Today marks the official National Day of Prayer. Republicans and Democrats across the nation will soon sit down to meetings and meals bookended with an opening and closing prayer. Certainly there is much to pray for: action on global climate change, fiscal responsibility, justice for immigrants, wisdom, humility, and peace.

Yet with the National Day of Prayer, we inevitably witness another festival: the debate between those demanding its end in the name of separation of church and state, and others who will complain that government is censoring prayers in the name of political correctness. Upon what might be a welcome bipartisan interlude, shrill voices intrude.

Having spent time studying religious freedom at Monticello’s International Center for Jefferson Studies, I inevitably come back to the following question: What would Jefferson do? How would he react to a National Day of Prayer mandated by Congress and proclaimed by the President?

Several years ago, U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb ruled the official Day of Prayer unconstitutional (before the case was thrown out for lack of standing). Judge Crabb was clear: the problem is not prayer, or even prayer by government officials; rather, the issue is government seeking to use prayer for political purposes, literally taking what is sacred and making it profane. Judge Crabb quoted the Supreme Court: “in the hands of government what might begin as a tolerant expression of religious views may end in a policy to indoctrinate and coerce.” This echoed James Madison’s admonition almost two hundred years earlier that official prayer proclamations “seem to imply and certainly nourish the erronious [sic] idea of a national religion.” It was for this reason that Jefferson emphatically rejected any “official,” government call to prayer. Not only did Jefferson see government prayer proclamations as unconstitutional, but he added: “I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct it’s exercises . . . Fasting & prayer are religious exercises. . . . Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, & the objects proper for them . . . and this right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the constitution has deposited it.” Jefferson undoubtedly would join Judge Crabb in insisting that prayer should not be government-directed or sponsored. Jefferson’s concern for mixing government and religion was both political and theological. Politically, government support of religion threatened “tyranny over the mind,” a country led by “priestcraft.” Theologically, Jefferson would have agreed with eighteenth century evangelicals, equally committed to strict separation of church and state, who understood that even government encouragement interfered with a “free will offering” to God, a wholly-voluntary decision to believe and pray.

To stop there, though, is to miss an important part of Jefferson’s learning. In both of his inaugural addresses, Jefferson invoked divine guidance. Some, ignoring his emphatic declaration to the contrary, insist that Jefferson supported official prayer. Others accuse Jefferson of inconsistency, saying that prayer proclamations which he insisted were unconstitutional and his inaugural prayers were “indistinguishable.” Jefferson did not see it that way. An official proclamation of a day of prayer is a government act – subject to the constraints of the First Amendment; a private prayer, even when made by a public official in a public setting, is not. Madison made a similar point when he concluded that an official congressional chaplain was unconstitutional, but Members of Congress, acting in their private capacity, could certainly gather to pray: “If Religion consist in voluntary acts of individuals . . . and it be proper that public functionaries, as well as their Constituents should discharge their religious duties, let them like their Constituents, do so at their own expense.” What they should not seek is government endorsement or funding for their prayers.Thus, Christian ministers rightly object that government should not tell them to omit Jesus’ name from their prayers, but that is the result of being officially-sponsored. Eighteenth century evangelicals rejected government assistance for this reason, recognizing that it would be “the first link which Draws after it a chain of horrid consequences, and that by Degrees it will terminate in who shall preach, when they shall preach, where they shall preach, and what they shall preach.”

Jefferson was a prayerful man, but he rejected as both inappropriate and dangerous government intrusion into the sacred realm. So, what would Jefferson do? Paul advised to “pray ceaselessly,” but he certainly did not ask the government to sponsor his prayer meetings. Jefferson would agree.

The debut of the new movie 42 reminds us of a time when America was segregated, riven by racial differences, stereotypes, and violence. In 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers placed Jackie Robinson front and center for our country to debate a bold new step in race relations. His color-barrier-shattering achievements reached far beyond the baseball fields of New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. Robinson’s efforts opened a new chapter for Americans, bringing us closer to what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. later described as “the beloved community,” a community where integration and tolerance were the watchwords.

Jackie Robinson may have ended Major League Baseball’s color barrier, but in baseball’s minor-league towns throughout the South, both the law and rigid customs barred black men and white men from playing America’s national pastime together. And yet it was here—in places like Danville, Virginia, Hot Springs, Arkansas, Savannah, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama—that the next stage of America’s integration was to play out, in the years following Robinson’s ascendency.

“I tend to refer to us as Jackie’s disciples,” explained former big leaguer Ed Charles in Brushing Back Jim Crow. “We spent years and years trying to make breakthroughs down in the South. We were carrying his torch a little further. We all tried to emulate Jackie. All the guys patterned themselves after Jackie. They may have gotten to the point where they wanted to quit and they just thought about Jackie. I know I did.”

