Faith News Network

Lee University has once again been ranked in the “top tier” in the 2014 “Best Colleges” edition of U.S. News & World Report. The rankings were announced in a special issue last week.

On Constitution Day, Tuesday, September 17, 2013, author and long-time Christian advocate Sandra Lee Snowden will be praying in front of the Capitol steps in Washington, D.C. to inspire Christians across America to rally behind their faith. “I want Christians across America to take action now in order to support and secure a nativity in their own state capitol, city, and town,” says Sandra.

Sandra fought for three years in one of the largest federal court cases for a nativity display in her former hometown of Bay Harbor Islands, Florida. The federal court issued an opinion finding Bay Harbor Islands to be in violation of seven of Sanda’s constitutional rights. Bay Harbor Islands paid $262,000 of taxpayer money in legal fees to combat Sandra’s rights as a citizen, resulting in her court victory. Sandra signed a ten-year Consent Judgment with her then hometown, ensuring that her nativity would be displayed beside the town’s menorah. “This is a big legal win for Baby Jesus,” said Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, when Sandra was invited as guest on his show. Sandra was named one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Miami-Dade County after forcing her mayor to step out of office, for referring to her request as “trivial”.

Sandra claimed her right as a US Citizen to arrange for an American flag to be flown on Constitution Day above the capitol building in dedication to Reclaim Christmas for Christ’s cause. “I would like to empower all Citizens to continue to stand up and stand strong against our elected officials who try to limit or silence our Constitutional rights of freedom of speech, freedom or religion, and equal protection,” said Sandra, who expressed her excitement regarding her trip to DC.

The demand for Sandra’s work has grown since her initial court battle, and she has decided to respond to the Christian community by launching her new website: www.reclaimchristmasforchrist.com. Sandra’s site will serve as a community resource where Christians will be able to network and share their own stories about their experiences regarding nativities in their hometowns / state capitals. “We hope to partner with organizations across the country to provide free nativities to members, and aspire to offer accessible opportunities regarding legal advice surrounding this issue,” said Sandra. Many organizations are expected to join together to support Reclaim Christmas for Christ, as Christians begin to rally for this cause.

Sandra invites all citizens to join her, or email prayers and pictures of nativities from around the world to share during her trip, where she will pray for religious rights, granting nativities in all US hometowns.

You can E-mail Sandra at: Sandra@reclaimchristmasforchrist.com

Sandra will be at the Capitol steps praying under her flag from Sunrise 6:52 AM – Sunset 7:15 PM EST. Look for posters stating “Reclaim Christmas For Christ”.

(Source: Christian Newswire)

Losing a child is a terrible thing. Losing a child at the hands of a doctor is incomprehensible. And that’s what made the National Day of Remembrance for September 14, 2013 necessary. This solemn event will memorialize tens of thousands of children killed by abortionists and buried at gravesites around the nation — a tiny fraction of the 55 million children killed by abortion since it was legalized in 1973. Citizens for a Pro-Life Society, Priests for Life, and the Pro-Life Action League are coordinating this day to heighten awareness that every abortion results in the death of an innocent child, create an appropriate outlet for both personal and national grief, and pray for an end to abortion. Details on the event are available at www.AbortionMemorials.com.

The National Day of Remembrance for Aborted Children is set for September 14 to mark the 25th anniversary of the burial of several hundred abortion victims in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Solemn prayer vigils will be conducted at the Milwaukee gravesite, as well as 34 other burial sites, as well as dozens of other memorial sites dedicated to the unborn victims of abortion. There are hundreds of such sites across the country.

“The graves of these victims are scattered across America — graves of sorrow and graves of indictment on a nation that permitted the killing of the innocent,” observed Monica Miller, Co-Director of National Day of Remembrance and Director of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society. The gravesites stretch across the country from Riverside, California, to Wilmington, Delaware — including a grave in Los Angeles containing the remains of 16,000 aborted babies.

