TruthBook Religious News Blog

Despite global unrest, young people remain dedicated to making the world a better place. Nearly 80 percent of the 9,891 youth who responded to a recent survey conducted by the PBS kids show "ZOOM'' said that they volunteer in their communities.

Highlighting the importance of starting to volunteer at an early age, a report by Independent Sector and Youth Service America revealed that two-thirds of all adult volunteers began volunteering their time when they were young. The study also showed that volunteering among high school students recently reached the highest levels in the past 50 years.

It should be no surprise that this generation of youth is volunteering more than any other, but they are also the most tolerant generation in history. These great young people embrace their peers regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or cultural difference, all in the name of serving their communities together. They are our nation's greatest generation they are the "we' generation, who scoff at the notion of just being interested in "me.'

Service and service-learning are becoming the common expectation and the common experience of all young people in America. Why then do we only hear about the small portion of young people who get into trouble? Why does the news cover youth violence and ignore youth service? We dedicate several minutes each night to covering sports; why not also dedicate just a few minutes, each broadcast, to covering local citizen service?

An entry point for many young people into service will be the 17th Annual National Youth Service Day, 15-17 April, a program of Youth Service America. Young people across America will address important community needs through service- learning projects focusing on literacy, hunger, public safety, youth voice, health care, and the environment.

Sponsored by State Farm Companies Foundation, National Youth Service Day is the largest service event in the world, engaging millions of young people in service, recruiting the next generation of volunteers, and highlighting their year-round contributions and community leadership. Youth in more than 150 countries will band together with their American peers as part of Global Youth Service Day, which takes place concurrently, thanks to the GM Foundation. This is a perfect occasion to recognize that young people are not the hope of the future they are assets, resources and leaders today. Rather than expecting young adults to simply flip a switch and become engaged citizens when they turn 18, we should encourage community participation at a young age. Children as young as 5 years old can benefit from a service experience with their parents, siblings and friends.

By magnifying the negative acts of a few young people, the media falsely portrays all youth in the same negative light. National Youth Service Day is an opportunity to inform and educate the public that today's young people make up the greatest generation in history. Not only are they serving in their communities at record rates, they are also graduating from high school and enrolling in college at unprecedented levels.

And despite public perception, college-age drinking is at the lowest levels since 1965, and teenage pregnancy is at the lowest level in 60 years. Parents deserve much of the credit for these positive trends.

Let's not forget to thank teachers, who have been stepping up to the plate to underscore the importance of citizen service. With the growth of service- learning programs, teachers have found that linking academic curriculum to hands-on community service increases the retention of information. I know the academic lessons I remember most were the things I "learned by doing' in school and in my community.

If you are an adult, how can you help a young person get involved in service? If you are a young person, what will you do for National Youth Service Day and over the next years of your life? Look around your neighborhood. Where is the need the greatest? What person or problem could benefit from your amazing energy, commitment, experience and skills? Visit www.YSA.org/NYSD to find volunteer opportunities in your community or to recruit others to get involved in your National Youth Service Day project.

National Youth Service Day is not a one-hit wonder. It's a celebration of the contributions young people make all year long. It is also an intense service blitz when hundreds of pounds of collected food become meals for the hungry; paint that is donated all year meets the walls of schools and community centers; and the nails and lumber that AmeriCorps volunteers organized during the week become homes for families in need.

Learn more about National Youth Service Day

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Monday, March 28, 2005

Where faith is a healer

The answers to Africa's problems increasingly lie with spirituality rather than politics

A recent Reader's Digest survey found that 31% of people thought Easter was sponsored by Cadbury's, while 48% had no idea what the religious festival was about. The 16-24 age group had the lowest level of knowledge. The survey is more evidence of how Britain has been comprehensively de-Christianised in the past 50 years.

What's interesting is how peculiar this phenomenon is in a global context and how blind we are to our peculiarity. As we have become increasingly wedded to our faithlessness, the world beyond western Europe has experienced an astonishing increase in religiosity. We have painfully and slowly been forced to acknowledge this in the US and in the Muslim world - and it completely bewilders the faithless. Secular Europe is losing an ability to speak a language - that of faith. It pretends that faith is simply a personal hobby. When the pretence doesn't work, it peers, fearfully, at a world all around it that has become profoundly foreign.

Nowhere is that more true than Africa. It is another part of the globe that urgently needs to be mapped in terms of its rapidly intensifying religiosity if we are to begin to understand what is happening there. Some argue that the intensification of religious identity and consciousness - evident from the Pakistani madrasas to the Baptist churches of the American south - finds its apogee in Africa. Christianity and Islam are expanding dramatically as they gather new converts, while African traditional religions are experiencing a renaissance.

While Africa may be struggling to integrate into the global economy, its integration into the global religions is gathering apace. The astonishing growth of Pentecostal churches throughout Africa is being driven by US evangelical missionaries and their wallets. Meanwhile, the Saudis and Kuwaitis are pouring huge sums into Muslim communities across Africa. Known Saudi aid transfers to the continent amount to $1bn a year (the real figure could be much higher), which is not far from the British level of aid. Yet this is rarely acknowledged in the west.

