Still, Francis persevered, relying on his immediate popularity and innate charm, and soon the outside world began to look at the Catholic Church in a new, positive light under his guidance. Suddenly, it was cool to be Catholic.

But the traditional conservatives within the church didn’t want to be cool, and while the new pope was hardly progressive by secular standards (he is still Catholic, after all), they preferred the cold church, the one that protected them from the outside world behind layers of immovable doctrine.

While Francis reached far into the margins to minister to the […]

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A canoe rests in shallow water at the Mudro Lake, Minnesota.
Credit: Jeffrey Phelps/Getty

Trump administration officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced in a quietly released statement on Thursday that 234,000 acres of land near a popular Minnesota wilderness area will officially open to mining.

“Interested companies now may soon be able to lease minerals in the watershed in the Superior National Forest,” the USDA said in its announcement, noting that it had removed a “major obstacle” to mining in Minnesota’s Rainy River Watershed. The watershed sits next to the popular Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in the northeastern part of the state.

Critics, however, say this decision ignores “science and facts” because the department did not conduct an adequate study into the environmental, social, and economic impacts that may occur as a result of lifting a temporary suspension on mining in the area.

Trump administration plan […]

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Church attendance has edged down in recent years. Gallup’s latest yearly update from its daily tracking survey shows that in 2017, 38% of adults said they attended religious services weekly or almost every week. When Gallup began asking this question in 2008, that figure was 42%.

Gallup has asked a different question in its polls going back to the 1950s: “Did you, yourself, happen to attend church, synagogue or mosque in the last seven days, or not?” That number, too, has been edging down over the years. It was as high as 49% in the mid-1950s, but has been in the mid-30% range in recent years.

A lot of attention has been paid to reasons for the decline in participation in formal religious services. One potential explanation that doesn’t receive as much attention as others is the impact of the quality of religious leaders at the church level. Much of our Gallup research for business and industry focuses on the importance of managers for employee engagement — summed up by the statement, “Workers don’t quit companies; they quit managers.” It’s […]

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The 2 megawatt SR2000 turbine produced more than 3 gigawatt hours of renewable electricity in less than 12 months.
Credit: Scotrenewables Tidal Power

A tidal turbine has generated record levels of power production in its first year of testing.

The 2 megawatt (MW) SR2000 turbine produced more than 3 gigawatt hours (GWh) of renewable electricity in less than 12 months, Scotrenewables Tidal Power said in a statement Tuesday.

The turbine is located at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney, Scotland. Scotrenewables described the SR2000 as “the world’s most powerful operating tidal stream turbine.” Tidal stream technologies are able to harness the kinetic energy of currents flowing in and out of tidal areas, according to the EMEC.

Scotrenewables said its turbine had supplied the equivalent annual electricity demand of roughly 830 U.K. households and, at times, more than 25 percent of the Orkney Islands’ electricity demand. An estimated 22,000 people live on the islands.

Looking at the bigger picture, the 3 GWh produced by the SR2000 during the last 12 months is greater […]

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Ten years have passed since the 2008 financial crisis, and the effects linger. For one thing, the crisis produced a significant shift in American higher education. Scared by a seemingly treacherous labor market, since the downturn college students have turned away from the humanities and towards job-oriented degrees.

It’s not clear they are making the right decision.

The humanities were humming along prior to 2008, according to an analysis by the Northeastern University historian Benjamin Schmidt. Over the previous decade, disciplines like history, philosophy, English literature, and religion were either growing or holding steady as a share of all college majors. But in the decade after the financial crisis, all of these majors took a nosedive.

The popularity of the history major is an illustrative example. From 1998 to 2007, the share of college students graduating with a degree in history averaged around 2%. By 2017, it had fallen closer to 1%. (All data in this article are based on reports that colleges submit to the US Department of Education.)

Other humanities majors saw a similar fall. “Declines have hit […]

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