1. Christmas noise, sacred silence

    Seconds after the curtain came down on the first Radio City Christmas Spectacular show of the day at the Fox Theatre on Saturday, a dozen crew members got-chaotically-to work. They sucked up fake snow from the stage floor into industrial vacuum cleaners. They pushed red and green sleighs and giant staircases on squeaky wheels across the stage. They mopped and remopped a stage where live camels, donkeys and sheep had been part of a Nativity scene.


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  2. In God, and in church security, we trust

    Houses of worship take new steps to protect faithful

    A gunman bursts into a church sanctuary and opens fire on hundreds of worshippers. Vandals target a house of worship, spray-painting its walls or defacing its artifacts. A father who lost custody of his child finds a way to enter the church nursery to kidnap a toddler.


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  3. Couple carry gift of faith St. Louisans take Torah, Judaism back to Germany

    Eva Susskind and Fred Ashner, both in their 20s and single, discovered they shared much in common when they met in 1959 at a Passover seder in New York City. As children, both had been forced from their native Germany by the Nazis. Both had lost parents in the war. Both had traveled a tumultuous and violent road to this moment in a strange new land.


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  4. Bishops struggle as flock balks at voting guidance

    • Topics:
      • Politics
      • Faith/Religion
    • Published:
      1. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 16, 2008
    • Metainfo:
      • 1254 words
      • 41.8 inches

    "If the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders labor; if the Lord does not watch over the city, in vain does the watchman keep vigil." Chicago's Cardinal Francis George used this verse from the 127th Psalm to begin a statement released last week by the nation's Catholic bishops warning President-elect Barack Obama and a majority Democratic Congress about their abortion policy.


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  5. Obama flipped religious vote in Democrats' favor this time

    "Keep the Faith" column

    President-elect Barack Obama captured the 2008 religious vote on Tuesday, according to national exit polls. It was a reversal from four years ago, and partly a result of a drastic change in the way the Democratic Party targeted and organized religious voters.


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  6. Bishop tightens reins on Catholic Charities

    The St. Louis Archdiocese has demanded that Catholic Charities, the largest private provider of social services in Missouri, turn over control of the way it raises its money. The acting leader of the archdiocese, Bishop Robert Hermann, has given the board members an ultimatum: Agree with his plan, or get out.


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  7. Bishop links election to abortion/Holocaust comparison

    "Keep the Faith" column

    A month before the 2004 presidential election, former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke sent out a pastoral letter on voting to St. Louis Catholics. He began the letter by relating a conversation he'd had with a German man in the 1980s. The man had grown up during the Nazi era and told Burke he was despondent that he and his fellow Germans had failed to stop the Holocaust.


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  8. Notes on Contributors

    • Published:
      1. Esquire, November 01, 2008
    • Metainfo:
      • 621 words
      • 20.7 inches

    Arthur L. Shash grew up in Bear, Delaware, and received a degree in herpetology from Goldey-Beacom College in Wilmington. Poems from his collection, Viper Fangs, Ya'll, are due to appear in the spring 2011 issue of Casual Pants Quarterly. He is at work on a biography of the late-nineteenth-century deaf German salamander specialist Willy Wolterstorff, whose editorship of Blätter saw that publication's readership soar among amphibian hobbyists in the years preceding World War I.


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  9. Church takes on ‘new atheism’ by embracing the doubt

    When she was 20, Jessi Thull's father died of cancer, an event that took seven months from diagnosis to death, and that she describes now as "overwhelming." Thull was brought up as a churchgoing Christian, but her father's death and the resulting pain made her question God's existence.


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  10. McCain stem cell ad irks conservative Christians

    A radio ad for Sen. John McCain trumpeting the Republican presidential candidate's support for stem cell research is upsetting some conservative Christians he recently won over by choosing one of their own-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin-as a running mate.


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