Some of the most original and arresting sections of the report by the Commission for Africa deal with religion. It argues that nationalism in Africa is exhausted, and that politicians and state structures have lost almost all credibility or legitimacy. Into the vacuum left by the failure of the nation state has stepped religion. This analysis in the report is largely Bob Geldof's doing. He says that grasping the significance of faith in Africa was "like a light going off in my head". Without understanding faith, he argues passionately, we can't begin to find development strategies that are going to work.

Geldof's position draws heavily on the work of a couple of development thinkers, and his travels in Africa to make a BBC series due to be broadcast in June. "There's not a single part of Africa where the spiritual is not vitally present. For Africans it's as real and tangible as the phone you're holding," he told me. "The spiritual is to be negotiated on a daily basis."

Christianity and Islam have three great strengths over the nation state in Africa. The first is trust. Whereas politics and politicians are synonymous with corruption and lying (in the Senegalese language of Wolof, politig means lying), faith organisations are trusted; they can gather tithes and build up institutions, investing for the benefit of the community. Whether it's mosques in Sierra Leone or churches in Nigeria, they have succeeded where the state has failed.

The second strength is that faith organisations deliver the goods - they account for a staggering 50% of all health and education in sub-Saharan Africa. They are far more effective than any state in reaching the most destitute, and their decentralised structures often prove far more resilient in conflict countries, such as in south Sudan.

In rapidly urbanising Africa, faith organisations are sometimes the only functioning form of institution and of social capital - which explains something of the appeal of the Pentecostalist churches mushrooming in shanty towns. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Catholic church even runs the only semblance of a national postal service.

Third, and crucially, Christianity and Islam offer what Ian Linden described in his paper for Geldof as "a language for change and redress". The issue in Africa often is how to mobilise people to demand and achieve change, and faiths provide the ideology and legitimisation for change in a way that politics no longer can - whether galvanising a community to set up a school or to run a health project.

The million-dollar question is whether the changes championed by faiths coincide with western development priorities. Often they do. For example, faith groups have a track record of conflict resolution and peace-making across many troubled regions. Or take another example: the Pentecostalist message of marital fidelity and no pre-marital sex could become a critical tool in the battle against HIV/Aids in urban Africa; imams and pastors have more chance of getting the public health education messages across than discredited politicians (which makes the Catholic church's position on condom use even more shockingly irresponsible).

But Linden has serious concerns on one key issue - how to increase the autonomy of women, which is vital to the achievement of a wide range of development goals such as infant mortality. The faiths, which all promote male authority, are so much "part of the problem, they can't be part of the solution".

Last, the aspect of religion in Africa that provokes most fear and ignorance to the secular European is traditional African religion. Geldof points out that talk of witchcraft, sorcerers and evil spirits is commonplace in Africa. To the rationalist secularist, such things as voodoo and evil spirits are deeply alienating. But Geldof pleads for greater understanding, arguing that we have to put aside the prejudices of imperialism and their manipulation by Hollywood. There is a profoundly benign dimension to traditional animism. The emphasis on evil is a recent distortion, as a system of beliefs struggles to interpret a world that has delivered such devastating suffering as Aids and the uncontrollable violence of AK-47s. For us, evil is little more than a metaphor, he says; to many Africans it is terrifyingly real.

Geldof has astutely blown open a much needed debate: economists and politicians have dominated the agenda of African development for half a century, and look where it's got us. Economic growth is not just about technical knowledge, but also about human behaviour - and that is rooted in beliefs such as what constitutes progress and development. Indeed, what is wealth? These questions are spiritual as much as material in Africa; if we appreciated more of the African understandings of these concepts, we might learn as much from Africa as Africa is expected to learn from the west.

www.commissionforafrica.org
m.bunting@guardian.co.uk
Madeleine Bunting
Monday March 28, 2005
The Guardian

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Sunday, March 27, 2005

Angels on the battlefield

Christians, Jews and Muslims have always believed in angels. These days people of little or no formal religious belief - including some who would normally consider themselves agnostic - seem to be turning to them.

Two recent books include Your Guardian Angel and You: Tune in to the Signs and Signals to Hear What Your Guardian Angel Is Telling You and In the Arms of Angels: True Stories of Heavenly Guardians.

Nine decades ago, when the world was plunged in the horrors of the Great War, British and French troops, fighting on the Western Front, sought comfort from a particular "angel", whose intervention and very existence remains the subject of controversy.

The story involves an incident during the retreat following the Battle of Mons on August 26 and 27, 1914. The regiments involved, notably the 3rd and 4th divisions of the British Expeditionary Force, including the Life Guards and Coldstream Guards, were being sorely pressed in the retreat. The Guards units were the last to be withdrawn, and in the half-light of a false dawn they became lost and wandered about trying to make contact with their main body.

There was thick fog, bullets were flying and the men feared they were about to blunder into the German lines. One of the Guardsmen saw a "warm glow" just ahead, and as my father, who was one of them, told it, assumed it was "some bloody fool farmer" carrying a lantern.

