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Posted 2000

> Preview of Bowling Alone

Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified and describes in this brilliant volume, Bowling Alone.


> Give Honest Airing to Plan to Fund Faith-Based Groups

Over the years, we have witnessed "no-win" gridlock in the corridors of Congress. Now we may be seeing it in communities of faith. Thanks largely to the politics of faith communities, a potentially important initiative may be aborted without a fair hearing. The initiative is President Bush's proposal to broaden charitable choice options.


> Love Is Colorblind

David and Fea are not your average Jewish children. For one thing, there's the accent with which they speak: it has a French Creole lilt, so Fea's calls for Tradd are light-tongued, with an extra syllable: "Trad-da, Trad-da." There's also their ancestry. Both David and Fea were adopted by their parents, Elliot and Beth Raizes.


> Marketing Violent Entertainment To Children: A Review Of Self-Regulation And Industry Practices In The Motion Picture, Music Recording & Electronic Game Industries: A Report Of The Federal Trade Commission

On June 1, 1999, President Clinton asked the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice to undertake a study of whether the movie, music recording, and computer and video game industries market and advertise products with violent content to youngsters. The President's request paralleled Congressional calls for such a study. The President raised two specific questions: Do the industries promote products they themselves acknowledge warrant parental caution in venues where children make up a substantial percentage of the audience? And are these advertisements intended to attract children and teenagers? For all three segments of the entertainment industry, the answers are plainly "yes."


> The Sam Nunn NationsBank Policy Forum, March 1999
Leadership, Values and Ethics: Educating Global Citizens for a New Millennium
Remarks by Dr. Michael Novak

Today the United States is facing its worst crisis in history -- a crisis of floundering political and personal morality. Does this century mark our nation's last? Are we a meteor now exhausted? Or is the present moral fog simply the dark hours before the rampart's new gleaming?


> What's Behind Resilient Communities?

Something's afoot in the United States, and Canada, and Australia, and Europe, and Asia and Africa -- all over the world. Increasing numbers of people are saying they want a different life than that being offered by industrial-era society. Paul Ray, in his 1977 Integral Culture Survey: A Study of the Emergence of Transformational Values in America says that as much as 25% of populations in industrial countries are looking for a better way of life.


> School Shootings and White Denial

Tim Wise: "I can think of no other way to say this, so here goes: white people need to pull our heads out of our collective ***. Two more white children are dead and thirteen are injured, and another 'nice' community is scratching its blonde head, utterly perplexed at how a school shooting the likes of the one yesterday in Santee, California could happen. After all, as the Mayor of the town said in an interview with CNN: 'We're a solid town, a good town, with good kids, a good church-going town...an All-American town.' Yeah, well maybe that's the problem."


> Excerpt from Soul Among Lions: Musings of a Bootleg Preacher, Chapter 8

We refer to people living on the street as homeless. Actually they are houseless, not homeless. Their home is wherever they may be. A sad plight, especially with winter coming on.


> Excerpt from Soul Among Lions: Musings of a Bootleg Preacher, Chapter 13

I've just come from another national church convention. They always talk about race, that matter Gunnar Myrdal, fifty years ago, called an "American Dilemma." Now it seems not a dilemma, but America's preoccupation and clinical fixation. Strange, for in reality race does not exist. It is a sociological concept, not a tangible reality. God created human beings, and we did the rest.


> Tim Wise: A White Man Speaking Black Truths

Though Tim Wise is a white man, the piece was redistributed largely by people of color. Our reactions to it were universal: we couldn't believe that a white man was writing something that most of us had been quietly thinking and surreptitiously discussing for years.


> New Survey Reveals "Moral Illiteracy" Problem That Needs To Be Addressed In Educational Reforms

In releasing preliminary data from the 2000 "Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth," a comprehensive national survey on the ethics of young people, Michael Josephson, founder and president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics and the CHARACTER COUNTS! Coalition, called on politicians to recognize the vital importance of dealing with "shocking levels of moral illiteracy" as part of any educational reform package. Saying the survey data reveals "a hole in the moral ozone," Josephson added: "Being sure children can read is certainly essential, but it is no less important that we deal with the alarming rate of cheating, lying and violence that threatens the very fabric of our society."

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