Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

From the Schwartzreport, which I encourage you do subscribe to.

Does God Answer Prayer? ASU Research Says ‘Yes’

Arizona State University

This is the ninth meta-analysis of Therapeutic Intention research, eight of which have supported the idea that the consciousness of a person(s) can have a therapeutic effect on the well-being of another organism. David Hodge is widely published and has appeared on the pages of Social Work, Social Work Research, Journal of Social Service Research, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, and Families in Society. He has also authored the book ‘Spiritual assessment: A handbook for helping professionals.’

Thanks to Larry Dossey, MD

David R. Hodge, an assistant professor of social work in the College of Human Services at Arizona State University’s West campus, has conducted an exhaustive meta-analysis on the effects of intercessory prayer among people with psychological or medical problems.
In other words, does God — or some other type of transcendent entity — answer prayer for healing?

According to Hodge’s study, ‘A Systematic Review of the Empirical Literature on Intercessory Prayer,’ the answer is ‘Yes.’

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An interesting perspective!

From The Christian Chronicle, which calls itself “An International newspaper for members of Churches of Christ” — http://www.christianchronicle.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=653 - via the Schwartzreport.

Federal judge: Faith under attack in U.S.

By Charles Babb
For The Christian Chronicle

SEARCY, ARK. - Attacks leveled at those of faith represent a great threat against America, a federal appeals court judge said at Harding University.

Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a member of the Silver Spring, Md., church, spoke on “Faith and Freedom” as part of Harding’s American Studies Institute lecture series.

“In my view, Christianity at its best is the foundation of reason and liberty,” said Brown, a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “The true American religious tradition, the one that disciplines power, subjugating it to reason, truth and, ultimately, an all-powerful God, is not a threat to liberty but its best defender.”

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Some people sort news into three categories: important and urgent, important but not urgent, and urgent but not important. The news media can usually be counted on to at least notice the first. Television can always be counted on to notice the third. It is the second — important but not urgent — that is most likely to be overlooked in ongoing news coverage. “Important but not urgent” all too often means “put on the back burner.”

Matters that are put on the back burner until they become urgent

Putting things on the back burner guarantees that by the time they are noticed — that is to say, by the time they become urgent — we will have lost any chance that might have existed to deal with the beginnings of a problem rather than a full-fledged problem. Now, sometimes there’s nothing to be done in any case. I well remember one of my professors in college saying that he only got worried when people said “we have to do something” because of course that indicated that the proposed action without knowing what to do.

Nonetheless, even if there is nothing to be done, isn’t it better to know what’s going on than not? The melting of Antarctic ice seems to be approaching the “important and urgent” status, even if there isn’t anything to be done about it. It’s like watching a slow motion train wreck. Or perhaps a better analogy would be watching movies of lava flowing down the volcano’s side, because the latter analogy does not imply that there is something that might have been done to prevent it. Fromhttp://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/45890.html

Scientists say huge Antarctic ice sheet is melting
Posted on : Fri, 30 Mar 2007

by Ryan Jones

A 700 square kilometer ice sheet in Amundsen Sea Embayment in Antarctica has thinned over the last few decades, mostly on account of global warming and contributing to sea level rise, climate scientists and polar experts said at a recent meeting.NEW YORK: A 700 square kilometer ice sheet in Amundsen Sea Embayment in Antarctica has thinned over the last few decades, mostly on account of global warming and contributing to sea level rise, climate scientists and polar experts said at a recent meeting.

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Congressman Ron Paul must be pretty lonely in Congress, making sense as he does.

Particularly it must be lonely being a Republican, given that this war is their mess more than anyone else’s, as they controlled both houses of Congress from 1995 til this year, and the presidency since 2001. However he is quite right in stating that the Democrats aren’t any better. Particularly he is right to keep pounding on the fact that Congress is not doing its job of protecting the constitution from presidential incroachments — incroachments that go back a long, long way, always accompanied by war and rumors of war, with all the profit that accrues to well-heeled campaign contributors.

