This Wednesday, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA cast two contradictory votes. On the one hand, it voted 405-92 to maintain the church constitution’s “fidelity and chastity” rule for ordained ministers. In other words, Presbyterian pastors must be faithful in marriage and chaste in singleness. Like other mainline denominations, the PCUSA has also debated whether to sanction same-sex marriages, but so far, it has refused to do. Maintaining the fidelity and chastity rule strengthens this refusal. On the other hand, the General Assembly also voted 298-221 to allow ordaining bodies within the denomination considerable leeway over how–or whether–to … Continue reading The End of the PCUSA?

Today’s Washington Post includes a article by Shankar Vedantam about the increasing social isolation of the average American. A quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom they can discuss personal troubles, more than double the number who were similarly isolated in 1985. Overall, the number of people Americans have in their closest circle of confidants has dropped from around three to about two. One of the sociologists interviewed for the article attributed this isolation to commuting and television. Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard and the author of “Bowling Alone,” a book about … Continue reading WaPo: Social Isolation Growing

From Best of the Web Today comes this post, with which I agree:  Horrific news out of Iraq, where two U.S. soldiers, Pfc. Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, were either killed or captured and later killed in an enemy attack Friday. Their bodies were found Monday, CNN reports, “mutilated and booby-trapped”: The bodies also had been desecrated and a visual identification was impossible–part of the reason DNA testing was being conducted to verify their identities, the sources said. . . . Not only were the bodies booby-trapped, but homemade bombs also lined the road leading to the victims, an … Continue reading The Fallacy of “Cycles of Violence”