Now a crunch is coming. The churches that make up 45 per cent of our Grade I listed buildings cannot be looked after in perpetuity by the dwindling band of faithful who worship in them. We need, as a nation, to work out how they can be preserved and allowed to thrive.

Churches don’t have any particular right to survive. St Bartholomew the Great can claim to be the oldest surviving extant church in the City of London only because all of those older foundations burned down or got bombed over the years.

We came close — in 1830 the timber store in the nonconformist chapel caught fire and took the whole south side of the church with it. It took decades for the church to be restored. This is the nightmare that haunts every parish priest: that your time in office might be short, but might also be fatal.

Which means we need, as a society, to decide what we want to do with these treasure-houses. How much do we really want them to survive and, if we do, what we want them to do and to be? Or will we decide to let them, rent-free to rain and sheep?

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Five of the victims were transported to Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital, about four miles away, but were pronounced dead on arrival.

“The children … started their morning in their cute little uniforms,” Rachel Dibble, who was at the Baptist church with the waiting families, told the Associated Press. “They probably had some Froot Loops, and now their whole lives changed today.”

At Woodmont Baptist, not long after they heard the sirens whir by, pastors and staff read reports of a shooting at Covenant. When they saw on Twitter that their church was named as the reunification site, they didn’t question it—they just put on their nametags, met police in the parking lot, and prepared to open their doors to buses of surviving children and parents desperate to see their kids safe and sound, senior pastor Nathan Parker told CT.

The children gathered in the fellowship hall, where the student minister handed out coloring sheets and began processing the shooting with them. Parents waited in the sanctuary through the slow reunification process, not yet knowing the extent of the attack.

“As pastors, we are supposed to have the words. Today was one of those days that words didn’t come easy. If they came, they came from the Spirit,” Parker said.

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The adult victims were head of school Katherine Koonce, 60; substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, 61; and custodian Mike Hill, 61.

The three students killed were each 9 years old. https://t.co/zb9zQjrEbr

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) March 28, 2023

The portion of American hospital beds occupied by children with suicidal or self-harming behavior has soared over the course of a decade, a large study of admissions to acute care hospitals shows.

An analysis of 4,767,840 pediatric hospitalizations by researchers at Dartmouth, published on Tuesday in the medical journal JAMA, found that between 2009 and 2019, mental health hospitalizations increased by 25.8 percent and cost $1.37 billion.

The study did not include psychiatric hospitals, or reflect the years of the coronavirus pandemic, suggesting that it is a considerable undercount.

Especially striking was the rise in suicidal behavior as a cause: The portion of pediatric mental health hospitalizations involving suicidal or self-harming behavior rose to 64.2 percent in 2019, from 30.7 percent in 2009. As a proportion of overall pediatric hospitalizations, suicidal behavior rose to 12.7 percent in 2019 from 3.5 percent in 2009.

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American hospitals are increasingly crowded with children brought in for self-harming behavior, an analysis of 4.7 million hospital stays found. “You have a whole system failure here that is registering itself in suicidal kids” one doctor said. https://t.co/waLeoQVMTl

— NYT Science (@NYTScience) March 28, 2023

A last bastion of privacy, our brains have remained inviolate, even as sensors now record our heartbeats, breaths, steps and sleep. All that is about to change. An avalanche of brain-tracking devices—earbuds, headphones, headbands, watches and even wearable tattoos—will soon enter the market, promising to transform our lives. And threatening to breach the refuge of our minds.

Tech titans Meta, Snap, Microsoft and Apple are already investing heavily in brain wearables. They aim to embed brain sensors into smart watches, earbuds, headsets and sleep aids. Integrating them into our everyday lives could revolutionize health care, enabling early diagnosis and personalized treatment of conditions such as depression, epilepsy and even cognitive decline. Brain sensors could improve our ability to meditate, focus and even communicate with a seamless technological telepathy—using the power of thoughts and emotion to drive our interaction with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) headsets, or even type on virtual keyboards with our minds.

But brain wearables also pose very real risks to mental privacy, freedom of thought and self-determination. As these devices proliferate, they will generate vast amounts of neural data, creating an intimate window into our brain states, emotions and even memories. We need the individual power to shutter this new view into our inner selves.

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Brain sensors could improve our ability to meditate, focus and even communicate, but they also pose very real risks to mental privacy, freedom of thought and self-determination. | Analysis https://t.co/BDeqplwldb

— Scientific American (@sciam) March 28, 2023

O God, the font of resurrected life, draw us into the wilderness and speak tenderly to us, so that we might love and worship thee as did thy servant James Solomon Russell, in assurance of the saving grace of Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

O God, who by the example of thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ hast taught us the greatness of true humility, and dost call us to watch with him in his passion: Give us grace to serve one another in all lowliness, and to enter into the fellowship of his sufferings; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end.

I lift up my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved, he who keeps you will not slumber.

–Psalm 121:1-3