March 15, 2000

Three years ago, on the very first broadcast of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, the PBS program I host, we did a feature on a stretch of road outside Washington, D.C., that has been nicknamed the “Highway of Heaven.” Side by side, block after block, is an amazing variety of new places of worship for Vietnamese Catholics, Korean Presbyterians, Cambodian Buddhists, Ukrainian Orthodox, Spanish Seventh-day Adventists, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and, tucked away among all the newcomers, American Episcopalians too.

Back when I made my living as a high school English teacher, I used to tell my ninth graders that the class unit with the most practical application to their lives was Greek tragedy. “Grammar’s important, too,” I would hasten to add. “Don’t get me wrong. But not all of you will require a working knowledge of English grammar to get by in life. In fact, there have been any number of persons, including one or two recent presidents of the United States, who seemed to do quite well without it.

On the cusp of the 21st century, a strange thing is happening. Congregations—not all, but a noticeable number—are choosing to highlight their denominational particularities. While for some this might not seem so strange, for much of the 20th century highlighting denominational differences has been considered by many to be somewhat suspect. Early in the century, H. Richard Niebuhr wrote, “Denominationalism thus represents the moral failure of Christianity. . . .

In December a jury in Memphis, Tennessee, concluded that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy involving Loyd Jowers and “others, including governmental agencies.” Almost 32 years after King’s murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the now deceased James Earl Ray, the man sentenced for the crime.