All the News Fit to Print (from NY Times)

Sometimes the NY Times has articles that get us thinking...

A $10 Mosquito Net Is Making Charity Cool

Donating $10 to buy a mosquito net to save an African child from malaria has become a hip way to show you care, especially for teenagers. The movement is like a modern version of the March of Dimes, created in 1938 to defeat polio, or like collecting pennies for Unicef on Halloween.

Unusual allies, like the Methodist and Lutheran Churches [and Episcopal Church!], the National Basketball Association and the United Nations Foundation, are stoking the passion for nets that prevent malaria. The annual “American Idol Gives Back” fund-raising television special has donated about $6 million a year for two years. The music channel VH1 made a fund-raising video featuring a pesky man in a mosquito suit.

It is an appeal that clearly resonates with young people.

Read more about it here.

Learn about the Nets for life Program (through Episcopal Relief & Development) here.

Gay Unions Shed Light on Gender in Marriage

For insights into healthy marriages, social scientists are looking in an unexpected place.

A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Most studies show surprisingly few differences between committed gay couples and committed straight couples, but the differences that do emerge have shed light on the kinds of conflicts that can endanger heterosexual relationships.

Read the rest here.

Out of a Church Kitchen and Into the Courts

NEBRASKA BEEF has been accused of making people at a church social very sick; one elderly woman died. Meatballs served at a smorgasbord of the Salem Lutheran Church in Longville, Minn., were tainted with deadly E. coli bacteria, and Nebraska Beef was named as the culprit in lawsuits filed by the dead woman’s husband and by Ellie Wheeler, one of 17 other people who became ill.

Ellie Wheeler, one of those at a church social who became ill, is suing Nebraska Beef. The company is suing her church. Carolyn Hawkinson died after eating meatballs at Salem Lutheran Church in Longville, Minn. All of this is straightforward enough, and you might expect that it would lead to an out-of-court settlement, with the meat company vowing to clean up its act.

But Nebraska Beef, based in Omaha, is pursuing a very different tactic. For starters, the company has denied that it is responsible for providing bad meat, and it has provided a culprit of its own. It blames the Salem Lutheran Church — contending in its own lawsuit that the volunteer church ladies who prepared the food were negligent.

Read the rest here.