In Friday’s RNS report Bruce Nolan reports that college students are spending spring break this year helping out in New Orleans: Thousands of college students who might have spent spring break sunning in Acapulco or on Florida beaches this year are pouring into New Orleans to sleep in dormitory tents or on classroom floors, eat off paper plates and spend a week of vacation hauling foul muck out of homes ruined by floodwaters. For many attached to campus ministries it is an exercise in faith, or what Steve Griffing, a Naval Academy midshipman from Augusta, Ga., called “practical love.” Others, like an estimated 1,000 students spread among several encampments of the Common Ground Collective, are more political: They see spring break as an opportunity not only to help storm victims, but also to study the landscape of race and class that shaped the devastation they see. They are urged to go home and use the lessons of New Orleans to agitate for social change.

Peter Ames Carlin reviews the new HBO drama “Big Love,” which focuses on religious polygamy: Polygamy has existed in this country for centuries, and for a time was one of the central tenets of the Mormon Church. The church has officially opposed the practice since 1890, so the nation’s remaining polygamists tend to be renegade fundamentalists, ostracized by the church and society alike. But they exist, and not just in the hills. It’s all very strange and intriguing, and not a little bit titillating. Therein lies the appeal of “Big Love,” HBO’s new drama about one man who just happens to be married to three women. The gang, which includes seven children, lives in a newish Utah suburb, residing in three neighboring homes that share a yard and swimming pool, all in a religious compound somewhere up in the Wasatch Mountains. Like the family it describes, “Big Love” is crowded with faces and ambitions. It’s full of good intentions and weird ideas. And God only knows where it’s headed.