March 27, 2007
More Pork for More War
by Rep. Ron Paul

Last week the House passed an emergency supplemental spending bill that was the worst of all worlds. The president’s request would have already set a spending record, but the Democratic leadership packed 21 billion additional dollars of mostly pork-barrel spending in an attempt to win Democrat votes. The total burden on the American taxpayer for this bill alone will be an astonishing $124 billion . Democrats promised to oppose the war by adding more money to fight the war than even the president requested.

I am pleased to have joined with the majority of my Republican colleagues to oppose this bill.

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A Conversation With Philip G. Zimbardo
Finding Hope in Knowing the Universal Capacity for Evil

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Published: April 3, 2007

Philip G. Zimbardo, at home in San Francisco with some of the masks in his collection.

SAN FRANCISCO — At Philip G. Zimbardo’s town house here, the walls are covered with masks from Indonesia, Africa and the Pacific Northwest.

Dr. Zimbardo, a social psychologist and the past president of the American Psychological Association, has made his reputation studying how people disguise the good and bad in themselves and under what conditions either is expressed.

His Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, known as the S.P.E. in social science textbooks, showed how anonymity, conformity and boredom can be used to induce sadistic behavior in otherwise wholesome students. More recently, Dr. Zimbardo, 74, has been studying how policy decisions and individual choices led to abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The road that took him from Stanford to Abu Ghraib is described in his new book, “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil” (Random House).

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In addition to making Maureen Caudill’s book, Suddenly Psychic: A Skeptic’s Journey a ForeWord Spotlight Review for their March/April issue, they’ve also featured an interview with her in their ForeWord This Week Newsletter.

Your local library can be a great source of information, and libraries these days are more focused than ever on presenting helpful resources in new and accessible formats.

For example, Washington state’s King County Library System is presenting a Critical Choices series that arranges for authors to help you learn what you need to know on subjects that can otherwise be pretty daunting.

One such scheduled author is our own Jim Comer, who will be speaking at the Fairwood Library in Renton, WA at 7 P.M. on April 10. He’ll be talking about how to care for your aging parents, which is a problem that more and more of us will be facing in the coming years.

If you can’t make it to his talk, try checking out Jim’s book, When Roles Reverse: A Guide to Parenting Your Parents. And see what your own library has planned.

Or, if you want to see what’s going on behind the scenes, try checking out some library weblogs.

Upper panel shows Onychiurus arcticus. The effect of protective dehydration is shown in the lower panel.

Antarctic insects make natual anti-freeze to survive cold
mongabay.com
April 2, 2007

Insects in the some of the world’s coldest places produce natural anti-freeze that enables them to survive sub-freezing temperatures for months on end accoridng to research repsented at the Society for Experimental Biology’s Annual Meeting in Glasgow.

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Web news readers have greater attention span: study

Sat Mar 31, 2007

By Belinda Goldsmith

WASHINGTON, March 29 (Reuters) - People who use the Internet to read the news have a greater attention span than print readers, according to a U.S. study that refutes the idea that Web surfers jump around and don’t read much.

The EyeTrack07 survey by the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism school, found online readers read 77 percent of what they chose to read while broadsheet newspaper readers read an average of 62 percent, and tabloid readers about 57 percent.

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From the Houston Chronicle, http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/4677258.html

March 31, 2007, 1:16AM

Model proves shining success
Lennar’s latest solar-powered homes in California getting snapped up

By BOB KEEFE
Cox News Service
ROSEVILLE, CALIF. — The houses that Lennar Corp. is building here look like the tract homes you might find just about anywhere in America.

But there’s one major distinction: They’ll get power from the sun.

In a crystal-clear sign that solar is finally going mainstream, Miami-based Lennar recently announced that photovoltaic solar energy systems will come standard — just like carpet or cabinets — in the more than 2,000 homes it plans to sell in the Sacramento and San Francisco Bay areas over the next few years.

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