But with the encouragement of our Board of Trustees (they even put it in my annual evaluation to make this a priority) this three year project is now in print and was released last week.  One of my great joys about the book is the opportunity to share the stories of how God has worked so marvelously at Belhaven through these years.

David C. Cook is the publisher.  They are working with B&B Media to help get out the word about the book, and I discovered last week that the daughter of the VP for B&B, Diane Morrow, is studying dance here at Belhaven – Amy Morrow.

With their guidance I started a round of radio interviews last week, and there are more on the schedule – Detroit, Charlotte, Des Moines, Cleveland, etc. – I’ll be sharing on the American Family Radio broadcast to several hundred stations tomorrow with Matt Friedman.

On Wednesday the 28^th at 4:30 central time, I’ll have the honor to talk about the ideas of the book on the national broadcast of Prime Time America, on Moody Radio .

I put in the campus mail today a signed copy of the book to each faculty and staff member because they make leadership easy for me at Belhaven. Thanks!!

But if you’re not on the team here at Belhaven and would like a copy, it is on all the major book websites now, and will be featured in Family Christian Stores and in LifeWay Christian Stores during the month of November.

Here is the quick link to Amazon where you can order, or share your reviews if you like (of course, if you don’t like it, just tell me instead of the whole world on Amazon!!)

Had some nice endorsements for the book including Ken Blanchard, Joni Erickson-Tada, Michael Lindsay, Ed Young, Steve Douglass, Duane Litfin, and Doug Birdsall.

There is a website for the book as well:  www.thelongview.info

Since you know me, you won’t be surprised that some concepts run against the norm of traditional leadership thinking, such as the chapter:  Planning Will Drain the Life from Your Ministry. This has been one of the hallmarks of distinction for Belhaven, and while our long-term faculty and staff lived through this dramatic shift, those who are newer may be interested to know the philosophy behind our not having a traditional long-range plan.

The core focus of the book is on pages 11 and 12, calling us to break free from the immediate results driven culture that has taken over business – and permeated the church as well.

Our theology and our ministry passion draw us to talk about longview outcomes as our heart’s desire, but we have been duped into fostering a generation of leaders, board members, employees, and constituencies who value short-term gain over longview significance. Ministry leaders believe it and act accordingly—hiring and rewarding people who can promote Band-Aid fixes as monumental solutions, creating plans that promise the moon and always come up short, raising funds from unrealistically compressed donor relationships, and touting to boards and constituencies those results that can most easily be measured and applauded.

Because this short-view corporate culture has so permeated the church today, we in ministry have loosened our grip on the biblical model for leadership. . . . The time is right for rising leaders to break free from the short-term leadership patterns of the past and set their sites on the horizon to ensure a life of leadership that will be honoring to God and bring us back to principles that will allow the church to make a transformational difference in the world.

We need to be leading for significance rather than giving into the pressure for short-term results.  This book not only calls us to this priority, but deals with the practical implications of leading for the longview.

I’d welcome your feedback and insights.  You can leave them here, or on www.thelongview.info blog.

.

A friend I’ve worked with in India sent me this email yesterday.  If you have a heart to help with the India flood and don’t know how to make a gift that can be used well, Sam is someone in whom you can give confidently.

Sam’s report of the flood is overwhelming – read below.

He gets more ministry out of very little money than about anyone I know (he is on such a tight budget he doesn’t even have a web site) so I’m sure he’ll be thankful for whatever you’d like to share.  His contact information is at the bottom of his email.

Dear Doctor Parrott:

Greetings to you in the name of Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

The worst flooding in 100 years has hit the states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in India. Over 300 people have died and over 10 million others are homeless. Transportation and electric power was cut off. People are suffering without food, drinking water, clothes and shelter. These floods effected over 30,000 Christian families and also many of Gospel Outreach Ministries church buildings/ shelters for the orphans and elderly widows.

Hindus have cried out to their gods for help as they saw the flood waters rush by and wondered why their gods and goddesses did not help them. Some lost their small children while trying to cross to safer places. Unable to fight against the rushing waters, elderly people died. Loosing everything in the floods, some have committed suicide and died. Dead bodies of people and animals are submerged in contaminated waters.

Many of the people who have survived the floods are suffering from fever, swelling and other waterborne sicknesses. Most of the crops were destroyed so there is no income for the poor that work the fields for a living. Cobra snakes are swimming in the waters to seek refuge in the palm tree roofs and biting people. Prices of food have escalated as crops were destroyed under water.

