In Seattle, Jon Ramer has started the 10 Year Compassionate Cities Campaign. If 1,000 residents join up by March 15—a sign that they’ll commit hours or dollars for public service—he says the mayor and city council will affirm the Charter for Compassion and declare Seattle a “City of Compassion.” In part that means that for the next 10 years, the city and its residents will deepen their commitment to compassionate action during the months of April and October.
As he explains:

The campaign demonstrates that citizens care deeply about compassionate action and are ready and willing to hold themselves accountable for the quality of compassion that is experienced in their homes, schools, offices, and throughout our city.
Our goal is to create a compassionate world, one city at a time. It takes awareness plus commitment to make personal as well as collective change.

According to Ramer, a number of other cities are already planning their own campaigns, including Portland, San Francisco, Vancouver, London, and Lahore in Pakistan.

In the April issue of Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens deconstructs and revises the Ten Commandments, giving them an update for the 21st century.
As he explains:

I am trying my best not to view things through a smug later prism. Only the Almighty can scan matters sub specie aeternitatis: from the viewpoint of eternity. One must also avoid cultural and historical relativism: There’s no point in retroactively ordering the Children of Israel to develop a germ theory of disease (so as to avoid mistaking plagues for divine punishments) or to understand astronomy (so as not to make foolish predictions and boasts based on the planets and stars). Still, if we think of the evils that afflict humanity today and that are manmade and not inflicted by nature, we would be morally numb if we did not feel strongly about genocide, slavery, rape, child abuse, sexual repression, white-collar crime, the wanton destruction of the natural world, and people who yak on cell phones in restaurants. (Also, people who commit simultaneous suicide and murder while screaming “God is great”: is that taking the Lord’s name in vain or is it not?)

The Yale Center for Faith and Culture recently received a 1.875 million dollar grant from the Templeton Foundation to empirically study “spiritual capital”—the effects of spirituality on entrepreneurship and business management. The project will be led by Miroslav Volf, who directs the center, and Ted Malloch, who studies business ethics at Yale Divinity School.
As Volf explains:

Dr. Malloch argues that entrepreneurs’ authentic spirituality should be given amplified expression in their business activities, and that, when given expression, societies, economies, and companies will prosper and contribute to the common good.
Dr. Malloch relates the concept of spiritual capital to the widely studied concepts of human and social capital, which he argues are based, to a large extent, on the existence of good faith, trust, stewardship, a sense of purpose, and other moral characteristics that are generated and sustained by the piety, solidarity, and hope that come from religious faith.

The Smithsonian Institution Archives has recently acquired a series of photographs from the famous Scopes trial taken by William Silverman of Chattanooga, Tennessee, then a 19-year-old student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The photos, says Tammy Peters, director of the archives division, “add a new visual take on the trial and the spectacle surrounding it.”