Prayers

The resignation of Chief Justice Warren E. Burger was hailed Tuesday as an "answer to our prayers" by a fundamentalist pastor who earlier had asked his congregation to pray that five Supreme Court justices either repent, retire or die. "God answered our prayers," said the Rev. Robert L. Hymers, pastor of the Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle church in Los Angeles. "It's astonishing . . .

A Grand Island meatpacking plant fired at least 86 workers after they walked off the job amid a dispute over prayers during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, company officials said. A Muslim leader and one of the fired workers said 150 lost their jobs. Muslim workers -- mostly Somalis -- had been asking for break times to allow prayer at sunset. The issue led to walkouts this week -- not only by Muslims but also by non-Muslims protesting such accommodations as preferential treatment.

The Citadel military college has started having a moment of silence instead of spoken prayers before meals in response to a recent appellate court decision. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals refused this month to reconsider an April decision by a three-judge panel that declared dinnertime prayers at the Virginia Military Institute to be unconstitutional. As a result, Maj. Gen.

Muslims were allowed to pray at a mosque in the Albanian capital of Tirana Friday for the first time in more than 20 years and, in another sign of reform, Albania proposed legalizing strikes. Albania, which had been the last haven for hard-line communists in Eastern Europe, began introducing gradual changes last year. A ban on religion was lifted in November.

Saying that Iraq's missile attacks on Israeli civilians "raises up within all of us horror and revulsion," Archbishop Roger M. Mahony has assured the large Jewish community in Los Angeles that his 3.4-million-member Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles "stands with you" and is offering prayers that the "deranged assaults" will end.

The Lord's Prayer, one of the cornerstones of Christianity, has become the focus of a religious donnybrook pitting traditionalists against modernists in Britain's official Church of England. Should prayer use powerful rhetorical language, or should it be simple, direct and accessible? That is the question facing leaders of the Church of England and being echoed in other Christian denominations around the world also seeking ecumenical agreement and a common Lord's Prayer for the new millennium.

The Supreme Court today let stand a decision banning organized prayers at the start of high school football games. The court, without comment, refused to review a ruling in a Georgia case that such pregame invocations impermissibly promote religion. The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, by a 2-1 vote Jan. 3, said prayers carried over the public address system before Douglas County, Ga., High School home football games had to stop. Separation of Church, State In a ruling affecting all public schools in Georgia, Alabama and Florida, the appeals court said the organized prayers violated the separation of church and state required by past Supreme Court decisions.

At the Temple Israel in Hollywood, they would read from the book of Psalms and say a special prayer for peace. At the Islamic mosque on Vermont Avenue, they spoke of dignity and of persecution and asked for Allah's guidance. And at an ornately Gothic Protestant church on Wilshire Boulevard, worshipers who came for a wartime prayer service spoke of the horrors of hostilities in a faraway land, where young people are killed.

During a day of anguished services filled with prayers for victims and the driver in the Santa Monica Farmers' Market tragedy, the 86-year-old man who was behind the wheel issued his first public statement Sunday, calling what happened a "devastating accident." "There are no words to express the feelings my family and I have for those who suffered loss and pain ... " said George Russell Weller, in a statement read by his pastor, the Rev. Stephen C. Lien of Brentwood Presbyterian Church.

No clear, common thread ties a Mexican sex worker in San Francisco to members of a deaf Mormon community in San Diego. Little would seem to connect the former nuns of the Immaculate Heart Community in Santa Barbara with prison inmates at San Quentin or Chino. The same could be said of recovering drug addicts in Culver City and Cambodian refugees in Santa Ana, AIDS patients in West Hollywood and members of a Native American tribe in Santa Rosa. Rick Nahmias saw a connection, though.