Currently over 100 non-believers are receiving help and shelter at Gospel Outreach Ministries campus at Repalle, Andhra Pradesh.

Our evangelists and Bible ladies are reaching out to them and ministering to them. They are showing “The Life of Jesus” movie in Telugu language with generators.

At this critical time we earnestly request your prayers and financial help. We need extra funds to help the flood survivors with food, clean water, medicines, clothes, hygiene kits, blankets and a Bible.

Please pray for Gospel Outreach Ministries Evangelists and Bible Women who are risking their lives taking this opportunity to reach out and touch the flood survivors with the love and Gospel of Jesus Christ.

With Jesus’

Love,

Sam Paul Gokanakonda

Gospel Outreach Ministries International

8476 Old State Route 21

Hillsboro, MO 63050

Tel: 636 948 9836

gomint@aol.com

(CNN) — Nearly one in four people worldwide is Muslim — and they are not necessarily where you might think, according to an extensive new study that aims to map the global Muslim population.

India, a majority-Hindu country, has more Muslims than any country except for Indonesia and Pakistan, and more than twice as many as Egypt.

China has more Muslims than Syria.

Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon.

And Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya put together.

Nearly two out of three of the world’s Muslims are in Asia, stretching from Turkey to Indonesia.

The Middle East and north Africa, which together are home to about one in five of the world’s Muslims, trail a very distant second.

There are about 1.57 billion Muslims in the world, according to the report, “Mapping the Global Muslim Population,” by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. That represents about 23 percent of the total global population of 6.8 billion.

There are about 2.25 billion Christians, based on projections from the 2005 World Religions Database.

Brian Grim, the senior researcher on the Pew Forum project, was slightly surprised at the number of Muslims in the world, he told CNN.

“Overall, the number is higher than I expected,” he said, noting that earlier estimates of the global Muslim population have ranged from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.

The report can — and should — have implications for United States policy, said Reza Aslan, the best-selling Iranian-American author of “No God but God.”

“Increasingly, the people of the Middle East are making up a smaller and smaller percentage of the worldwide Muslim community,” he told CNN by phone.

“When it comes to issues of outreach to the Muslim world, these numbers will indicate that outreach cannot be focused so narrowly on the Middle East,” he said.

“If the goal is to create better understanding between the United States and the Muslim world, our focus should be on south and southeast Asia, not the Middle East,” he said.

He spoke to CNN before the report was published and without having seen its contents, but was familiar with the general trends the report identified.

The team at the Pew Forum spent nearly three years analyzing “the best available data” from 232 countries and territories, Grim said.

Their aim was to get the most comprehensive snapshot ever assembled of the world’s Muslim population at a given moment in time.

So they took the data they gathered from national censuses and surveys, and projected it forward based on what they knew about population growth in each country.

They describe the resulting report as “the largest project of its kind to date.”

It’s full of details that even the researchers found surprising.

“There are these countries that we don’t think of as Muslim at all, and yet they have very sizable numbers of Muslims,” said Alan Cooperman, the associate director of research for the Pew Forum, naming India, Russia and China.

One in five of the world’s Muslims lives in a country where Muslims are a minority.

And while most people think of the Muslim population of Europe is being composed of immigrants, that’s only true in western Europe, Cooperman said.

“In the rest of Europe — Russia, Albania, Kosovo, those places — Muslims are an indigenous population,” he said. “More than half of the Muslims in Europe are indigenous.”

The researchers also were surprised to find the Muslim population of sub-Saharan Africa to be as low as they concluded, Cooperman said.

It has only about 240 million Muslims — about 15 percent of all the world’s Muslims.

Islam is thought to be growing fast in the region, with countries such as Nigeria, which has large populations of both Christians and Muslims, seeing violence between the two groups.

The Pew researchers concluded that Nigeria is just over half Muslim, making it the sixth most populous Muslim country in the world.

Roughly nine out of 10 Muslims worldwide are Sunni, and about one in 10 is Shiite, they estimated.

They warned they were less confident of those numbers than of the general population figures because sectarian data is harder to come by.

“Only one or two censuses in the world … have ever asked the sectarian question,” said Grim.

“Among Muslims it’s a very sensitive question. If asked, large numbers will say I am just a Muslim — not that they don’t know, but it is a sensitive question in many places,” he said.

