University of AL students fix up a historic high school
WLTZ-NBC (Columbus, Ga.) – May 25
More than a dozen students from the University of Alabama got together to spruce up a historic high school. They’re painting and fixing up the Old Lincoln High School in Marion. It’s the school where Coretta Scott King graduated, and has been abandoned since 1970. A group of senior citizens use the school to teach others how to sew and quilt. The honor students chose it as one of several places to do community service. Among their other projects: repairing batting cages at the city park and holding workshops.
Professor tells story of faith in practice
Florence Times Daily – May 26
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and anti-Nazi in Hitler’s Germany, and his story is one that the First Presbyterian Church of Florence wants to share. On June 3, the First Presbyterian will be hosting a free lecture by University of Alabama professor Dr. Thomas Herwig. Herwig teaches religion courses in the Honors College at Alabama…Herwig is being invited to participate in First Presbyterian’s Elting Lecture Series…Bonhoeffer was outspoken about the treatment of the Jewish population in Germany in the early days of Hitler’s rise and even became a conspirator against the Nazi state later in Hitler’s Germany. Herwig attributed part of Bonhoeffer’s sympathy toward the Jewish situation to his Jewish brother-in-law. “If you are in touch with people who are minorities, of people in a certain situation, if you walk in their shoes so to speak,” Herwig said. “Then you get a completely different sense of the situation. So he, of course with the help of his family situation, he was very aware of every little detail of the worsening of the situation of the Jews in Germany.”
Martone returns for staging of play based on his book
Fort Wayne (Ind.) News Sentinel – May 25
Why, it’s fair to ask, does a guy who writes so much about Indiana live in Tuscaloosa, Ala.? Author Michael Martone, a Fort Wayne native, gives the obvious answer. “Weather. Thirty (degrees) is real low here. In February and January, you hear crickets, so that is really pleasant.” And then of course there’s the family factor. He and his wife moved to Tuscaloosa 15 years ago and raised their two boys there. They thought about moving back to Indiana, but “we just didn’t want to move the kids,” said Martone, who is a professor in the English Department at the University of Alabama. Martone will be in Fort Wayne next week for the 3rd annual Northeast Indiana Playwright Festival. One of his books, “Alive and Dead in Indiana,” published in 1984, has been adapted into a play by Doug Long and will be presented as part of the festival.