Commentaries

Imagine a health affliction that ends a career but not a life: a surgeon contracts Parkinson's disease, a NASCAR driver goes blind, a world class sprinter acquires rheumatoid arthritis, or an orchestra conductor goes deaf. My last example is not hypothetical. It happened to Dr. Isaiah Jackson, music director of the Youngstown Symphony from 1996 to 2006. Isaiah, as he likes to be called, came to the Mahoning Valley with impressive credentials:

In 1899 the U.S. Supreme Court issued an important decision on whether government may constitutionally grant public funds to a religious organization. In Bradfield v. Roberts the Court ruled that the District of Columbia could pay a hospital in Washington operated by an order of Catholic nuns to provide a secular service to the poor health care. (1) Under this ruling, many religious groups received public funds without controversy year after year. Typically such groups did not seek to proselytize their clients, only to serve them, and used no religious test in hiring and firing.

Last month researchers at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, published the results of a national survey of beliefs about religion called the American Religious Identification Survey, or ARIS for short. This is the third such survey from this group over an eighteen year span. (1) Perhaps the most startling finding in ARIS 2008 is about the Nones. That's N-O-N-E-S. The Nones are the non-religious among us. There are twenty million more Nones today than in 1990, an increase of 138 percent, and the percentage of Nones has jumped from 8.2 percent to 15 percent of the population. (p.