The glowing nimbus moved in closer and the Guardsmen perceived the dim outline of a female figure. As it became more distinct, they decided that they were looking at an angel: tall, slim and wearing a flowing gown. She had a gold band around her hair and Eastern-style sandals on her feet.

The angel beckoned the men to follow her, her right hand making an inviting gesture until the party came to a halt on the upper rim of a sunken road. The men recognised the road as the track they were supposed to follow. The vision smiled and vanished.

Within a few days the story of the Angel of Mons had trickled all along the front. Official censors were not sure what to make of it. One school of thought accepted it as a token of support from the Almighty, and therefore good propaganda. Another held it would make the troops look ridiculous, and urged caution.

By early 1915 the story had leaked out. Clergy preached sermons about it and wrote pamphlets. Sceptics claimed it was a hoax thought up by Arthur Machen, a Fleet Street writer and war correspondent known for his fertile prose. Machen revelled in the notoriety, claiming in a book, The Bowmen and other Legends of the War, that he had invented the Angel of Mons. Another author, Harold Begbie, retaliated with On the Side of the Angels, which set out to prove the story had circulated well before Machen had heard about it.

In April 1930, a former German intelligence officer, Colonel Friedrich Herzenwirth, claimed the Angel of Mons had been produced by magic lantern slides thrown upon "screens" of foggy cloudbanks by projectors with high-powered Zeiss lenses mounted on German aeroplanes which flew above the British lines.

His story was dismissed as implausible by technical experts, but the German stuck to his explanation. He said the vision, intended to frighten the British, had misfired because the Guardsmen assumed the angel was their protectress. Herzen- wirth said the Germans had achieved better luck with their cloud magic lantern shows on the Russian front in 1915. The Virgin was shown with uplifted hand, as if motioning to stop the "murderous" Russian night attacks.

"We knew from prisoners we took that in some cases companies actually killed their officers and flung their rifles away, shouting that they would not be guilty of firing upon an army over which the Mother of God hovered in protection," the colonel said.

With the French in Picardy and the Champagne region, the Germans made another miscalculation, however.

"Instead of taking the figure of a woman that we threw upon the clouds one night as that of the Virgin or a saint protecting our army, the French promptly recognised Joan of Arc," he said.

Those who had seen it insisted the Angel of Mons was true. My father died, in 1960, swearing its authenticity. The current fad for angels has renewed interest. There are books, plays and websites exploiting the story of the Angel of Mons. The late Marlon Brando was planning a film about the celestial visitor at the time of his death last July.

Some years ago Britain's The Observer newspaper ran a story about a group of socialites, partying at a swank London hotel, one of whom made reference to the Angel of Mons as among the "great hoaxes" of the 20th century. An elderly man of military bearing, at an adjoining table, broke into the conversation: "That was not a hoax, madam. I was there."

In the past 20 years I have tried to contact witnesses, other than my father, to the Angel of Mons. Letters in the Imperial War Museum, London, and the Australian War Memorial suggest the angel appeared in different locations, though at approximately the same time. There is disagreement about the angel's gender. Several letters claim there was not one angel but three.

Alan Gill

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Friday, March 25, 2005

Jesus wuz that religious bloke?

More than half of British people have no idea why Easter is celebrated, a survey revealed.

Just 48 per cent of some 1,000 adults questioned for the Reader's Digest Magazine poll correctly answered the resurrection of Christ.

Despite their lack of religious knowledge, the poll found 64 per cent of people quizzed believed in God and 58 per cent in an afterlife.

"Britons have a strong spiritual sense, with a majority expressing a belief in God and an afterlife, but they have little grasp of or interest in the basic tenets of Christianity," said Reader's Digest editor-in-chief Katherine Walker.

"Many people who would profess to be Christian know little more about the faith than they do about other world religions," she added.

On top of general ignorance about Christianity, the British public appeared ill-informed about the other five major faiths practised in the country.

Less than a quarter of adults associated the Torah with the Jewish faith, while only 40 per cent knew halal food was eaten by Muslims.

A mere 44 per cent correctly said the cow is sacred to Hindus and 41 per cent knew the Dalai Lama is Buddhists' spiritual leader.

As for which religion is associated with the turban - Sikhs - 56 per cent got the answer right.

The question that attracted the most right answers was: To whom did God give the 10 commandments, 64 per cent correctly said Moses.

Of 1001 adults surveyed, the average number of correct answers was five out of 10.

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Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Drink from your spiritual well

We live in an incredible world. The diversity of land, nature and people who live on Planet Earth has always amazed me. I have often wondered what my life would be like if I was born and nurtured in China or India; maybe the Middle East or some other faraway land. It's hard to fathom, but if we look very closely at ourselves it is through the gifts of God that "we are who we are" and have been nurtured by traditions because of our ancestral heritage or geography or family community. As Matthew Fox, a priest and author of may books on spirituality appropriately described it, "We are one river but many wells."

It is not easy being human. We find ourselves up against many obstacles not only to surviving but to living lives of quality and happiness. As we are members of a whole body, we must live in a world where there is war, famine, natural catastrophes, poverty, oppression, sickness and hate. The journey of a human being is not easy.

