Antioch

Perhaps the only really important lesson art can teach us is that life goes on, despite the catastrophes that befall it. Civilizations arise and fall and their glittering cities crumble into dust, yet in their ruins we detect a tragic beauty that encourages us to press on: ancient death begets new life. The medieval world lived in an eternity of spirit, but when it rediscovered its classical past, the stasis was broken and a new world struggled into being. We are the heirs of that centuries-old rebirth, and also of the ancient world whose ruins inspired it. Of the four great cities of the ancient world -- Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch -- Antioch, situated in what is today southeastern Turkey near the Syrian border, may have been the most like our own. It was a prosperous, cosmopolitan, consumer metropolis devoted to trade and the arts, whose colorful, diverse citizenry -- Romans, Greeks, Jews, Syrians, Turks and Persians -- was drawn from every corner of the ancient world.

It was something he rarely talked about, and friends felt reluctant to introduce the subject in conversation. Now, more than a half-century later, Gino Marchetti, not offended or in any way irate, describes how it was when the government made his mother move outside the town of Antioch, Calif., restricting her movements during World War II because she was Italian-American and lacking citizenship papers. The Marchetti family had to leave its home and find another place to live -- separated from the geographical boundaries of its then-tiny community in Northern California.

As summer winds down, students are starting their back-to-school routines: buy a new book bag, a fresh supply of notebooks, an updated wardrobe.At the New Antioch Baptist Church of Randallstown, there's a different twist to that list: Make a brand-new commitment to Christ.For three days this week, youths at New Antioch opened their doors to more than 1,000 of their peers from Baltimore, Delaware, Virginia, Washington, and even Georgia, for a Back To School Revival.Diane Kaintuck of Northeast Baltimore arrived with her 14-year-old daughter Naquisha in tow."

A GOOD consensus is hard to find -- especially on sexual politics today in America.But the infamous rules instituted last year by Antioch College, which require students to give explicit verbal consent before so much as a kiss is exchanged, have created just that.They have provoked indignation (this is a serious threat to individual freedom!) as well as ridicule (can this be serious?).Sexual correctness thus proves a worthy successor to political correctness as a target in public debate.Yet this consensus reveals shared assumptions among both liberals and conservatives about the sexual The question is no longer "Did she say no?"

Frederick L. JonesCollege adviserFrederick Lewis Jones, a former Baltimorean and an educator at Stockton College in Pomona, N.J., died of cancer Sept. 22 at his home in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia. He was 55.He had been an academic adviser at the college since 1990 and a mediator for the Atlantic County (N.J.) Community Justice Institute. He also directed Project IMPACT, a program to provide tutoring to county junior high students involved in the juvenile justice system.Mr. Jones was reared in Baltimore and attended public schools there, graduating in 1956 from Frederick Douglass High School.

Boston. -- When they call, reporters ask the dean the same question: Are you serious about this? The fine print in the Antioch College Sexual Offense Policy could provide raw material for a dozen campus parodies.New students who arrive on the venerable Ohio campus, it turns out, are not only told about rape, assault and harassment. That's standard freshman fare these days. At Antioch, they are handed a script for safe, community-approved consensual sexual relations.Consent, it says, is not something to be assumed.

Washington. -- I suppose it was inevitable in this day of increasing intrusions by colleges into personal speech and conduct that one was going to come up with a code of sexual conduct that governs just about every aspect of private romantic moments between students.The college is Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, long a bastion of progressive, free-wheeling thought that seems to be having second thoughts lately.In a wretched excess that could be headed soon to your nearby campus or statute books, Antioch officials have approved a policy that requires verbal consent by both parties at each stage of what we used to call in my day ''making out.''The college's ''sexual offense policy,'' adopted by its board of trustees three years ago at the request of students, no less, was strengthened last year to include such dubious clauses as, ''Obtaining consent is an ongoing process in any sexual interaction.

ANTIOCH, Calif. -- A despairing man, so distraught about his impending divorce that he threatened six weeks ago to kill his two children, shot them to death yesterday and then turned the gun on himself, destroying, with three bullets, the "all-American dream family."After hearing those shots shortly after 1 p.m., police broke into the master bedroom of the house at 4745 Hunter Peak Court and found the body of Joel Dennis Souza, 35, of Antioch.They also found fatally wounded 8-year-old Nicholas and 5-year-old Cherie.

A couple of Easter bunnies hopped out yesterday to prove that the holiday isn't just for people with living rooms and lawns, it's also for those without a place to sleep at night.At the Antioch Shelter Home in Baltimore, representatives from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) served a vegetarian breakfast while children swarmed the big bunny, almost knocking off his oversized white head with their hearty hugs.At Baltimore's Carroll Park, another mammoth rabbit presided as more than 100 children from three other area shelters played outdoor games and hunted for 1,000 plastic eggs filled with candy, in an event staged by students at the University of Maryland school of law.Antioch's breakfast menu dropped the usual bacon, sausage and scrambled eggs.

Mount St. Mary's completed its recruiting for the 1991-92 basketball season when it received a letter of intent from Phil Galvin, a 6-foot-4 guard from Antioch, Calif.Galvin spent 1990-91 at Santa Rosa (Calif.) Junior College, wherehe averaged nine points and five rebounds, and made 49 percent of his field goal attempts. As a senior honor student at Antioch High, Galvin averaged 18 points and 4.5 rebounds. He received little interest from Division I recruiters coming out of high school.In other basketball signings, Towson Catholic High grad Calvin Scruggs is headed to Quincy (Ill.