January/February 2004

Remember all those pictures of Iraq you’ve seen on TV? Believe most of it, but not all. A few things are better than reported; some others are a lot worse. Very little here is normal. Iraq is hot, dirty, hot, chaotic, hot, stressful, hot, dangerous—did I mention hot? The afternoon highs run 115 to 120 degrees, with not a cloud in sight.

It is time to acknowledge the atrocious treatment that people of faith receive around the world. It is time to send the governments of these nations clear messages that they cannot persecute people of faith while the world stands silently by.

In the Middle East the freedom to practice various faiths is something rare; usually subject to the whims of rulers and clerics. But we are in an era of change.

Most presidents in American history have integrated religion into their political speeches in what scholars have dubbed civil religion. This has especially been the case in wartime, as war seems to inspire in people a need to know that God is with us.

Those who study human behavior as a science often comment on the destructive power of guilt. Unresolved guilt can destroy self-respect and create dangerous pathologies.

fter midnight on the last day of the 2003 legislative session, the California legislature adopted a controversial measure to require religious institutions to provide the same benefits to domestic partners of employees as are provided to spouses as a condition of contracting with the state.

In 1960 playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee immortalized the Scopes “monkey trial” in their classic drama Inherit the Wind. The play told of the legal battle that took place in Dayton, Tennessee, over the teaching of evolution in public schools.

When Roy Moore ran for chief justice of Alabama, he promised voters that if he was elected he would display the Ten Commandments as his pledge to restore the moral foundation of the law. And so he did. Without letting any of his other eight justices know, Moore hired a company to sneak a 5,280-pound granite monument of the Ten Commandments into the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building.