It is not simple either. Our strongest assets of language, intelligence and creative powers can also get us into our deepest quagmires.

There is one thing though, that can make our human lives, our existence, more meaningful. It can give us strength and courage to live and navigate our lives around so many troubled waters. And that is a healthy spirituality. When religion is true to itself and is itself healthy, it is about spirituality. Spirituality is the core of any religion. But religion can become distorted and misused. Religion can develop its own institutional ego, even while it preaches to individuals about the need to humble oneself.

Spirituality is like living water that springs up in the very depths of the experience of faith. To drink from your own well is to live your own life in the Spirit of our Lord God Creator. Whether it be from the Well of Jesus, Bahaullah, Krishna, the God of Abraham, Mohammad or other prophets, the spiritual journey is thirst-quenching, refreshing and touches every dimension of our lives. Spirituality is the healing, reconciling and liberating force in human life.

In times like ours, when our planet is reeling from abuse and misuse at the hands of humans, when our ability to connect with each other across the globe can be within seconds, when livable space for our own selves and the Creator's other species is dwindling, we might want to take a long, refreshing drink from our spiritual well. It might help us quench our parched journey. We might want to acknowledge and taste the waters from other wells and discover that those wells can nurture us too. Jesus of Nazareth said, "Love one another. It is my Commandment to you." He didn't quality or quantify. He meant everyone. He nourished a woman at the well and embraced her as His own. Let's embrace the diversity of wells that we all drink from and get spiritual nourishment from them all.

----

Father Micheal Curran
Living and Growing
• Father Michael Curran is the priest of St. Brendan's Episcopal Church in Juneau.

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Monday, March 14, 2005

MTV's 'Spiritual Windows' mix faith with rock 'n' roll

It looked like a few seconds of footage taken in a room of Muslim men, bowing in prayer, with some funky Eastern-type music playing in the background.

And then words appeared in the middle of the screen: "Rejuvenate: MTV."

... at the next commercial break, another one of these dealies appeared.

It was about 10 seconds long and showed gondoliers rowing in the canals of Venice, Italy, while a Latin-sounding man's voice said: "Your heart is where your treasure is, and you must find your treasure in order to make sense of everything."

And then more words appeared on the screen: "Everyday grace: MTV."

It turns out that in late January, MTV, the arbiter of all things hip, quietly launched a campaign of 24 of these little films, known in the biz as "promo spots."

They call the campaign "Spiritual Windows."

"We wanted to create little, short moments, almost breaths of peace, for the channel," Kevin Mackall, the ponytailed 37-year-old senior vice president of on-air promos for MTV, explained as we sat in his 24th-floor corner office, a pair of electric bass guitars standing at attention near his cluttered desk. "There's a genuine appetite for spirituality these days. And that was the mission."

According to a little-known poll that MTV (in conjunction with CBS News) took of MTV viewers during the presidential election last fall, 53 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds said "religion" was "extremely important" or "very important" to their daily lives. Another 31 percent said it was "somewhat important," and only 14 percent said religion wasn't important to them at all.

(Only 23 percent of those MTV viewers said they would describe themselves as "evangelicals" or "born again," but 46 percent said they attended religious services once a month or more.)

Together, the "Spiritual Window" spots Mackall created paint a picture of modern religiosity that reflects something of his own spirituality and, I would argue, that of many other people his age and younger.

They're finding genuine spiritual guidance and expression inside and out of institutionalized religion. In traditional and unexpected places. It can be subtle, or in your face.

One spot, with the tag line "Consume mindfully," shows a Tibetan nun hauling two plastic garbage bags to the curb in front of her Buddhist temple.

One of my favorite spots, tagged "Meditate," has a barber in what could be Anytown, U.S.A., carefully shaving the neck of a customer with a straight razor.

Then there's "Everyone," with a Chinese dragon dancing in the foreground accompanied by a voice-over that says, "We need other human beings to be human. I am because other people are."

And one of the longer spots -- it lasts 13 seconds -- shows the sun setting over a pyramid in Egypt as the Brazilian magical realist author Paulo Coelho's voice announces, "The desert will give you an understanding of the world. How do I immerse myself in the desert? Listen to your heart."

What's missing from the "Spiritual Windows" are explicitly Judeo-Christian images. Producers did shoot some footage inside a church with a Catholic nun, but it ended up on the cutting-room floor. Something about the expression on her face being too . . . something.

"That's, I think, one of the things that is like a turning point, a next step for us," Mackall said.

He insists the "Spiritual Windows" are no gimmick.

"It really, truly is answering a call from our audience," he said. "Hopefully it's a first step into some other content like this."

BY CATHLEEN FALSANI RELIGION WRITER

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Thursday, March 10, 2005

An important lesson: Learning to fail

Smiling success experts on TV or at business sessions help us kid ourselves. They imply that we'll never taste of failure if our convictions are strong, our courage is great, and we follow their formula.