One in three of the world’s Shiite Muslims lives in Iran, which is one of only four countries with a Shiite majority, he said. The others are Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain.

Huge as the project of mapping the world’s Muslim population is, it is only the first step in a Pew Forum undertaking.

Next year, the think tank intends to release a report projecting Muslim population growth into the future, and then the researchers intend to do the whole thing over again with Christians, followed by other faith groups.

“We don’t care only about Muslims,” Grim said.

They’re also digging into what people believe and practice, since the current analysis doesn’t analyze that.

“This is no way reflects the religiosity of people, only their self-identification,” Grim said. “We’re trying to get the overall picture of religion in the world.”

Top 10 Muslim countries, by population

1. Indonesia: 202,867,000 (country is 88.2 percent Muslim)
2. Pakistan: 174,082,000 (country is 96.3 percent Muslim)
3. India: 160,945,000 (country is 13.4 percent Muslim)
4. Bangaldesh: 145,312,000 (country is 89.6 percent Muslim)
5. Egypt: 78,513,000 (country is 94.6 percent Muslim)
6. Nigeria: 78,056,000 (country is 50.4 percent Muslim)
7. Iran: 73,777,000 (country is 99.4 percent Muslim)
8. Turkey: 73,619,000 (country is about 98 percent Muslim)
9. Algeria: 34,199,000 (country is 98 percent Muslim)
10. Morocco: 31,993,000 (country is about 99 percent Muslim)

We are proud of her distinguished career, and also proud that Belhaven College is the only Christian College offering a bachelors degree of fine arts in creative writing.  That growing program is led by Dr. Randy Smith.

This week we had Mississippi Public Broadcasting on campus shooting a piece about Elizabeth for their writers series

Follow the three links above to find out more.

OneHope found 91% of youths in Costa Rica say they do not believe they will go to heaven despite claiming to have accepted Jesus Christ. In Spain, 74% say they do not want to be a virgin when they marry, and in Russia, 42% report having tried to commit suicide. (Christian Post 7/29/09)

American teens who say they definitely believe in God or a higher power declined from 54% to 37% between ‘84 and ‘08, while the percentage of atheists rose from 6% to 16%. The percentage of teens uncertain about God remained stable at 31%. (The National Post 4/7/09)

While more Americans describe themselves as “non-religious” today, the percentage who believe in God remains stable at 93%. Researchers believe the group that is growing is what they call “unchurched believers.” If you think of organized religion as having two parts – the organized part and the religious part – the church-leavers quarrel is with the organized part. (Pastor’s Weekly Briefing 8/14/09)

Josh McDowell claims only 9% of young Christians in America say there is absolute truth, only 3% higher than the general youth population. (Christian Post 7/13/09)

About 1 out of every 3 scientists in the U.S. professed believing in God in a recent Pew Research survey, in comparison to 83% of the general American public. (Christian Post 7/16/09)

It is always interesting and sobering to read this list – and makes lots of us feel older than we wish we were.  Here is their introduction, and a portion of this year’s list:

If the entering college class of 2013 had been more alert back in 1991 when most of them were born, they would now be experiencing a severe case of déjà vu. The headlines that year railed about government interventions, bailouts, bad loans, unemployment and greater regulation of the finance industry. The Tonight Show changed hosts for the first time in decades, and the nation asked “was Iraq worth a war?”

• They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
• Dan Rostenkowski and Mike Tyson have always been felons.
• The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables.
• Salsa has always outsold ketchup.
• Rap music has always been mainstream.
• Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream has always been a flavor choice.
• The KGB has never officially existed.
• Babies have always had a Social Security Number.
• Bungee jumping has always been socially acceptable.
• The European Union has always existed.
• There has always been a Cartoon Network.
• They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.
• Women have always outnumbered men in college.
• There have always been flat screen televisions.
• Britney Spears has always been heard on classic rock stations.
• Someone has always been asking: “Was Iraq worth a war?”
• Most communities have always had a mega-church.
• There has always been a computer in the Oval Office.
• Avon has always been “calling” in a catalog.
• Official racial classifications in South Africa have always been outlawed.

