A trio of denominational leaders will once again offer seminary students a for-credit deep dive into all things Presbyterian at the upcoming 224th General Assembly in Baltimore next June.
The course, “Presbyterianism: Principles and Practices,” will be co-taught by Cliff Kirkpatrick of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Paul Hooker of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and Jerry Van Marter, former director of Presbyterian News Service and current stated clerk of Mid-Kentucky Presbytery.
When Cameron Newell joined the Ghost Ranch college staff for his second summer, he was eager to work with the children of the guests and staff of the busy national education and retreat center.
As a Reformed and connectional church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has much to offer college students, agreed the denomination’s Collegiate Ministries task force at its Nov. 16-18 meeting here.
Samantha Perilstein is a bubbly hospitality major at the University of Delaware and deeply connected to Jewish life on campus. Which is a change from where she started.
To Rabbi Jeremy Winaker, that made Perilstein a perfect candidate for an ambitious national experiment to bring college Jews back to Judaism.
Under a $17 million program sponsored by the national Jewish campus group Hillel, students like Perilstein are hired to help their less Jewishly inclined peers achieve some kind of “meaningful Jewish experience.” The upcoming High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah (Sept. 28-29) and Yom Kippur (Oct. 7-8) are a natural time to engage Jewish students.
“Religions as instruments of peace” is the subtitle of a 2011 summer course on “Building an interfaith community.” Twenty-three students from more than a dozen nations have assembled at the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, Switzerland for the course which runs from July 4-29.
One of the early lecturers admitted that many observers today see religions not as instruments of peace but as reasons for conflict. “Our hands as religious leaders are not clean,” said Rabbi Richard Marker of the International Jewish Committee on Inter-religious Consultations.
The experience of too many nations and their governments, he added, “is that religion is a cause of divisiveness that works against shared values.”
Leaders of the Presbyterian Campus Ministry at the University of Arizona in Tucson have sent a letter to supporters describing the March 16 assault on a PCM student group in La Oroya, Peru, and thanking them for their prayerful response to the attack.
The White House is hoping to recruit America’s college and seminary students in a nationwide interfaith service campaign that was launched on March 17.
Brigham Young University was named the nation’s most religious campus, and Sarah Lawrence College the least religious, in new rankings released Aug. 3.
The Princeton Review released the 2011 edition of their yearly assessment of “The Best 373 Colleges,” which included rankings of the most and least religious students.
Mormon-owned BYU rose from second place in last year’s rankings. It also ranked first in the list of “Stone-Cold Sober Schools,” an honor which the school has held for 13 consecutive years.
All of the schools with the most religious student bodies hold some kind of church affiliation — including two …