Yet, at some time or other, we all fall. We fall on our faces, fall for someone's manipulations, fall ill from sickness or injury, fall into a depression or a period of grieving We all know of a marriage that couldn't be saved, a child lost to drugs, or the job we were performing so well, and lost.

Not too long ago, CBS's Sunday night 60 Minutes had a segment about 20- and 30-year-olds in the workplace. These young people were raised in an era of over concern about their self-esteem. Their every effort was praised, everybody on their sports team received a trophy, and rarely was firm discipline or a corrective critique offered.

This "You're wonderful" treatment has now bred unfortunate personality traits carried into the job market.

A psychologist said this age group now expects to rise quickly in their jobs, they're not open to suggestions for improvement, and are offended when their bosses don't constantly compliment them. Falls and failures are foreign to them. They didn't learn how to fall.

To a secular and materialistic world, falls and failures are totally unacceptable. But in the world of "reality spirituality" personal failures are a necessary yet paradoxical part of human development.

For, it is not our successes, but our falls and failures that provide our chief opportunities of transformation. Don't we all know some people who failed but who now are clothed with a certain nobility of character?

Sure, we all seek success and welcome its arrival. But to lack the capacity to live and deal with failure leaves us only half-formed persons. The vulnerability of human life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. At times the mystery is best lived and our character best formed by letting go of the constant need of apparent success.

By Father Lou Guntzelman
Father Lou Guntzelman is a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Reach him at life@communitypress.com. Please include a mailing address if you wish for him to respond.

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Nobel laureate, Charles Townes wins 2005 Templeton Prize

Nobel laureate, Charles Townes wins 2005 Templeton Prize

Charles Townes, a University of California, Berkeley, professor who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1964 for his work in quantum electronics and then startled the scientific world by suggesting that religion and science were converging, was awarded the $1.5 million Templeton Prize for progress in spiritual knowledge Wednesday.

The co-inventor of the laser, Townes, 89, said no greater question faced humankind than discovering the purpose and meaning of life -- and why there is something rather than nothing in the cosmos.

"If you look at what religion is all about, it's trying to understand the purpose and meaning of our universe. Science tries to understand function and structures. If there is any meaning, structure will have a lot to do with any meaning," he said from New York. "In the long run they must come together."

It was the 1966 publication of his seminal article, “The Convergence of Science and Religion” in the IBM journal THINK, however, that established Townes as a unique voice - especially among scientists - that sought commonality between the two disciplines. Long before the concept of a relationship between scientific and theological inquiry became an accepted arena of investigation, his nonconformist viewpoint jumpstarted a movement that until then few had considered and even fewer comprehended. So rare was such a viewpoint at the time that Townes admitted in the paper that his position would be considered by many in both camps to be “extreme.” Nonetheless, he proposed, “their differences are largely superficial, and…the two become almost indistinguishable if we look at the real nature of each.”

Understanding the order in the universe and understanding the purpose in the universe are not identical, but they are also not very far apart.

When Charles Hard Townes suddenly figured out how to tame microwaves and, in the process, set the foundation for the development of masers and lasers, it changed the modern world. But, for Townes, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics for his realization that day, it was also a moment that spoke to a larger truth, about how the power of revelation — not unlike that recorded in the scriptures — evidences the similarity of science and religion.

Born in 1915 on a farm in Greenville, South Carolina, to Ellen Hard Townes, a well-educated homemaker, and Henry Townes, an attorney, Townes grew up in a Baptist household that prized intellectual pursuits and vigorous, open-minded discussion of the Bible. His home, nestled near the Blue Ridge Mountains, presented the young boy with a world of biological diversity, one he eagerly explored.

His voracious curiosity and encouraging home life led Townes rapidly through the education system, skipping seventh grade and graduating at age 19 with a B.A. in modern languages and a B.S. in physics, summa cum laude, from Furman University, a Baptist college in Greenville. He went on to Duke University where he completed a Master of Arts in physics in 1936.

Intent on furthering his education, but lacking scholarship offers from MIT, Cornell, Chicago, or Princeton, Townes instead packed his belongings, along with $500 in savings, and took a bus to Pasadena to enroll at the California Institute of Technology. After three years there, he received his Ph.D. in physics with a thesis on isotope separation and nuclear spins in 1939.

Townes planned to stay in academia but, with job offers scarce — the Great Depression was still a crushing presence in the United States — he reluctantly accepted a position on the technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York, one of the most vital arenas of cutting edge research. With the outbreak of World War II, he worked on radar bombing systems that could operate effectively under the severe humidity of the South Pacific.

While in New York, Townes met Frances H. Brown, a young woman who had traveled extensively and who served as social director of International House for graduate students. The two married in 1941.

After the war, Townes was named associate professor of physics at Columbia and soon met Arthur L. Schawlow, who had come to the university on a fellowship and became Townes’ research assistant. It was a fortuitous match: the two would soon combine their energies (and, coincidentally, become brothers-in-law) to make major advances in the field of microwave spectroscopy, including designing the maser and the laser.

