The ACLU of Massachusetts says Quincy should cancel plans to frame the entrance of the city's new public-safety building with massive statues of Saint Michael and Saint Florian, because both the state and federal constitutions prohibit governments from favoring one religion over others. Read more.
By adamg - 2/11/25 - 10:30 am
The Massachusetts Council of Churches and 26 other religious groups, including the Boston-based Unitarian Universalist Association, this morning sued Homeland Security and ICE over their announced intentions to have agents storm religious sanctuaries in their efforts to find brown people to deport. Read more.
By adamg - 2/8/25 - 7:55 pm
The Quincy Patriot-Ledger introduces us to the ten-foot-tall statues of two Catholic saints that Mayor Tom Koch is paying to have installed at the front of the city's new public-safety building - St. Florian pouring water on a flaming building for the firefighters and St. Michael standing on the head and neck of a guy screaming in agony to represent police. Read more.
By adamg - 1/27/25 - 3:19 pm
A school psychologist for Newton Public Schools today sued over her 2022 firing for refusing Covid-19 shots, saying she had a legitimate religious reason to avoid the shots: Her Greek Orthodox church is against the use of substances derived from aborted babies, which she claims Covid-19 vaccines are from. Read more.
By adamg - 12/29/24 - 9:52 am
J.L. Bell, who studies and writes about pre-Revolutionary New England, discusses a Louisiana law (currently stayed during a lawsuit) that requires public schools to display a copy of the Ten Commandments - and a "context statement" that refers to the 17th-century New England Primer, a reader for young students, as proof Christianity has always been a part of American public education. Read more.
By adamg - 12/5/24 - 9:28 am
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.
By adamg - 11/27/24 - 2:48 pm
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.
By adamg - 10/12/24 - 11:47 am
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.
By adamg - 10/2/24 - 10:23 am
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.
By adamg - 9/3/24 - 9:52 am
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.
By adamg - 8/20/24 - 1:31 pm
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.
By adamg - 8/7/24 - 12:12 am
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.
By adamg - 7/19/24 - 2:14 pm
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.
By adamg - 7/12/24 - 11:46 am
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.
By adamg - 7/7/24 - 12:55 pm
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.
By adamg - 6/29/24 - 12:50 pm
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.
By adamg - 5/15/24 - 12:45 pm
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.
By adamg - 5/7/24 - 3:47 pm
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.
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