Golf is HUGE in Korea.  I had the opportunity to play there this summer with my host, Dr. Billy Kim, president of Far East Broadcasting.  The course was demanding in the magnificent mountains about two hours outside of Seoul, the players were strong, and even the caddies were intimidating

I have never seen anything like these caddies. They managed five golfers and take care of everything for you – even bring green tea ice cream as in the picture below.  The carts run on a guidance system so they can move them forward remotely, and have communication systems to the group in front to assure you don’t need to wait to play the next hole.  It was quite a production.

 Seoul, with it’s 10 million people, doesn’t have much room for golf, so they build driving ranges throughout the city – often over parking lots.  A couple pictures from my trip are below:

He was the first to develop the electric guitar, although others take credit as well. Today a “Les Paul” made by Gibson is the cream of the crop in guitars.

More importantly, he and his wife Mary Ford were the first to develop multi-track recording. Using a regular tape recorder, they would record a song, and then play it back, recording over it again….until they achieved the full sound of multi-track recording which is standard today.

Their recording of “How High the Moon” is a classic…..and is played often on my iPod.

Something I didn’t know about him that I found today in a report:

In January 1948, Paul was injured in a near-fatal automobile accident in Oklahoma, which shattered his right arm and elbow. Doctors told Paul that there was no way for them to rebuild his elbow in a way that would let him regain movement, and that his arm would remain permanently in whatever position they placed it in. Paul then instructed the surgeons to set his arm at an angle that would allow him to cradle and pick the guitar. It took him a year and a half to recover.

Posted April 24, 2009 | 07:33 AM (EST)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/georgianne-nienaber/mary-chapin-carpenter-ret_b_189042.html

Mary Chapin Carpenter Returns to the Stage and Talks about Eudora Welty, Inspiration, and Bonding

Five-time Grammy winner Mary Chapin Carpenter is still raving about the experience she had performing with Kate Campbell, Claire Holley and Caroline Herring at the Eudora Welty Centennial Concert in Jackson, Mississippi last week. Mary Chapin spoke to us from her farm–a sanctuary that she shares with her husband, six dogs, six cats, and a “menagerie” of other animals, all nestled securely up against the Blue Ridge mountains in south central Virginia.

“It is pretty hard to leave home, but it was certainly worth it for the experience I had this last week in Jackson,” she said.

To hear her tell it, the act of leaving her beloved home and animals is testimony to the regard in which she holds the literary giant Welty–who is not exactly a household word. Although critically acclaimed for their respective bodies of work, Mississippi daughters Herring, Campbell and Holley are not exactly household words either, but one might argue that they, along with Welty, should be. Mary Chapin Carpenter certainly thinks so. She was more than excited to meet the other performers. She was “anticipating” doing so.

They are all so amazing. I have loved their music before I met them, I have felt a kinship with their music, and I have known Kate’s music for years. To finally meet after so long, well it was just wonderful. I was trying to tell a friend of mine about how extraordinary it was to be there with them. Every single one of them. Claire has such an angelic and interesting way of writing, and Kate’s writing is so masterful, and Caroline’s is so literary. It was like my cup positively overflowed. Their material was extraordinary.

Something beautifully compelling happened onstage at the Belhaven College Center for the Arts. Carpenter provided the star power for the benefit performance, but more than that, she quietly and graciously deferred to the other women, learning their material, requesting their songs, and harmonizing in lovely support of the Welty tribute.

This is the definition of grace. Campbell, Herring and Holley remarked in subsequent conversations that Carpenter went out of her way to make each of them feel comfortable. The admiration was returned onstage when Carpenter said that she had not known what exactly to expect but that she felt she had “made three new friends.”

Had she lived to reach her one-hundredth birthday, Eudora Welty would have certainly enjoyed this gathering of new friends on a sweet-scented southern spring evening. There was a hint of ozone in the air, a harbinger of thunderstorms that would roll through Jackson later in the evening. Welty often wrote about the weather and its ability to set mood and tone. In one of her best loved books, One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty described her father’s “country boy’s accurate knowledge of the weather and its skies.” Her art was firmly rooted in family and her fascination with the grownup world of storytelling that was part and parcel of southern family living.

So I developed a strong meteorological sensibility. In years ahead when I wrote stories, atmosphere took its influential role from the start. Commotion in the weather and the inner feelings aroused by such a hovering disturbance emerged connected in dramatic form.

No shy and retiring southern belle, Welty said she tried a tornado first.

Some said they felt Welty’s presence at Belhaven last week, and it is not out of the realm of possibility.