In 1951, Townes, along with many other physicists, was attempting to figure out ways to use microwave spectroscopy to better examine molecular structure. As part of his research, he chaired a Navy-sponsored committee that sought to encourage research that might result in generation of waves shorter than those of current radar systems. It was a goal that had proven frustratingly elusive to Townes and like-minded researchers across the globe.

Early one spring morning before a committee meeting in Washington, D.C., Townes got up early but, finding the hotel restaurant not yet open, went outside and sat on a bench in Franklin Square. Alone on the bench, Townes wrestled with his research questions when, like a bolt from the blue, a solution popped into his head and he quickly jotted it down on a piece of paper.

That moment of revelation has been cited repeatedly by Townes during the past half century as a crystallization of how topics normally associated with religion or science — revelation, intuition, observation, faith, and aesthetics — can easily apply to both disciplines. Ironically, the bench where Townes conceived his groundbreaking insight was across the street from the site where Alexander Graham Bell experimented with sending messages on beams of light.

Townes’ discovery would lead to the first working maser in 1954 and soon after, in collaboration with brother-in-law Schawlow, to the invention of the laser. In 1955, Townes and Schawlow co-authored the influential book, Microwave Spectroscopy and, in 1960, the two shared a patent for the laser.

In 1961, Townes took another step into a future few had imagined. A year after Dr. Frank Drake and associates launched the first scientific search for radio transmissions from distant solar systems, Townes co-authored a paper with R. N. Schwartz in Nature that proposed using the optical spectrum for similar indications. More than 40 years later, optical searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (OSETI) are underway at observatories at Harvard, MIT, and the University of California, among others.

Three years later, in 1964, Townes received the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with two physicists from the Lebedev Institute in Moscow, Aleksander Prokhorov and Nikolai Basov, for “fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle.”

A major turning point in Townes’ career came in 1964, when members of the men’s Bible study group at Manhattan’s Riverside Church asked him to speak on the relationship between science and religion. Townes later recalled that he was selected for the talk because he was the only scientist they knew who regularly attended church. It was to be a turning point in the nascent movement to understand where these two disciplines might intersect.

As it happened, the lecture was heard by the editor of the journal THINK, published by IBM. Two years later he published an article by Townes based on the Riverside presentation. Although difficult to imagine now, publishing an article that even touched upon religion in a strictly scientific journal was a revolutionary idea. When the article was republished in Technology Review, MIT’s alumni journal, it caused something of a storm among some scientists who saw no room in their profession for anything remotely related to religion.

His venture into this fertile but unexplored area was accompanied by a number of top positions in academia. He was named provost and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961, director of the Enrico Fermi International School of Physics in 1963, and, in 1967, university professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, a post he held until 1986. He also chaired or participated in numerous defense, space program, and science and technology policy committees and panels.

Townes’ background in military research came full circle in 1982, when he chaired a U.S. Defense Department committee advising the Reagan administration and successfully recommended against the widespread placement of the MX missile system.

Townes has solidified his leadership role in the dialogue at the boundary of science and religion with the publication of many papers, including “Science, values, and beyond,” in Synthesis of Science and Religion (1987), “On Science, and what it may suggest about us,” in Theological Education (1988), and “Why are we here; where are we going?” in The International Community of Physics, Essays on Physics (1997).

The American Institute of Physics Press published a collection of his writings, Making Waves, in 1995, and his book, How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist, a personal story illustrating the sociology of science and discovery, was published to great acclaim by Oxford University Press in 1999.

His lectures, too, have kept him at the forefront of the discussion. Most recently, he delivered the keynote address, “Do science and religion converge?” at the Second World Congress for the Synthesis of Science and Religion in Calcutta, India in 1997, and the lecture, “The Convergence of Science and Religion,” at the annual UNESCO meeting in Paris and at the American Scientific Affiliation annual meeting at Pepperdine University in California in 2002.

Townes holds more than two dozen honorary degrees and a trove of awards and honors. Now 89, a father of four and grandfather of six, he continues a vigorous schedule equal to the demands of his chosen path of inquiry, lecturing, writing and serving as Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California at Berkeley. He and his wife of 63 years reside in Berkeley.

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Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Field Notes For A Compassionate Life

New Book from Rodale Explores Basic Human Goodness

What exactly is compassion? How can tapping into this single trait transform not only individual lives but the world at large? Author Marc Ian Barasch set out to answer these questions, exploring what he calls “the x-factor that every faith exalts as a supreme virtue.” What he discovered is recounted in fascinating detail in the new book, “Field Notes For A Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness” (Rodale Hardcover; March 28).

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said that Barasch’s book is, “An argument for compassion that is balanced yet persuasive, and long overdue. This book ought to be a compulsory read for all.” Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, said that “Field Notes For A Compassionate Life” is “an essential guide for anyone who cares deeply about the human condition. Barasch, an astute chronicler of our deepest potentials, proves our future may well depend on one thing: a regime change of the heart.”

Barasch ventured forth with an open mind, a healthy dose of skepticism, and an unfailing curiosity about the possibilities of what he might find—and their implications. Drawing from science and spirituality, history and popular culture, button-down business and a high sense of fun, Barasch has created a smart, provocative argument that a simple shift in consciousness can change who we are and the society we have become.

