J.L. Bell introduces us to the cherubs of Old North Church - and alerts us to a talk next Wednesday by the conservator who is leading the effort to restore all those cute little cheeks you'll just want to pinch, only you shouldn't.
Boston College is fighting back against a worker who's suing it for disregarding what he claims is his religious right to not get a Covid-19 shot in a way that other organizations facing similar suits cannot: It argues it has its own religious rights under the First Amendment to require workers to get vaccinated. Read more.
Ad for the show that still showed Thompson.
Boston Mega Praise, headquartered in an office park off VFW Parkway in West Roxbury, today sued gospel performer Phil Thompson - born in Boston and a former member of a group called Ashmont Hill - and his promoter over the more than $460,000 it says it spent to arrange his attendance at a performance at Worcester's DCU Center last year, which he pulled out of at the last minute. Read more.
A Massachusetts Land Court judge this week agreed to let the state Attorney General's office get into the legal scrum over the future of a former library on Hamilton Street in Hyde Park's Readville neighborhood that is owned by the church next door - which wants to raze it to build apartments. Read more.
City Councilor Liz Breadon (Allston/Brighton) reports that BTD has ajusted traffic lights at several Brighton intersections to automatically signal time for pedestrians to cross between 7 p.m. on Friday and 7 p.m. on Saturday - so that observant Jewish pedestrians don't have to press buttons at the intersections on their sabbath.
The new automated pedestrian-crossing lights start this Friday at: Read more.
Brookline.News reports the South Brookline Chabad Center says its outgrown its current home on the Putterham rotary - across from Temple Emeth - and wants to build a new, larger center down Bellingham Road - but nearby residents say the proposal is just too darn big, and besides, the home it would replace are historic. Read more.
A chain of "pregnancy resource centers" - including outlets in Revere and Brookline - that won't offer referrals for abortions for pregnant patients wants the state to leave it alone and stop warning people about them. Read more.
A federal appeals court has tossed a lawsuit by Salem-based Satanists over the way the Boston City Council has local clergy members start its weekly meetings with an invocation - and over the way the city fought the group's efforts to make then Councilor Michelle Wu show up for a deposition way up on the North Shore on the day of the election in which she was running for mayor. Read more.
Rendering by Shepley Bulfinch.
Boston College has filed plans with the Boston Planning Department to build a three-story, roughly 45,000-square-foot building to store collections of religious stuff "as well as limited artwork and cultural artifacts" on a hillside between its Theology and Ministry Library and its St. John's Seminary property off Lake Street in Brighton. Read more.
A Boston board that oversees a federally mandated limit on the total number of parking spaces in Boston Proper voted last month to forbid any more parking at a lot between Hudson and Harvard streets in Chinatown, arguing the 30-space lot violates the parking cap. Read more.
A disgusted citizen filed a 311 complaint about BTD's callous disregard for Beacon Hill residents by refusing to send in a squadron of ticket writers to ding people parking illegally on Brimmer Street to attend Sunday services at an unspecified church on Mt. Vernon Street (Church of the Advent?): Read more.
Rabbi Shlomo Noginski yesterday sued Khaled Awad, whom authorities say stabbed Noginski eight times as Noginski successfully managed to get the man away from children at a summer program at Shaloh House on Chestnut Hill Avenue in Brighton Center on July 1, 2021. Read more.
Some residents living near a church-owned "reading room" in Readville that once served as a BPL branch have gone to court to counter the church's own court court effort to win approval to replace the building with a six-unit apartment building even as the Hyde Park Historical Society is offering to buy the building to keep it a public site. Read more.
The Courthouse News Service reports on a hearing today before the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston on the City Council's decades-long policy of having a local member of the clergy open its weekly meetings with an invocation.
The hearing came on the Satanic Temple's appeal of a district court judge's ruling allowing the council to continue not inviting the group to give an invocation.
Inside the old library in the 1930s, by W. Jordan, from the BPL's Boston Pictorial Archive.
A Readville church is asking a judge to let it ignore a restriction in the 1897 deed that limits the use of a side building to "a free and public reading room and library" so that it can put up a six-unit apartment building in its place. Read more.
The Boston Fire Department reports firefighters responded to the Boylston Church at 207 Amory St. in Jamaica Plain for a basement fire around 3 p.m. Read more.
Christianity Today reports on divisions inside Park Street Church:
A years-long fight over leadership styles and decision-making processes at historic Park Street Church in Boston has boiled over into accusations of abusing spiritual authority and authoritarianism.
Our Lady Help of Christians Parish on Washington Street in Nonantum had been providing emergency shelter for up to 30 migrant families since November, but only went public with the news yesterday, after rumors began spreading about violence at its campus - rumors the parish says are completely wrong. Read more.
Eileen Murphy had to do a double take today when she saw what you can buy at the East Broadway Walgreens these days:
Can't say I ever expected to see "Catholicism for Dummies" at the Southie Walgreens.
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