Word: prayerful
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...Sara Van Der Werf, sits silently for most of the meeting, although she takes part in the final embrace. The club serves as an emotional bulwark for members dealing with life at a school where two students died last year in off-campus gunfire. Today a club member requests prayer for "those people who got in that big fight [this morning]." Another asks the Lord to "bless the racial-reconciliation stuff." (Patrick Henry is multiethnic; the prayer club is overwhelmingly white.) Just before Easter the group experienced its first First Amendment conflict: whether it could hang posters on all school...
...Alabama, the new school-prayer bill attempts to skirt those boundaries. The legislation requires "a brief period of quiet reflection for not more than 60 seconds with the participation of each pupil in the classroom." Although the courts have upheld some moment-of-silence policies, civil libertarians say they have struck down laws featuring pro-prayer supporting language of the sort they discern in Alabama's bill. In the eyes of many church-club planters, such fracases amount to wasted effort. Says Doug Clark, field director of the National Network of Youth Ministries: "Our energy is being poured into what...
Reaction to the prayer clubs may depend on which besieged minority one feels part of. In the many areas where Conservative Christians feel looked down on, they welcome the emotional support for their children's faith. Similarly, non-Christians in the Bible Belt may be put off by the clubs' evangelical fervor; members of the chess society, after all, do not inform peers that they must push pawns or risk eternal damnation. Not everyone shares the enthusiasm Proffitt recently expressed at a youth rally in Niagara Falls, N.Y.: "When an awakening takes place...
...First Amendment's Free Exercise clause protecting religious expression is as vital as its Establishment Clause, which prohibits government from promoting a creed. The civil libertarians' acceptance of the clubs owes something to their use as a defense against what they consider a truly bad idea: Istook's school-prayer amendment. Says Lynn: "Most reasonable people say, 'If so many kids are praying legally in the public schools now, why would you possibly want to amend the Constitution...
...prospects for prayer clubs seem unlimited. In fact, the tragic shooting of eight prayer-club members last December in West Paducah, Ky., by 14-year-old Michael Carneal provided the cause with martyrs and produced a hero in prayer-club president Ben Strong, who persuaded Carneal to lay down his gun. Strong recalls that the club's daily meetings used to draw only 35 to 60 students out of Heath High School's 600. "People didn't really look down on us, but I don't know if it was cool to be a Christian," he says...