Eric Scheidler, Co-Director of National Day of Remembrance and Executive Director of the Pro-Life Action League, lives near the Chicago-area Queen of Heaven Cemetery where 2,000 tiny abortion victims were buried in 1988 by Cardinal Joseph Bernadin, then prelate of the Archdiocese of Chicago. “It’s sobering to realize that these grave markers for the unborn victims of abortion list only a date of burial,” Scheidler remarked, “They have no birthdays because they were never allowed to be born.”

In a time when thousands of abortions are legally performed each year on children of the same gestational age that neonatal surgeons work to save, National Day of Remembrance coordinators look to this project to emphasize the humanity of unborn children. Fr. Frank Pavone, Co-Director of National Day of Remembrance and National Director of Priests for Life, declared, “Having a memorial service where these babies are buried reminds us that abortion is not merely about beliefs, but about bloodshed; not just about viewpoints, but victims.”

For more information about the National Day of Remembrance or to locate September 14 events at burial sites or other memorial sites, visit www.AbortionMemorials.com.

Religion is a hot topic in the news, with the pope’s recent visit to Brazil and unrest in the Middle East leading to increased killings of Coptic Christians in Egypt and Catholics in Syria. It is also a hot topic in academia.

By Pat Fagan

In one recent week, 16 articles were posted on the Social Science Research Network, and more than 50 were posted in the weeks before it. Gallup research recently showed that those who worship weekly are much less likely to smoke than those who never worship. Study after study show this positive impact of religious worship on nearly every outcome measured. Though there are myriad reasons to tout the benefits of religion, two stand out.

First, the proposition that weekly worship of God is indisputably good for individuals—and by extension, good for society—is beyond question. On virtually every outcome measured in U.S. surveys, those who worship weekly score highest as a group on all positive measures and score lowest on all the negative measures, almost without fail.

From such a robust pattern it seems like a common-sense deduction that weekly religious worship is a common good and one to be strived for. Going further, one could conclude that society does not work as well as it might if it does not worship God on a weekly basis. This sounds almost biblical, but that is what the data show at the macro level.

The second reason is that as demographic surveys show, there is a drift away from religious worship. That means society is passing up on significant societal benefits—benefits most citizens take for granted they will naturally continue to have but which will erode further if they continue to worship less and less.

This is all testable: As the coming decades unfold, the drift away from or back to worship of God will reveal measurable effects across all dimensions of concern in our public discourse. The past can be studied more thoroughly as well—researchers can probe data from federal surveys and the like to determine the significance of worship on individual well-being. For example, research on the benefits of religious practice on educational performance illustrates benefits that leave the effects of increased government spending in the dust by comparison.

Religious worship tied to another aspect of a healthy society—intact marriage—yields children who grow up to be much more functional than their nonreligious counterparts. Those children who grow up in intact families that also worship God weekly comprise the high-functioning core of our country, while at the opposite pole, those children from non-intact, never-worshipping families are the lowest functioning group.

It bears emphasizing that this pattern holds for the groups involved, not for all the individuals who make up each group. There is naturally a wide variation between specific individuals.

On the whole, however, as marriage declines, the worship of God tends to decline as well, as Mary Eberstadt has cogently illustrated in her book, How the West Really Lost God. This demographic drift ought to be of major national concern because with both marriage and worship declining, American children are losing the human capital capacities that are needed to sustain a Republican constitutional government.

The Founders were quite aware of the connection between religion and the virtues needed in a republic and expounded on it repeatedly. Benjamin Franklin, though among the Founders least likely to worship God regularly, was still the leader of prayer at a moment of crisis during the Constitutional Convention. His inimitable quip that the Founders had given us “A republic, if you can keep it” may eventually apply to an unhappy loss of piety that leads to a loss of republican sentiments and virtues.

Auguste Comte, the father of sociology, would be amazed that his science, developed to replace religion, now points very definitely to society’s need to worship God weekly if it wishes its citizens to reach their potential and society to function smoothly.

(Source: Washington Times via Charisma Media. Pat Fagan is director, Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) at Family Research Council.)