His hands-on fieldwork took him to a maximum-security prison in Georgia; from the streets of Denver (where he lived homeless for a week) to a conference at MIT with the Dalai Lama and neuroscientists to an encounter with the bonobo apes.

Marc Ian Barasch is the author of Healing Dreams, The Healing Path and the bestselling Remarkable Recovery. He has been an editor at Psychology Today, Natural Health, and New Age Journal. He has appeared on Good Morning America, Today, and NPR’s All Things Considered. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

>From late March until the end of May, Barasch will be on a book tour visiting Minneapolis, Boulder, Denver, San Francisco bay area, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and New York. Visit him online at www.compassionatelife.com. For requests involving interviews or review copies of the book, please contact: Josh Baran at 212-779-2666 or jcbaran@aol.com.

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Saturday, March 05, 2005

Loss of leisure time, loss of faith

A puzzling paradox of our time is that leisure continues to shrink even as "labor-saving devices" spread everywhere, performing more and more human tasks like banking, collecting tolls and answering phones.

Three powerful and dangerous trends operate here.

First, working hours slowly but steadily increase. According to a study by Professor Juliet Schor of Harvard, the average person now works 164 hours more per year than he or she did 20 years ago. This means that nearly a full month of additional work has been crammed into people’s lives.

Another study discovered that 30 percent of employees skip at least part of their allotted vacation days. In just one year, 415 million vacation days went unused. Rather than relaxing, people felt compelled to work.

Worse still, some long-established laws and regulations that discouraged excessive work have been weakened, repealed or simply gone unenforced.

Second, technology has allowed work to invade every inch of space and every moment of time. For many people, work has become a seamless experience that knows no boundaries. Work inexorably spills over into "home space" and "free time."

Third, many leisure activities, especially for children and teenagers, have become hyper-organized, brutally competitive, and driven by the hope of eventual financial reward, specifically the snaring of scarce athletic scholarships. Everything is now tightly scheduled, governed by intricate rule books and increasingly competitive. Rather than being an end in itself, play has become "marketized," valued primarily for its potential economic payoff. Play, when deprived of spontaneity, just becomes another form of work.

These three pervasive trends have devastating consequences for communities of faith. After all, common worship necessarily requires leisure time; personal spirituality needs at least some mental territory that is entirely "work free." Without a generous amount of leisure, the spiritual dies. And when this happens, faith communities become lifeless museums used for "holy days."

Judaism, more than any other religion, has long understood the essential connection between leisure and religious experience, whether communal or personal. The passionate protection of the Sabbath - a full day devoid of labor - flowed from the notion that the human person is primarily a child of God, not a worker. Unless people rest and enjoy leisure, they foster the blasphemous notion that they are self-created and self-sustained. This obliterates the constant awareness of the creative love and power of God, an awareness that evokes worship.

Who defends leisure? In recent times the strongest resistance to longer working hours has come from the political Left, the very ones accused of secularism. In France, for example, the crowning achievement of Francoise Mitterand’s Socialist Party was the law creating a 35-hour work week, a law now under fierce attack. And in Germany, opposition to Sunday commerce came primarily from the Social Democrats and the trade unions. Amazingly, they won, and a common day of leisure has been preserved, at least for now.

Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian, once remarked that God’s work is sometimes done unwittingly by those who seem indifferent - or even hostile - toward religion. In light of Tillich’s view, any social force that resists the smothering of life in an avalanche of work and hyper-organization is truly protecting the territory of the Holy.

By Rev. Fr. Michael Kerper
s.jameschurch@ comcast.net
The Rev. Fr. Michael Kerper is pastor of St. James Catholic Church in Portsmouth.

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Preaching Morals Via Harry Potter, Homer Simpson and Andy Griffith

About two thousand years ago, Jesus told the parable of the weeds in the field to illustrate how wheat -- the good people of the world -will be separated from the weeds -- the bad ones.

Today, some pastors believe, the focus would be on the sheriff of Mayberry.

"Lo, Andy Griffith was a sheriff in a town called Mayberry. And he angered a local publisher when he gave him a speeding ticket. The publisher took revenge by printing a false article about the sheriff. Is it right for one man to use his job to vengefully punish another for doing his job?"

Recent years have seen pastors and church lecturers increasingly rely on parables involving such pop culture icons as Andy Griffith; Harry Potter; and Wilson, the volleyball from the movie "Cast Away" to teach morals and Bible lessons.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO WHOM?

Lynn Schofield Clark, an assistant research professor in the religion department at the University of Colorado, said book publishers are responding to the popular spirituality movement by putting out as many types of "The Gospel According to (insert pop culture figure here)" books as there are references to God in the shows.

"This is a franchise in publishing, and that's an indication that people are interested and are buying them," Clark said.

The Rev. Steve Hein at St. Andrew's-Covenant Presbyterian Church, also in Wilmington, said there are programs for pastors that will match a Bible lesson or Scripture with a relevant movie or television clip. He shows film and TV clips in his contemporary services on Saturday nights and sometimes makes movie references in his Sunday sermons.

