Anne Rice, the bestselling novelist with a reputation for her religiosity, has quit being a Christian. She announced it on her Facebook account and her message has created quite a stir.

Rice declared on her Facebook account:

“For those who care, and I understand if you don’t:  Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always, but not to being a Christian or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to belong to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

“I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.”

As expected, pro and con comments are appearing all over the internet. On Watts Cookin Blpg we have posted a column by Leonard Pitts on the subject. We will post others as well as comments.

By David S. Broder

The Washington Post

August 6, 2010 12:01AM

Washington • Earlier this week, as the United States Senate went through the motions of debating Elena Kagan’s nomination to a Supreme Court seat that almost certainly will be hers, readers of The New Yorker across the country could review journalist George Packer’s masterful article “The Empty Chamber,” tracing the decline and fall of that same Senate.

Packer shares with thousands of citizens what every reporter who covers the Capitol knows: that the public disdain for Congress, measured in record low approval scores in polls, is mirrored by the frustration of the members of both parties who have to serve and bear the scorn.

I heard it over lunch one day last week from a conservative Republican senator with three years of seniority. He was bitterly disappointed that he did not find the collegial, challenging body that his predecessor had described to him — or the cross-party friendship that Vice President Joe Biden had told him he once enjoyed in his travels with a Republican counterpart from the senator’s own state.

Packer does as good a job as I have ever read (more…)

by Rosemay Winters,

Salt Lake Tribune

Murray » Geniah Stuber, a third-grader at Parkside Elementary, knows why it’s important to learn to read.

“So then you can be, like, smarter,” she said Tuesday during reading time in Mrs. Buehler’s class.

Learning to read by the end of third grade also is a key predictor of children’s future success, according to a new report released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. But nationally and in Utah, two-thirds of students are not proficient readers when they start fourth grade, according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Process or NAEP.

“Up to third grade, children are learning to read,” said Abel Ortiz, the foundation’s director of evidence-based practices. “Starting in fourth grade, they are reading to learn. So if they don’t learn to read by third grade, that greatly impacts their ability to learn in later years.”

It also affects students’ long-term earning potential, Ortiz said, and for low-income kids, their ability to leave poverty behind.

As a teacher back in the mid-60s I taught health to all the seventh graders at Logan Junior High School. After two weeks I would make a list of those students who would be juvenile delinquents by the ninth grade and took it into the principal.

The list was composed entirely of non-readers, and it proved to be a very (more…)

Play Mozart – Ah! Vous Dirai – Je, Maman

Everytime I listen to this I am put to sleep.

Play the Minute Waltz

Play Mozart – Ave Verum Corpus

Play Chopin – Nocturne No 2

Play Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue

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