June 2022. I thought this was pretty wild — what you see is a row of buildings that have been almost entirely demolished, all facing Campbell Avenue. (These include what used to be the Campbell Court Bus Station and the deli beside it.) The facades at front remain intact for now, but they are otherwise gutted.
The Roanoke Times today published my letter to the editor about mandatory prayer in the public school classroom. You can read it online right here.
The Roanoke Times is Virginia’s third-largest newspaper, with a Sunday circulation of nearly 230,000 people. Thanks so much to its editorial staff for allowing me to share my opinion with my neighbors in Southwest Virginia.
Roanoke, VA, June 2022.
Heading east. Overhead is the Market Street Walkway.
As always, I apologize here for the shaky-cam. I was especially discombobulated after running to get the shot. It even exceeded my daily baseline of dysfunctional discombobulation.
June 2022.
I passed a neat milestone today. With my letter in The Richmond Times-Dispatch, I’ve now seen my writing appear in 50 periodicals (in addition to standalone publications like anthologies and such). I started waaaaaay back in 1996 or so with my first job as a reporter for the Culpeper Star-Exponent.
This arrives just a bit ahead of my 50th birthday, too — so I celebrated with a strawberry lemonade in Market Square.
I’m so happy today to see my latest letter to the editor (about mandatory prayer in the public school classroom) appear in the pages of The Free Lance-Star. You can read it online right here.
In addition to being the newspaper for my college town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, The Free Lance-Star is a leading regional news source with more than 65,000 weekday readers. I’m quite grateful to its editorial staff for allowing me to share my perspective there.
I am so happy today to see The Roanoke Star feature my opinion piece on mandatory prayer in the public school classroom. You can read it right here.
Thanks once again to Publisher Stuart Revercomb for allowing me to share my voice through this superb source of local news and commentary.
I am so happy today to see Spillwords Press publish my love poem, “Where Would We Go?” You can find it right here.
Thanks once again to Director of Development Dagmara K. for allowing me to share my voice via this wonderful online magazine!
It seems that no school shooting is complete without renewed calls for mandatory prayer in the public school classroom. But how exactly would that help?
What sort of Creator do the proponents of mandatory prayer envision? Only a barbarous God would demand prayers from schoolchildren before protecting them from being shot to death. Is He really so voracious for praise? Is He really so ruthless in extorting it from us? Should we trust such a deity to help us, if He egomaniacally threatens us so — with violence so horrifying that we are loathe to even imagine it?
And if prayer is sufficient to secure this god’s protection, then why do we see shootings at houses of worship? Were the victims there not praying hard enough? Were they just not sincere enough in their invocations?
Finally, why should arriving police wear body armor, instead of only the “armor of God” that their prayers could afford them? Shouldn’t that be enough, according to those calling for mandatory prayer?
Separation of church and state is enshrined in our Constitution. By keeping the government and public institutions neutral in religious matters, it protects the rights of both religious and non-religious people. (Students are already perfectly free to pray voluntarily, alone or in groups, without being prompted by school staff — because the First Amendment protects their rights, as well.)
Church and state are like peanut butter and tuna fish. Either one of those things might be just fine on their own — but not when they are combined together.
“The Infant Samuel,” Joshua Reynolds, 1776
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 