The Search for Peace
- January/February 2016
- January 1, 2016
Kim Davis has become a symbol. To some, she represents a stubborn bigotry; to others, she’s a twenty-first-century American heroine. It’s an unlikely fate for the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk, who labored in relative obscurity until the U.S. Supreme Court’s June verdict in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Davis, who identifies as
READ MOREThe Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount contain my religion,” wrote John Adams, the second president of the United States, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, dated November 4, 1816. The U.S. Supreme Court building has four displays of the Ten Commandments along with other allusions to antiquity: the first is engraved on
READ MORERoger Williams was the apostle of religious liberty—of soul liberty in the New World. He had the high honor, in the providence of God, of being the first man to establish in practice the emancipation of the conscience of man from the fetter of politico-ecclesiastical rule. He became the harbinger of religious liberty in its
READ MOREMartin Luther was on his way back to school after a visit with his parents in Mansfield, Germany, when he narrowly escaped being struck by lightning. He prayed to Saint Anna, the mother of the virgin Mary, “Help me, Saint Anna, I will become a monk!” 1 Twenty-one years old at the time, Luther spent
READ MOREThe pageantry and passion will long be remembered. The adoring crowds, the cheering children, the red carpets, the superlatives of welcome from heads of state, the gushing media accolades, the inspiring words transcending differences. Pope Francis is the fourth Roman pontiff to visit the United States, but without question—in the present age of 24-hour news,
READ MOREI’m back in the office now, but for a few days I was in another world; another time. I knew it to be so as our group drifted down the slopes of a valley toward a grove of gnarly old olive trees: some of them rather like empty wooden tubes with fresh green branches growing
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