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In February a New York court found Iraqi-American Rafil Dhafir, 57, guilty of violating U.S. sanctions against Iraq and of money laundering.

U.S. Capitol Police arrested 115 religious leaders in front of the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C., in December while they knelt on the steps to pray and protest the planned federal budget cuts to social programs that aid the poor. The event was organized by Sojourners and Call to Renewal. “I have lived and worked among the poor for 12-plus years,” Denver-based participant Michelle Warren told Sojourners. “I am an evangelical Christian and we, as evangelicals, need to advocate for the poor. Today was just the beginning.”

A Brazilian court found Rayfran das Neves Sales and Clodoaldo Carlos Batista guilty of the 2005 murder of 73-year-old Catholic sister Dorothy Stang, SND. The men received 27- and 17-year prison sentences, respectively. The ranchers accused of ordering the murder are expected to stand trial this spring. Stang, an Ohio native, had lived since the early 1970s in the Anapu region of Para, Brazil, where she fought large-scale ranching and logging interests to protect poor farmers and the rainforest.

Thank you for publishing Dan Charles’ hymn to the life of Nelson Good (“Everything He Touched Turned to Community,” December 2005). I’m one of those people who benefited from the “expanding circles” of Nelson’s life. I never met the man, but I loved someone who loved him, and thus was privileged to read Betty Good’s e-mail epistles about life in the midst of dying and grief. One was aptly titled “Abrupt Grace.” It offered deep wisdom about living and leaving a good life.

Was the cry they heard a kestrel’s or a distressed gull
or a passing soul or one not wanting to, a disciple
asked as fog burned off the harbor and left the water

glazed with fire: Jesus roused from dozing lightly. Sun
turned the shore rocks ocher. A bee thrummed near;
they watched it hover. John, who squatted to mend a net,

“Taking Back our Kids,” by Danny and Polly Duncan Collum (January 2006), has many important things to say about raising children in today’s American culture, but I take issue with one assertion: that it has been the “choice” of women to enter the workforce in the 1970s and beyond that is at least one cause of the degradation of the lives of children when compared to the 1950s.

Many of us attend worship communities that struggle to hit the right note between traditional hymn-and-organ music and the praise choruses of a (usually loud and) youthful rock band.

Shanti Sellz and Daniel Strauss, both 23, face felony charges for aiding people in the Arizona desert who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Their appeal to have the case against them dismissed was denied in January. Sellz and Strauss are volunteers with No More Deaths, a Tucson, Arizona-based coalition of faith-based groups that advocates for immigrant reform and provides food, water, and medical care to migrants crossing the desert.

While agreeing with Ted Peters (“Intelligent Religion,” December 2005) that one can both embrace the science of Darwinian theory and be religious, I take exception to his assertion that “the scientific establishment tries to assert that to be religious is like having a disease that quarantines a person against participation in science.” I don’t believe there is any such ideology in the scientific community. As a scientist, I would ask for his evidence of such a position.