The 800-seat Belhaven Theater is a former Methodist Church, and there is something about a church that invites a visitation from the muse or a ghost. The stage was bathed in the glow of blue Fresnels that enhanced the sense of mystery and romance. Throw in the incredible artistry of four women who have the dirt, sweetness, and sweat of the south in their bones, along with songwriting abilities that summon aching memories of the pain, triumph and anguish of the South, and the profound becomes tangible–the impossible, possible.

In many ways, the Eudora Welty Centennial event was a perfect marriage of the arts of songwriting and Welty’s literary storytelling.

Although Welty received the National Medal of Literature, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, and was the first living author to have her stories and essays compiled by the Library of America, these accolades did not define her existence. Welty looked to friendship and curiosity about the particulars of life. ” In writing, as in life,” she wrote, “the connections of all sorts of relationships and kinds lie in wait of discovery, and give out their signals to the Geiger counter of the charged imagination….”

Mary Chapin Carpenter is a northerner and New Jersey born, but became fascinated with southerner Eudora Wetly and the power of her imagination when she stumbled upon One Writer’s Beginnings through a comment from a friend.

The book is a bible, a talisman of sorts. It has meant so much to me. I was living in a scummy little apartment trying to be scrappy and eke out a living, when a very dear friend of mine quoted the very last line of the book. Our conversation was about struggle, and after I heard the quote I ran out and got it. I basically devoured it and found myself returning to it over and over again through the years. To this day I recommend it to any person I meet who is trying to establish a creative life within the requirements of making a living. It reaffirms what I am trying to accomplish for myself. Sometimes you are not sure of what you are trying to do; you are just trying to be happy.

Before our conversation thread ended, I looked up the last line in One Writer’s Beginnings and read it to Mary Chapin over the phone.

“As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within,” Welty wrote.

When asked why she opened the “guitar pull” in the round with the iconic Stones in the Road, Mary Chapin had the somewhat surprising answer that the song is an old friend and that the Welty tribute was her return to performing after two years.

This was my first show in two years and I had taken extensive time off because I had a pulmonary embolism. We were all talking about how nervous we were and it was especially true for me because this was my return to performing. ‘Stones’ is about a lot of things, about struggle, certainly, and it is my calling card as well.

The experience of having the embolism was terrifying. I had been having a lot of pain in my chest and luckily I got to the emergency room in time. It has taken me a long time to get back to my job. That is another thing that made it so meaningful to me–the fact that I was with such kind and considerate and lovely people in Jackson.

The Welty connection “of all sorts of relationships” was made.

The audience reacted as if it were greeting an old friend as Mary Chapin sang the opening lines of Halley Came to Jackson in a voice ringing strong and true with heart-felt emotion. The song and companion children’s book, illustrated by Dan Andreasen, is based upon Welty’s description of her father holding her in his arms as Halley’s comet appeared over the skies of Jackson in 1910.

Another connection–a connection to the past–made through a combination of great songwriting and powerful vocal harmonies, just about brought down the house when Kate Campbell walked over to the grand piano to play Look Away. Mary Chapin said that she and Campbell locked eyes as the song began. It is one of Carpenter’s favorites. Campbell is a respected presence on the folk music circuit as well as National Public Radio, and her work has been compared to that of Welty and William Faulkner. Campbell introduced the song from her album Rosaryville with a vivid personal memory.

I remember seeing Eudora on public television one night and there was a photograph of the mansion in Windsor, Mississippi behind her. I remember her talking about the New South and the Old South and along the way she said, ‘You know, not everything was bad and it doesn’t really matter where you are from, there is good and there is bad.’ She was talking about the Old South and she said ‘it really wasn’t all about hate.’ I, too, cannot believe that the history of the south is all about hate.

You could hear weeping in the audience as the four part harmony on Campbell’s song took hold:

It’s a long and slow surrender retreating from the past. It’s important to remember to fly the flag half-mast, and look away. I was taught by elders wiser, love your neighbor, love your god. Never saw a cross on fire, never saw an angry mob. I saw sweet magnolia blossoms. I chased lightning bugs at night. Never dreaming others saw our way of life in black and white. Part of me hears voices crying, part of me can feel their weight. Part of me believes that mansion stood for something more than hate.

The moment was positively transcendent, and the audience became one family in the telling, all sons and daughters of the south.

Carpenter, Holley, Herring and Campbell bravely shouldered this heavy sentiment in their songwriting and storytelling about the southland–each using compassion as a moral compass–each using the inspiration of Eudora Welty as a guidepost.

