Word: prayers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...worried government put a ban into effect in 21 black urban areas on all indoor meetings called to criticize or even discuss government policy; outdoor meetings on such subjects have long been banned. Nonetheless, a large crowd gathered at Soweto's Regina Mundi Church for a prayer meeting to commemorate the death of Steven Biko, a black student leader who died in a South African prison seven years ago. Police broke up the meeting with whips and tear gas. The next day in Soweto they shot and killed a black man who threw a gasoline bomb at a police...
...Billy Graham," said Piotr Konovalchik. "We rejoice that you are with us tonight." Many young women in the choir, clad in orange dresses and white headbands, wept along with him. As Graham quietly thanked Konovalchik, a clergyman who had come from Moscow strode to the pulpit to offer a prayer: "You shed your blood for Russia too, O Lord. We pray that a surge of revival may start in this house of ours...
...exactly sure when the most recent church-state debate began, though it is certain that President Reagan's Dallas prayer-breakfast speech and Walter Mondale's vigorous B'nai B'rith counterattack mark the high points of the current cycle. A low point of sorts was reached when Jesse ("God is not finished with me yet") Jackson declared himself dismayed to find Reagan injecting religion into politics. When Jackson, Reverend and aspiring President, was practically running his campaign out of churches earlier this year, the issue seemed less pressing...
...Ronald Reagan and his Evangelical friends began climbing over it. Liberal churchmen and politicians, who for years had nothing but praise for the church's role in the civil rights, antiwar and, most recently, antinuclear movements, have become strict First Amendment constructionists now that abortion and school prayer have turned up on someone else's political agenda...
...this is perfect nonsense. By Kennedy's logic, the church may legitimately try to influence the state on off-shore drilling, national park policy and collective school prayer (all "inherently public in nature") and not on help for the poor, racial discrimination or even murder (where "the church can persuade the individual"). To argue that the more collective the issue is, the more right the church has to try to influence public policy, is absurd. If anything, the reverse is true. Such attempts to justify a double standard give sophistry a bad name. Why not admit the obvious? That...