruption would come to light and the truth would be revealed.”

Startled and moved to tears, Pastor David Rice told the woman she had been “tricked by lies.”

“You need to know how crazy this is,” he said to his congregant at Markey Church in Roscommon County, Mich., a rural region of 25,000 residents that voted 2 to 1 for Trump. “You have been with my family and in my home and I care for you but you are dabbling in darkness. You are telling me it’s giving you hope. I’m telling you as your pastor that it’s evil.”

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“You have been with my family and in my home and I care for you but you are dabbling in darkness.” QAnon and conspiracy theories are taking hold in churches and pastors are fighting back
By @jaweedkaleem https://t.co/QvWqnQHl3S

— seth liss (@sliss33) March 3, 2021

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Covid-19 has already left a trail of death and despair in Brazil, one of the worst in the world. Now, a year into the pandemic, the country is setting another wrenching record.

No other nation that experienced such a major outbreak is still grappling with record-setting death tolls and a health care system on the brink of collapse. Many other hard-hit nations are, instead, taking tentative steps toward a semblance of normalcy.

But Brazil is battling a more contagious variant that has trampled one major city and is spreading to others, even as Brazilians toss away precautionary measures that could keep them safe.

On Tuesday, Brazil recorded more than 1,700 Covid-19 deaths, the highest single-day toll of the pandemic.

Read it all.

The surge in Brazil’s coronavirus cases could stymie efforts to end the pandemic, scientists warn. A new, more contagious variant identified there has spread rapidly and shown up in two dozen other countries.https://t.co/fV0Mluc01z

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 3, 2021

The third round of dialogue between the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Episcopal Church continued last week. The two denominations have been conducting bilateral dialogue since 2000 in an effort to deepen ties and work together.

In this latest virtual gathering, participants heard from the Rev. Dr. Amy Plantinga Pauw, a theology professor at Louisville Seminary, who led them through a discussion around her book “Church in Ordinary Time: A Wisdom Ecclesiology.” Plantinga Pauw writes about the seasons of the church year and uses wisdom ecclesiology to help the church think about addressing the realities of today’s world.

Dianna Wright, director of ecumenical and interreligious relations with the Office of the General Assembly, says the conversation centered on what it means to be church.

“We have this idea that we’re the ones who have all of what it means to be God wrapped up as the church. But there are so many different entities that are a part of who God is,” said Wright. “The church is only one part of that, and we are supposed to participate with the whole world and share the story of God. We don’t have it all together, but we are continuing to grow and evolve as the church.”

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There’s auto news out of Sweden: Volvo Cars says that it will be fully electric by 2030. No more internal combustion, no more hybrids. It’s batteries or bust.

In making this commitment, Volvo is betting on a trend: that as EVs are becoming cheaper and new conventional cars are being priced higher, consumers’ math on electric-versus-internal combustion will soon come out in electrics’ favor.

But there’s more to Volvo’s position on EVs than just changing the powertrain. The carmaker says its pure electric models will only be available for sale online, and that its first fully electric car is now receiving over-the-air software updates. (Tesla has been doing this for years.) That first plan has implications for the built environment; the second, for emissions and the global climate.

Read it all (subscription).

Online sales and over-the-air updates could spell the end of car dealerships https://t.co/vgjKX8lqDY via @business

— North Street (@northassoc) March 4, 2021

The teaching starts about 3:55 in.

O God, who through thy Son Jesus Christ hast promised help to man according to his faith: Grant us the freedom of the children to taste the food of eternal life, and to share with others what we ourselves receive; through the merits of the same thy Son, our Lord.

A spectacular sunrise over the Rwenzori Mountains commonly known as the mountain of the moon. The scenery is so beautiful .#VisitUganda #WhyUGDecidedM7 pic.twitter.com/cjFPRMz53u

— Komuntle Lisa (@komuntle) March 4, 2021

My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain!
Oh, the walls of my heart!
My heart is beating wildly;
I cannot keep silent;
for I hear the sound of the trumpet,
the alarm of war.
Disaster follows hard on disaster,
the whole land is laid waste.
Suddenly my tents are destroyed,
my curtains in a moment.
How long must I see the standard,
and hear the sound of the trumpet?
“For my people are foolish,
they know me not;
they are stupid children,
they have no understanding.
They are skilled in doing evil,
but how to do good they know not.”

–Jeremiah 4:19-22

Postcard sunrise bouncing off the buildings downtown this morning. pic.twitter.com/ixMIC1zEEa

— Scott Danka (@dankfloydKDKA) March 3, 2021

As a young Christian philosopher, I wanted to be the confident, heresy-hunting Augustine, vanquishing the pagans with brilliance, fending off the Manichaeans and Pelagians with ironclad arguments. As a middle-aged man, I dream of being Mr. Rogers. When you’re young, it’s easy to confuse strength with dominance; when you’re older, you realize the feat of character it takes to be meek. I used to imagine my calling was to defend the Truth. Now I’m just trying to figure out how to love.

It’s not that I’ve given up on truth. It’s just that I’m less confident we’ll think our way out of the morass and malaise in which we find ourselves. Analysis won’t save us. And the truth of the gospel is less a message to be taught than a mystery enacted. Love won’t save us either, of course. But I’ve come to believe that the grace of God that will save us is more powerfully manifest in beloved community than in rational enlightenment. Or, as Hans Urs von Balthasar has put it, “Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed.”