Frank Benedetti, a gay-rights activist from Winston-Salem, N.C., said he recently spoke at a Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on the "The Gospel According to Harry Potter."

He compared Harry's experience of being ostracized in his home and at school because of his magic powers to the experience of a gay person in an intolerant environment.

"When Harry was sent to Hogwarts School of Magic, he blossomed because people accepted him there," Benedetti said.

That's similar to how gays feel once they don't have to hide their identity, he said.

"Like Harry, the problem gays and lesbians have is they are made invisible," Benedetti said. "I asked the Unitarians, How are we -- do we go out of our way to make gays and lesbians or minorities feel accepted?"

MORAL IS THE MESSAGE

Hollywood has figured out that subtle spirituality sells, said Conrad Ostwalt Jr., a religion professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C.

"There are programs and movies that are not so explicitly religious in their messages, like `The Andy Griffith Show,' but offer a popular values or ethical system or spirituality," he said.

Clark said she sees vague spirituality represented in "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer," "The XFiles" and "The Matrix" movies.

" `Touched by An Angel' demonstrated that a program could be explicitly about spirituality and vaguely about religion. It danced around that," she said. "Since then, there's been a lot of experimentation."

Ever since the 2001 terrorist attacks, Clark added, "there has been a turn to interest in religion and larger questions -- about why are we here -- in the general public. I think people in Hollywood aren't making these decisions because they think religion is good, but it's profitable."

For many churches "popular culture can be a way of discussing religion in a non-threatening way," Clark said.

By AMANDA GREENE
New York Times Regional Newspapers
Amanda Greene writes for the Star-News in Wilmington, N.C.

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Barna survey - Qualities and Goals

The Barna Group, the religion research organization headed by pollster/author George Barna, asked parents to name the qualities that contribute most significantly to "effectively raising children.":

1. Patience was the No. 1 answer, listed by 36 percent of parents. Other qualities included
2. demonstrating love (cited by 32 percent),
3. enforcing discipline and being understanding (22 percent),
4. faith commitment and identifiable religious beliefs (20 percent),
5. good communication skills (17 percent),
6. compassion (14 percent),
7. listening (12 percent) and
8. intelligence (11 percent).

While only 6 percent said setting goals was significant, parents readily ranked their goals for raising their children:

1. The far-and-away leader was helping their kids get a good education, cited by 39 percent of parents.
2. Second was helping their children feel loved (24 percent), followed by
3. enabling their children to have a meaningful relationship with Jesus Christ (22 percent),
4. security (16 percent),
5. helping children feel affirmed and encouraged (14 percent),
6. providing a firm spiritual foundation (13 percent),
7. delivering basic necessities such as shelter (12 percent) and
8. food (10 percent), and
9. helping their children feel happy (10 percent).

U.S. parents split evenly over whether they teach moral absolutes to their children, with 43 percent affirming moral absolutes and 45 percent denying them.

The survey shows the faith commitment of parents does not significantly impact how children are raised. "We found that the qualities born-again parents say an effective parent must possess, the outcomes they hope to facilitate in the lives of their children ... (are) indistinguishable from the approach taken by parents who are not born again," Barna reported.

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Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Teenagers Greatly Influenced by Parents' Faith

A new survey funded by the Lilly Endowment found that most American teenagers are religious, pray while alone, feel close to God, and follow their parent’s faiths, but at the same time have difficulty expressing the faith’s teachings.

"Teenage religiosity for the vast majority is highly conventional," said Christian Smith, who co-wrote Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. "That may mean that compared to previous generations, teenagers today are more conventional and bound to mainstream values and cultures compared to, say, the '60s. They seem pretty content just going with how they were raised."

The book, to be released in March by Oxford University Press, is the compilation of the first major finding by the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR).

Of those surveyed, 82 percent said they are affiliated with a religious congregation and 71 percent said they felt “extremely,” “very” or “somewhat” close to God. Sixty five percent also said they pray alone a few times a week or more, and sixty one percent said they “definitely” believe in divine miracles from God.

In a larger picture, the survey found that most teenagers are greatly influenced by that of their parents’: less than one third of one percent reported that they were part of “alternative” religions such as Wicca. Three fourth of the religious teens said their beliefs were somewhat or very similar to that of their parents, and only 6 and 11 percent of teens said their beliefs are very different from their mothers’ and father’s beliefs, respectively.

Teens, like their American Baby Boomer parent generation, have a strong sense of religious identification, but are unsure of what the identification means in relation to their faith.

“What I find most interesting about the trend is the wide gap between religious knowledge on the part of most teens and their strong sense of religious identification and affiliation, as indicated by this survey,” said Mary Kupiec Cayton, a history professor at Miami University and a specialist in American spirituality.

“I agree that this trend isn't unique to teens: it increasingly characterizes how many American adults feel about religion as well,” Cayton said. “Contemporary Americans are often looking to religion to meet their personal needs for community and emotional comfort. ‘Belief’ seems to depend a great deal on the degree to which these needs get met.”