Ed Charles weathered many storms during his professional baseball tutelage in the South’s minor leagues where he played eight years in places like Corpus Christi, Louisville, and Jacksonville. Charles was often the first black man whom people had ever seen playing baseball on the same field with white ballplayers. Charles and his compatriots endured segregation, racial taunts, and almost ceaseless racial hostility, all while trying to learn their baseball crafts and follow in Jackie Robinson’s footsteps to the Major Leagues.

A teenaged Henry Aaron broke the color line in Jacksonville, Florida. Growing up in Mobile, Alabama, Aaron was well-acquainted with the Jim Crow South. He understood what he must endure on the ballfields of Charleston, Savannah, and Columbia, South Carolina, while a visiting player for Jacksonville. Aaron, like so many of his fellow line breakers, used the racial invective and segregation he experienced and turned it around, like hitting a high fastball and sending it screaming into the bleachers.

“Believe it or not,” Aaron explained in his interview for Brushing Back Jim Crow, “at night, you laugh about it. That’s one thing that made you go out the next day and say, ‘I can’t believe that people are this ignorant.’ And go out and do better. It was a motivator.”

Aaron’s is only one of the remarkable stories from this dramatic time in sports history. Brushing Back Jim Crow also recounts the successes and disappointments of such greats as Billy Williams, Felipe Alou, Chuck Harmon, Nat Peeples, Al Israel, Willie Tasby, Ed Charles, Don Buford.

As we enjoy 42 and celebrate Jackie Robinson’s achievements, let us also tip our caps to Jackie’s disciples, the men who broke the color barrier down South. As Congressman John Lewis explains in Brushing Back Jim Crow, baseball integration “helped to open and liberate people from stereotypes and attitudes. It broke down walls. It ended those feelings that somehow people could not be together. It had a profound effect on southerners. It was more than race relations. It was just pure human relations.”

This is the story of a false story.

We live and sometimes die for our stories; some benign (“God is Love,”"All Men are Created Equal”) others not (“lebensraum,”"separate but equal”). Among the false stories doggers tell are: “Registries don’t ruin breeds, breeders ruin breeds,” “Corrections are cruel,” and “Dogs offer unconditional love.”

We all have stories about our own dogs who are “natural outrunners” or who are “kind to their sheep” or “reliable around kids” or who “suffer from separation anxiety.” Some of these stories are true, others false.  Whichever, they color our expectations and the dogs’. They direct our training.

Last weekend Fly and I attended a Patrick Shannahan clinic in Maryland. Patrick is a fine, gentle teacher, and I learned from him, but my important discovery came watching a dog—not my own—trained by another trainer.

Backstory: when I bought Fly, Beverly Lambert told me a story about Fly and a Scottish trial man. Fly’s crate is her safe place and when she wouldn’t come out, her brand-new owner dragged her out and Fly bit him. Whereupon he got “harsh” with Fly and she responded by refusing to work for him. Period. A fully trained three-year-old open-trial winner gave up her career—not for everyone, Bev worked her, but she never worked for the Scot again.

Bev said something like, “You don’t see many Border Collies who’ll stand up for their rights.”

Good story. Dog is mistreated and removes the punchpowl. Brave Fly! The Defiant One!

When Fly came to me, she was a Wild Child and she wouldn’t work sheep. Period. Finally I tricked her into working and we’ve gone on from there. But Fly’s story was always: The Defiant One. Never mind in 30 years I’ve never seen one of these Defiants; never mind that while The Defiant One may lurk in some terrier genetic codes, it isn’t anything a Border Collie breeder would breed for. Never mind that she wouldn’t work for me—although I HADN’T dragged her out of the crate nor abused her. Fly had her story and I was sticking with it!

Backstory 2: After I’d had her six months we ran at Joanie Swanke’s in the Dakotas. Joanie’s outrun was four to five hundred yards blind through sagebrush on three range yearlings. You couldn’t see the work very well, and the three wild sheep broke 1-2, or 1-1-1 or broke back to the letout or over the ridge out of sight in a very big prairie.  One dog went missing and was recovered trying to fetch an antelope. It was very difficult work—so difficult that Tommy Wilson and Sly took twelve minutes to get the ewes to his feet. Tommy is a far, far better trainer/handler than I am.

Fly didn’t really want to outrun and disappeared at a lope. Since I couldn’t see I didn’t say anything, and directly she was behind her sheep, just a dot, and I couldn’t see well enough to read the pressure so stayed mum. As they moved past the letout, I couldn’t see well enough to command. I didn’t say anything until they were at the fetch panels. It was, the judge told me, the best outwork of the day, and the memory of it kept me going with Fly when good sense said quit. This story was “Dog so talented she could handle difficult work w/o help.”

Last weekend, both stories changed. Fly’s pup Rose was at the clinic, and she was her Mama’s daughter. If Rose had any genes from her sire, they weren’t on display. It was like seeing Basic Fly—absent all Fly’s training, work, and life experience.

