Free Republic

Witches are a big deal in Salem's modern culture. The city's association with witchcraft has been capitalized on from films like 1993's "Hocus Pocus" to the annual Halloween festivities that draw in nearly a million visitors throughout the month of October. But something often left out of conversations about the 17th century Salem Witch Trials is that the victims were real people who, along with their families, suffered a great injustice at the hands of their community. A new exhibition at Salem's Peabody Essex Museum is recontextualizing the witch trials from a human perspective: "The Salem Witch Trials: Restoring Justice"....

1.) An infant is baptized, is raised by believing parents and later when older turns from the faith. 2.) An infant is baptized, has no believing parents to be raised by, and when older doesn't turn from the faith. Given that the antithesis exists for 1 & 2, wouldn't it be prudent for the priest to baptize the fortunate infant as well as the unfortunate, as either could remain faithful when older, show perseverance against high odds, and no priest knows the future - only God Almighty? Given that only God knows the future, perhaps withholding baptism isn't an option...

In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam. Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate. More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a...

CBS reports Baathist insurgents and Sunni nationalists are fighting al-Qaeda together with US forces