A beloved Canton native, Caroline Herring is quite simply a treasure waiting to be discovered by mainstream America. Ten years ago, Herring established a strong following in the Austin music scene. Herring, like Campbell, does not shy away from the responsibility to tell the story of the south and shine the light of truth into the darker corners of southern history.

With wit and grace that elicited laughter and warm applause from the audience, Herring also paid tribute to Welty.

I do feel that Eudora Welty, like God, is looking down on me and saying, ‘Why have you not read everything that I have written?’ One thing I am struck with is the fact that she gives her characters such dignity through her honest portrayals of southern life in the twentieth century. Well, we are blessed to have had her in our midst.

Claire Holley is a Jackson native, but now resides in Los Angeles where her music is often featured in television. Holley and Campbell conducted a songwriting workshop the morning after the concert. Holley’s advice? Read Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings. “A lot of your best songs feel like gifts.”

Music, friendship, and inspiration were front and center during the Welty Centennial Concert.

“The chemistry was really there,” Kate Campbell said after the performance.

The audience was with us and everyone was there to honor Eudora. This was one of the best ways to give tribute to Eudora– to have women singer/songwriters share their music and inspiration. Through music and storytelling, we can have a conversation, a dialogue. As performers it inspired us to be up there with three other women who shared the same passion.
Carpenter agrees.

I asked her what she hoped to read in this article. She laughed.

No journalist has ever asked me that question. When I got home from the weekend and we were all home again and when I parted from my manager and guitar technician and guitarist we remarked that it would be so hard to explain unless you had been there. It was an amazing experience. Describe how MAGICAL it was. I am so happy a (Huffington Post) writer has taken the time and interest in this.

We ended the interview talking about Mary Chapin’s one and only meeting with Eudora Welty, some 20 years ago.

I had tea with Eudora 20 years ago in her home. I was so nervous I could hardly talk. The way the house is now, it is like she just stepped out for a while. Books on couches; books everywhere. Her reading glasses on the table. I remember she gave me a book about Cajun music. I found that really interesting and surprising. It was one of the most memorable events of my life. She was just so gracious and kind.

Welty passed in 2001 at 92, accomplished and beloved throughout the world.

Perhaps for Mary Chapin, her daring came in her ability to triumphantly take the stage again after a very serious health threat. Eudora Welty found strength, solace and comfort in the company of friends, and so did Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Four strong, talented women gathered in tribute to a woman who was a powerhouse of literary ability. In the gathering, they found friendship and reaffirmed their own abilities to use inspiration as the wellspring of creativity, courage, and terrific songwriting.

Magic.

………………..

Mary Chapin Carpenter’s 2007 CD, The Calling, was nominated for a Grammy for the Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album. Her latest recording, released in 2008, is Come Darkness, Come Light: Twelve Songs of Christmas. Mary Chapin Carpenter serves on the Eudora Welty Foundation board. She is the only artist to have won four consecutive Grammy Awards for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. (1992-1995) She is currently working on writing and recording anew album and will be touring in support of it next year. Mary Chapin has recorded 11 albums, sold more than 13 million records, and scored 12 top 10 singles.

The Eudora Welty Foundation aids in the cataloging of her manuscripts, correspondence, and photographs. The National Foundation for the Arts announced that the foundation has been awarded a $10,000 NEA grant that will support creative writing in 500 high schools.

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Liverpool Hope University has announced a new master’s degree program: The Beatles, Popular Music and Society, the first of its kind in the world.

The new course, which can be studied both full and part time, covers four modules with specific issues relating to The Beatles and Popular Music, consisting of four 12-week taught modules, plus a dissertation.

Mike Brocken, Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at Hope, said ‘There have been over 8,000 books about The Beatles but there has never been serious academic study and that is what we are going to address.

‘Forty years on from their break-up, now is the right time and LIverpool is the right place to study The Beatles. This MA is expected to attract a great deal of attention, not just locally but nationally and we have already had enquiries from abroad, particularly the United States.

”The Beatles, Popular Music and Society’ marks a seminal advance in popular music studies. For the first time in the UK and possibly the world, a postgraduate taught course is offered to research into The Beatles, the city from which they emerged, the contexts of the 1960s, technology, sound and songwriting and the industries that have set up in their wake to capitalise on tourism in the city of Liverpool.’