{"id":7453,"date":"2010-08-02T18:21:03","date_gmt":"2010-08-03T01:21:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=7453"},"modified":"2010-08-02T18:21:03","modified_gmt":"2010-08-03T01:21:03","slug":"front-page-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=7453","title":{"rendered":"Front page news"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A lead story today from the <em>New York Times<\/em> reminds us that &#8220;members of the clergy now suffer from obesity, hypertension, and depression at rates higher than most Americans. In the last decade, their use of antidepressants has risen, while their life expectancy has fallen.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And how can we stop this downward trend? No definitive answer yet, but: &#8220;a growing number of health care experts and religious leaders have settled on one simple remedy that has long been a touchy subject with many clerics: taking more time off.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Sounds about right to me. That&#8217;s the way many ministers are trained. I have minister friends whose internship supervisors insisted they work far more than 40 hours a week during their internships; one supervisor told her intern that the intern must work at least one 80 hour week &#8220;to know what it feels like&#8221;; that supervisor routinely worked 60+ hours a week.<\/p>\n<p>And then there are the minister who rarely take Sundays off, who never use all their vacation time, and rarely take more than one day off in any given week. And now of course cell phones mean that clergy feel they should always be available, at any time of the day or night (there goes your sex life, I guess) &#8212; even though we all got along just fine in the days when there weren&#8217;t even any answering machines.<\/p>\n<p>OK, so my bias is obvious (and I do take my vacations, and keep my hours below 50 hours a week). So what do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A lead story today from the New York Times reminds us that &#8220;members of the clergy now suffer from obesity, hypertension, and depression at rates higher than most Americans. In the last decade, their use of antidepressants has risen, while their life expectancy has fallen.&#8221; And how can we stop this downward trend? No definitive [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church-administration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7453"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7454,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7453\/revisions\/7454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}