What changed my mind?

In some ways, it was a philosophical appreciation for the limits of philosophy—a rational conclusion about the limits of reason.

Read it all.

Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build shows (as I wrote in..[an essay] essay) that to the extent there can be any solution to our current social crisis, it will require us to reform our social and political institutions in order to make them better capable of fulfilling their indispensable moral-formative function.

The good news here is that healthy institutions have never required their members to be fully conscious of the formative moral function that they serve. Only in a Simpsons mob would people consciously demand that others impose authoritative restraints on their demands, and only minors are compelled to enter formative institutions for the sake of formation itself. Outside of institutions aimed at forming minors (i.e., schools and families), an adult institution will primarily aim to achieve its “core goal”—winning wars, growing food, manufacturing cars, reporting the news, advancing scientific knowledge, writing laws—but, along the way, it will necessarily “also form people so they can carry out that task successfully, responsibly, and reliably.” Come for the paycheck, stay for the moral formation; or, as Aristotle might have said, institutions come into being for the sake of living but exist for the sake of living well.

The bad news is that all this means we are already being formed by our institutions, even and precisely when we do not think of them as formative. Levin highlights social media and the university as two very formative institutions for today’s elite culture: the former molds us by “encouraging the vices most dangerous to a free society,” while the latter “shapes the students who come under its influence . . . in ways that answer to the broader culture war.” This may be why Levin keeps recurring to the claim that we regard our institutions more as platforms than as molds. For the distinction does not describe the real character of different institutions so much as the different attitudes with which we approach them. You may consider Twitter to be your own personal platform, but Jack Dorsey is chuckling all the way to his vipassana tech-detoxes in Myanmar: he has molded millions of Americans to fit his own institution’s “core goal” better than Henry Ford ever managed to mold a few thousand employees in Detroit.

Read it all.

But how will Archbishop Cottrell ultimately judge the success of his own mission from a pastoral and personal perspective? “I’m not sure is the honest answer,” he concedes. “Let me tell you what I long for. I do long for our churches to grow. I do long for that. I think our world will be a better place, I think people would lead happier more fulfilled lives in communion with God. Even if that doesn’t happen, I won’t think I have failed because I don’t think I am personally responsible for that – I have my part to play.

“I also long for us to live in a fairer, better world where families and households and communities are properly supported, and I think the Church has a part to play in that, and I certainly want to do all that I can to develop and strengthen the life of the local church.

“We might even increase and develop that presence into new communities, that we will have worked out what it means to be an online church as well as a physical church. They are the things that I hope for. If that bears fruit with more people being part of the Church, then I will rejoice.” He means it.

Read it all.

It was during a quiet moment of reflection in York Minster when the new Archbishop of York appreciated how Covid was irrevocably changing the Church of England.https://t.co/wvDBIN2ugy

— The Yorkshire Post (@yorkshirepost) March 2, 2021

When the world went into lockdown last year, the 1,000 employees at Berlin-based tech company Awin did what millions of others did: They flipped open their laptops and started working from the kitchen or dining room. At the same time, Awin started running flat-out as its business with online retailers soared, putting intense pressure on the staff.

So last spring the company told everyone to sign off around lunchtime every Friday to ease into the weekend. The experiment was so successful—sales, employee engagement, and client satisfaction all rose—that in January, Awin decided to go a step further, rolling out a four-day week for the entire company with no cuts in salaries or benefits. “We firmly believe that happy, engaged, and well-balanced employees produce much better work,” says Chief Executive Officer Adam Ross. They “find ways to work smarter, and they’re just as productive.”

Awin is in the vanguard of a trend that’s getting increased attention worldwide. Jobs website ZipRecruiter says the share of postings that mention a four-day week has tripled in the past three years, to 62 per 10,000. Consumer-goods giant Unilever Plc in December started a yearlong trial of the idea for its New Zealand staff. Spain’s government is considering a proposal to subsidize companies that offer a four-day week. And even in notoriously busy Japan, whose language includes the word karoshi—death from overwork—lawmakers are discussing a proposal to grant employees a day off every week to protect their well-being. “The four-day week is picking up momentum,” says Will Stronge, director of research at Autonomy, a U.K. think tank. “For the large majority of firms, reducing working hours is an entirely realistic goal.”

Read it all (subscription).

A century after the invention of the weekend, more companies are adding another day.
https://t.co/2SPHHkjpPm via @BW

— Nikos Chrysoloras (@nchrysoloras) March 2, 2021

John and Charles Wesley are among the most notable evangelists who ever lived. As young men, they formed a party which came to be derisively called Methodists, because they methodically set about fulfilling the commands of scripture. In due course they learned that works cannot save, and discovered salvation by faith in Christ. Afterward, they carried that message to all England in sermon and in song. John Wesley is credited with staving off a bloody revolution in England such as occurred in France.

Although the brothers did not set out to establish a church, the Wesleyans and the Methodists are their offspring.

Both preached, both wrote hymns. But John is more noted for his sermons and Charles for his hymns. Here we present two hymns by Charles and a sermon by John.

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MT @stpaulslondon: Today we remember John and Charles Wesley, founders of @MethodistGB This statue is in our gardens pic.twitter.com/KBKrvJ7RAA

— The Methodist Church (@MethodistGB) May 24, 2017