BagOfNothing.com

Alex Baker leans on his walking stick and shuffles slowly down the garden path. Pointing to the greenhouse in the corner, he recalls: ‘That’s where the old air-raid shelter used to be.’

He clearly remembers him and his brothers digging the hole for the shelter back in 1939, giving the family a safe haven whenever German wartime bombers threatened.

Searching through old family photographs, he comes up with a snap showing the Baker lads in the back garden at the time.  But that’s a mere 68 years ago. Alex’s memories of the house go back a lot farther than that – because he has lived in the same property in North End for every one of his 96 years.

The liner Titanic had yet to make her fateful maiden voyage and the First World War was three years away when Alex was born in the two-up, two-down house in Basin Street.

Remarkably, Alex is still living there today with wife Edith. After 68 years in the house, she is a comparative newcomer.

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SPRINGMAID BEACH, S.C. (UMNS)-The United Methodist Church “must face an inconvenient truth” to reverse its 40-year decline in U.S. membership, worship attendance and church school attendance, its bishops agree.

“There are many roles to be played in facing the truth of our church in the United States,” said Iowa Bishop Gregory Palmer, chairman of the internal Council of Bishops Episcopacy Study Task Force.

In a May 3 task force report to the denomination’s Council of Bishops, Palmer told colleagues that retooling its leadership processes for lay members, clergy and bishops “is essential to reversing this decline.”

Since 1964, United Methodist membership in the United States has decreased 27 percent, despite the nation’s population growth by 54 percent. The percentage of youth members declined from one in seven in 1964 to one in 21 in 2005. Also in 2005, approximately 41 percent of its U.S. churches received no members on profession of faith.

The bishops are responding – beginning with themselves – by looking internally and asking “what is the role of episcopal leadership in making disciples for Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world?”

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FRAMINGHAM, Mass. — Several female students at Framingham State College are accused of stealing about one-thousand copies of the student newspaper, apparently because they thought they looked fat in a front page picture.

A school official says the women face possible disciplinary action.

The color photo in “The Gatepost” shows seven female students at a women’s lacrosse game wearing tank tops and shorts with the name of a player spelled out on their bare bellies.

Soon after the paper was distributed around campus, about half its two-thousand-copy press run disappeared.

Desmond McCarthy, an English professor and the paper’s faculty adviser, says he was told by other students that the women in the photo thought they looked fat.

And my favorite part …

McCarthy says editions of the newspaper have been swiped a few times in past years, but this — in his words — “is the most stupid reason the paper has been stolen.”

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It was a warm Saturday night in New York City as a mixed crowd of atheists and Christians converged on Calvary Baptist Church in midtown Manhattan for the first “Nightline Face-Off.” And it wasn’t long before temperatures began to rise inside the auditorium.

The question for our debate was “Does God Exist?” and both sides went at the issue with a series of passionate declarations and critical attacks on the arguments of their opponents. It was a clean but unflinching contest.

Former child star Kirk Cameron and his evangelist colleague Ray Comfort had pledged to prove the existence of God, scientifically.

Cameron opened the debate by addressing the crowd:

Hi, I’m Kirk Cameron and my partner and I Ray Comfort come to you tonight not as molecular biologists or rocket scientists, but simply as an author and an actor, and we want to do two things that fly in the face of convention. One, we’d like to show you that the existence of God can be proven, 100 percent, absolutely, without the use of faith. And secondly, as a former atheist myself — an evolutionist — I want to pull back the curtain and show that the number one reason that people don’t believe in God is not a lack in evidence, but because of a theory that many scientists today believe to be a fairytale for grownups.

You can watch the debate Thursday, May 10 at 1 p.m. on ABCNews.com and 2 p.m. on ABC News Now.

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