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So says Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary (and author of today's lead story at ChristianityToday.com). "In a secularized culture where 'official' praying is more and more restricted—if not forbidden—I think people are saying, 'Hey, we may not be able to get the preacher up on a platform at our local commencement, but nobody can stop me from making the sign of the cross at our local restaurant.'" The Dallas Morning News article also looks at public prayer from Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and various Christian points of view.

Two chaplains at a Fort Worth-area jail took a prisoner, charged with sexually assaulting a child, into an isolated area of the jail and performed an exorcism. Prison guards walked in on the middle of the procedure. Says one, "I did not stop this performance because I am not familiar with this type of process and did not know what the moral or legal ramifications might be for interrupting such a procedure." Sheriff's Capt. Dan West is asking for a full review of the incident, since the prisoner was removed from his cell without notifying the shift commander. Plus, says one guard, "We had already discussed and decided that speaking in tongues [which the chaplains did during the exorcism] was not going to be done [in the jail]."

"On June 30, Christian music channel Z Music Television will shut down its cable signal and move its operations online to Musicforce.com," reports Wired News. Explains Brian Payne, president of Gaylord Entertainment's Interactive Media Group, "Christian music is a very diverse genre, from gospel hip-hop to Amy Grant. The Internet allows us to delve deeper into those genres with our content and presentation than we ever could hope to do on cable television." That and ZTV never met the company's hopes to rival MTV.

A March 20 profile of Christian Internet site iExalt.com in the Houston Business Journal may have been too hasty. "After rising fivefold over a session and a half to above $18 on March 2, iExalt shares returned to earth as momentum investors demonstrated they can also taketh away. Still, the stock doubled to above $7 in the first two weeks of March," writes Jim Greer, who quotes the site's CEO and cofounder saying, "Right now the dot-com world is red hot." Since then, of course, the dot-com world has cooled off quite a bit, and iExalt, an over-the-counter bulletin board stock, was laid low in April's "market correction." The price at one point dropped to $1 and is now trading below $4. The shares of iExalt.com's competitor, Crosswalk.com, have also fallen from grace (they too are trading around $4), but not nearly as sharply as iExalt.com.

Not satisfied with Massachusetts Board of Education guidelines that mandate tolerance of homosexuality, gay activists are pushing for mandates that order teachers "to fight myths about gays as they do for women and students of all races," reports The Boston Globe. "The regulations passed by the Board of Education are an important step to reducing violence and harassment based on sexual orientation, but they do nothing to counter prevailing stereotyping or to make visible the contributions gay and lesbian students have made to our culture and history," says the executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network of Boston.

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May (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44