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• Minor delay for Barrow suit | The U.S. District Court in Gainesville notified the ACLU Tuesday morning by telephone that the lawsuit it had received against Barrow County commissioners could not continue until the ACLU submits the $150 filing fee (Athens Banner-Herald, Ga.)
  
  
• First Amendment as solid as a granite monument | The Ten Commandments display was yet another attempt to bring religion into public places and public life (Maya Valverde, The Olympian, Wash.)
  
  
• State vs. religion: Test of boundaries in Florida | Political debates in America are not between people who hold religious views and people who do not, but between people who hold different and sometimes sharply conflicting religious views (David C. Steinmetz, The Orlando Sentinel)
  
  

Church life:

• Dismay over Presbyterian-backed church for Jews | Philadelphia's Jewish community leaders, and some Presbyterian clergy, are dismayed that the prominent Protestant denomination is wooing Jews (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
  
  
• Megachurches, megabusinesses | Pastors often act as chief executives and use business tactics to grow their congregations (Forbes)
  
  
• A wide Bible belt | Residents are fighting church expansion plans that are swallowing their neighborhood (FW Weekly, Ft. Worth, Tex.)
  
  
• Preachers rethink merits of education | College attendance no longer seen as sign of weak faith (The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Ky.)
  
  
• Small churches connect big with under-35 crowd | The reason: "connectivity," according to George Barna (The Greenville News, S.C.)
  
  
• Target of protest 'shocked' | St. Joachim's pastor faced criticism for his handling of the church's Latino members (Los Angeles Times)
  
  

Spirituality:

• Navigation for the inward journey | Bethesda Institute helps meet growing demand for spiritual 'direction' and 'directors' (The Washington Post)
  
  
• Tense teens, adults flock to meditation | Once considered hippy-dippy by many, meditation is going mainstream much as yoga did a few years back (Contra Costa Times, Calif.)
  
  
• Wisconsin nuns pray around the clock for 125 years | Business has picked up recently for the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration (Voice of America)
  
  
• Struggling up an unfamiliar holy path | It is the last Sunday in July, and I am in the middle of the annual pilgrimage up the face of Croagh Patrick, or the Reek, County Mayo's holy mountain (Agigail Zuger, The New York Times)
  
  
• Marx was half right: Religion is a class A drug | But no single drug provides a suitable analogy for the contemporary role of religion (Andrew Anthony, The Guardian, London)
  
  

Pop culture:

• Spiritually profitable gaming | In a genre known for acts of obligatory and explicit violence, do videogames with Christian themes stand a chance? (Forbes)
  
  
• Kurt Warner, Pt. II: I still think saga is a matter of faith | A number of people called and e-mailed to tell me I was out of line with a recent column in which I suggested that perhaps Kurt Warner had sold his soul to the devil for three years of success on the football field (Bill McClellan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
  
  
• Major motion picture chronicles life of Martin Luther | $30 million production condenses about 30 years in Luther's life to an hour and 56 minutes and stars Joseph Fiennes (Minneapolis Star-Tribune)
  
  
• Garth, Mel | Of all the sacred texts to bring to the screen, why did you pick the most adversarial Gospel? (Donald Harman Akenson, The Globe and Mail, Toronto)
  
  

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September (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47