Word: prayerful
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...recent Supreme Court ruling against a Texas high school's prayers before football games, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, "[P]regame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship." The public-school district had argued that attendance at football games was voluntary and "decidedly extracurricular." Because I played high school football in Texas in the 1980s, one aspect of Justice Stevens' majority response to this distinction struck home to me. By pointing out that "team members themselves" have to be there, he defended those of us who were simply feverish...
Unlike many of the students this ruling is designed to protect, I didn't have strong feelings that were smothered by the prayer in my Texas high school. Until my family moved there from Chicago, my religious experiences, with a Jewish father and an Irish-Catholic mother, were brief and infrequent. For two days every autumn, I accompanied my dad to synagogue while my mom stayed home making matzo-ball soup, brisket and kasha. At services I sometimes crept from the auditorium and found a game room, where I played pinball like an uptight burglar, braced against discovery...
...Texas high school was a different world. Prayer season lasted all year, and I was fascinated by the fervor of my peers. Any cause for anxiety--tests, games, dates --was a chance to invoke Jesus. Up North, if I had seen a group of girls clutched together and whispering, it was a clear sign of gossip. Here it was a prayer circle, and there were boys in it too, holding hands, heads down, powerfully silent. To an outsider who had yet to make many friends, the prayer circles had some compelling advantages. If you aimed your point of entry correctly...
A.C.L.U. Court nixes football prayer. Next? Changing "Christmas" to "That Guy's Birthday...
...scoundrel, just give me a moment - the controversies of our day seem, if not innocuous by comparison, then at least pretty much the same old American thing. The dilemmas remain. The Supreme Court in recent days has handed down decisions on gays in the Boy Scouts, Miranda rights, prayer at high school football games, and - disgracefully - on partial birth abortion. Whitman's day had the Dred Scott decision, which denied American citizenship to blacks. The Supreme Court, never truly the last word on anything, has much to answer...