Between the years 1964-1968, when he attended St. Stephen’s, a faculty member came into his dorm room about once a month, after lights-out, and molested him. Haslanger told Woodruff that he told the school’s headmaster about that person, and the headmaster called him a liar. Now, according to Haslanger’s account, here’s where it got weird.
Two articles on the sex talk, both from the New York Times (well, one is from a NYT blog, Freakonomics), caught our attention in the last two days.
Some of the young people at St. Peter’s, Lewes, Delaware, tell why they are Episcopalians.
In one example of how clergy are attempting to use technology and popular culture to reach out to the young, Gardner is constructing a monthly sermon using songs from the iPods of her students, rather than biblical excerpts from a lectionary, as her texts. In her first three efforts, she has attempted to extract moral lessons from the lyrics of Kanye West, Nickelback, and India.Arie.
“That’s the basis of all history,” Doerr said. “You have to go back and ask people what happened and write it down. That’s where history begins.”
Episcope has a full round-up of the mainstream media’s coverage of yesterday’s National Prayer Service. But the work of the Church isn’t all about blessings presidents and squabbling about sexual ethics. Sometimes it is about prom dresses. That’s right, prom dresses. Have a look.
“Taking a pledge doesn’t seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior,” said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. “But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking.”
Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost.
A new national study by two Brigham Young University sociologists finds that religious involvement makes teens half as likely to use marijuana. “Some may think this is an obvious finding, but research and expert opinion on this issue have not been consistent,” said BYU sociology professor Stephen Bahr and an author on the study. “After we accounted for family and peer characteristics, and regardless of denomination, there was an independent effect that those who were religious were less likely to do drugs, even when their friends were users.”