Leanne Italie: A confirmation of Jean Twenge’s researches about “Generation Me.” NEW YORK  Dr. Leonard Sax has been a family physician and psychologist for 27 years, conducting workshops around the world for parents, teachers, social workers, counselors, school psychologists and juvenile justice professionals. He’s also a dad, and it’s from all those perspectives that he took on his fourth book, an alarm bell of sorts titled, “The Collapse of Parenting,” out recently from Basic Books. Sax, who lives in Exton,... Read more

While some might call faith’s sphere of work is “secularization,” Miroslav Volf suggests the issue is larger and more penetrating: it is globalization. Slowing down the runaway dimensions of the globalization truck is the challenge of our faith, in fact, Volf says the world’s religions can cooperate at some level to challenge the relentlessness of reducing live to the globalized material way of life. He argues this in his new important book, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World. Last... Read more

For tolerance to flourish the prominent virtue is freedom/liberty; however, at times justice advocates create intolerance. Many are experiencing and protesting the increased intolerance as a result of those who think their cause is not just right but the only right that can be tolerated. Lindsey Bever: Alumni and students from a prominent college in Ohio are concerned that pro-Palestinian student activists have taken their political views too far — creating an anti-Semitic culture on campus with comments that Israel is a “violent apartheid state” and “Ohio... Read more

Almighty and everlasting God, you govern all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen. BCP Read more

A bright morning with Bright Farms, by Whitney Pipkin: An unseasonably warm sun beamed heat into the refurbished greenhouse more than an hour outside Washington, making it feel like a place where tomatoes might not mind growing, even in mid-December. The plants already reached waist high, rooted in plastic-sheathed blocks of finely woven rockthat allow almost all the water to be reused in this hydroponic system. Here, a careful concoction of nutrients and cardboard-box hives filled with bees primed for... Read more

NORTHERN SEMINARY NAMES NEW PRESIDENT January 29, 2016 – Lombard, Illinois – Northern Seminary’s Board of Trustees is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. William D. Shiell as the eleventh president of Northern Seminary. Board Chair James Stellwagen states, “I am very excited to welcome Dr. Bill Shiell to the Northern community as president.  He has impressed me with his integrity, his peaceful nature, and his enthusiasm for the seminary’s mission.  Bill will be both a strong leader and... Read more

Gillian Woods: (At the link Woods pursues her question through his plays.) What was Shakespeare’s religion? It’s possible to answer this seemingly simple question in lots of different ways. Like other English subjects who lived through the ongoing Reformation, Shakespeare was legally obliged to attend Church of England services. Officially, at least, he was a Protestant. But a number of scholars have argued that there is evidence that Shakespeare had connections through his family and school teachers with Roman Catholicism,... Read more

Christian formation has developed from the early days when it was a kind of bricolage of various Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant spiritual practices into a far more developed theory of practices, but what has changed most is that the experience of spiritual formation directors with “students” has formed a much deeper and theologically sound understanding of spiritual formation. Jim Smith, with Apprentice Institute and the Apprentice Experience, is in my estimation one of the brightest lights in the... Read more