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Now here's today's news, discerned differently.

The body of Representative John Lewis is lying in state today at the U.S. Capitol in

Washington, D.C., as lawmakers and the public pay their respects.

According to congressional historians, he is the first black lawmaker to lie in state at the

U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

As I noted following Representative Lewis's death,

his original intention was to become a preacher. As a boy, he was responsible for taking care of

the chickens and the family farm. He fed them and read to them from the Bible, baptized them when

they were born, and staged funerals for them when they died. As he noted in his

memoir, I could imagine that they were my congregation, and me, I was the preacher. Representative Lewis

dedicated his life to civil rights as an expression of his faith and call to ministry. He was by no

means alone. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said of himself,

In the quiet recesses of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher. It has been

noted that the Black Church served as the center for the Civil Rights Movement in the South,

in both logistical and symbolic ways. Catholic activists

were prominently involved in the Selma demonstrations of March 1965 that led to the passage of the

Voting Rights Act. One writer describes the civil rights movement's leaders this way. They were pastors

who rose up to confront a powerful segregationist establishment

and face down violent mobs. Their steel will, backed by thousands of followers inspired by their

faith in nonviolent resistance, broke the back of unjust segregation laws, and set in motion

...