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Most college freshmen OK on gay marriages: Sixty percent support right to marry

More than 60 percent of incoming freshmen in U.S. colleges and universities believe that same-sex couples should have the right to marry—a 3.3 percent rise from the previous year’s class.

The annual study, this year based on 271,000 written questionnaires completed last fall at 393 schools nationwide, also showed that while more than 43 percent called themselves “middle-of-the-road,” that was the lowest percentage since the research program at the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute was begun in 1970.

Overextended: The increasing demands on seminaries

Within a single week this past fall I received requests that the seminary I serve staff a youth retreat for a congregation, send a speaker about starvation in Darfur to a conference in Washington, D.C., provide leadership to Presbyterian congregational leaders in a distant city, send curriculum for a seventh-grade class, offer training for Spanish-speaking and Latino lay leaders, open a D.Min. program in another city, and engage with a nearby university in an ethics project on stem cell research. Additional requests came that same week to administrators and other members of the faculty.