Word: prayerful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...quiet and philosophical became loud and politically explosive. Then, as the composition of the Supreme Court became more conservative in the Reagan and Bush years, expectations began to rise that the accommodationists might get a more sympathetic hearing. Yet many major issues remain in dispute, such as whether voluntary prayer should be allowed in schools, whether government bodies can mount religious displays and whether public funding should be used for church-sponsored social programs...
...most suppressed newspaper in America," says Dan Rodden, whose Caleb Campaign publishes Issues and Answers. "In the schools today there is definitely a religious and philosophical bent that is anti- Christian. Little children, by the time they're in second grade, know that God is illegal." The issue of prayer in the classroom arouses even greater passions. If public schools allow teachers to lead students in prayer, it looks very much like an endorsement of religion, and it is hard to imagine that a child would not feel pressured into joining in. Particularly in deeply religious communities, atheist and agnostic...
...read the Bible, it looks very much like a restriction of her freedom to worship. To publicize their own fervor, tens of thousands of students gathered around their school flagpoles to pray last Sept. 11. "I don't want a government church or a teacher opening class with prayer," says Jay Sekulow of Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism, a conservative organization specializing in church-state litigation. "But the First Amendment protects individual speech, even religious speech, and even on public property...
...General Kenneth Starr argued the Administration's position in the Lee case. He maintained that the government promotion of + religion through civic ceremonies does not violate the Constitution if coercion is not involved. Students who did not want to pray at graduation, Starr implied, could sit without joining in prayer or skip the exercises...
...astonishing things become O.K. The Constitution then means a lot less than we've thought." Theoretically, Congress could decide, for example, that it would pay the salaries of preferred members of the clergy. Even less outrageous consequences, such as requiring that all public functions begin with a nondenominational prayer, could be highly divisive...