Rose hated stress, and the balance point between necessary training corrections and losing her was unusually delicate—and that point shifted up and down the scale.

Linda Tesdahl had been training Rose for a year, and we watched while her owner and Patrick worked. Rose, like her Mama, is a piece of work. Talented but . . .er . . .

At the end, Rose was on sheep a hundred feet from her handler’s feet when he said, “That’ll do, Rose.” And Rose came off happily and straight to his feet! Which, in my experience, is really weird. Unless something really awful has happened, well started young Border Collies don’t want to/won’t come off their sheep. “Do you mean it?  Ah, you don’t really, really mean it! Just a minute more. I’ve come back partway, is that far enough? Don’t you want to send me again?”  We’ve all seen it. I said how odd Rose’s willingness to quit was, and Linda said, “She’s coming off stress.” Which was my Aha! Because 500 yards from me, Fly is perfectly willing to come off her sheep–just like her daughter. And both hate stress.

Story: Fly is thumped. Defies the man who thumped her by removing the thing (sheepwork) he cares about most. Great story. But impossible. How would Fly connect the thumping with working sheep? Even if she did, why would she later refuse to work for me?

So what’s the more likely story? If I were writing it, I’d continue after the thumping. We have a still angry handler. HANDLERS DON’T GET BIT! Fly is now chained in the stall. But the handler wants to end on a good note. He unclips Fly and takes her out to his training sheep, intending to get a brief gather and fetch, say, “Good Lass” and put her up. But he’s still angry and maybe she picks up on that and hesitates and he gets on her again—verbally this time—and Fly’s doggy mind is spinning and she shuts down hard. And stays shut down. In a brand new home with no anti-stress reserves (affection, safe routine) she shuts down. And Fly has learned that shutting down (like coming off sheep) removes the stress she hates.

No, its not as good a story (no movie sale), but it is more likely to be true.

So why’d she do so good on those range sheep?

Because she did it on her own—no handler commanding her. The most difficult sheep are much less stressful than her handler’s demands.

I’ll want to keep that in mind.

The celebrated modernist architect Richard Neutra (1892-1970) figures prominently in several recently published UVa Press volumes, and with his work we are faced with the enduring questions of how we define, honor, and struggle with history.

Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs was the western retreat for the family that commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. In 1937, he designed a modern house—his first outside California—for Pan Am pilot and executive George Kraigher in Brownsville, Texas. The subject of an entry in the just-released Buildings of Texas: Central, South, and Gulf Coast (written by Gerald Moorhead with seven prominent coauthors), the Kraigher House is a preservationist’s success story. Derelict and decaying, this luminous home was carefully rehabilitated by the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College in 2007, to welcome and inspire a new generation of architects, historians, and visitors.

The fifty-year history of one of Neutra’s most important non-residential commissions, the Cyclorama Center in Gettysburg, is recounted at length in Christine Madrid French’s essay in Public Nature: Scenery, History, and Park Design, a new volume edited by Ethan Carr, Shaun Eyring, and Richard Guy Wilson. Carefully positioned in Ziegler’s Grove on Cemetery Ridge, its rooftop ramp allowed visitors to scan the landscape from south to north, from the sites of the repulse of Pickett’s Charge to the dais from which Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address echoed. The center recalled “the essential link between the mass battle of 1863 and the mass culture of the present,” as succinctly summarized in Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania, by George Thomas and his five coauthors. Here too a battle ensued, this time between preservationists and Civil War historians, who struggled with which history should be safeguarded. Following a protracted lawsuit, the Cyclorama was razed this past month, just shy of the 150th anniversary of the conflict that saved the Union.

How to reconcile these diametrically opposed outcomes? The Kraigher and Kaufmann houses speak to our fascination with the recent past, as evidenced in the popularity and the settings of such shows as “Mad Men,” while the Cyclorama’s demolition privileges our longer national story. If both are worthy of attention, there are clearly no easy answers here.

As a freshman at Gettysburg College in the late 1970s, I spent a fair amount of time exploring the battlefield, walking the length of Cemetery Ridge and the rise of the Cyclorama ramp. For me, the Neutra center was warm and welcoming, an expanse of glass and terrazzo leading to a large cast-cement drum that housed Paul Philippoteaux’s circular panorama painting of the battle. This is how I’ll always recall the place, graced by that modernist memorial, no more intrusive than the Beaux-Arts marble mass of the Pennsylvania Monument to the south. And though historians of our great national conflict may applaud the landscape’s restoration, at least to its late-nineteenth-century appearance, something intangible, perhaps our generation’s rediscovery of the enduring significance of that conflict, has nonetheless been sadly and irrevocably lost.

Christine Dumaine Leche, editor of Outside the Wire: American Soldiers’ Voices from Afghanistan, appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition to describe the creative writing class she taught in occupied Afghanistan and her amazing students, all of whom were American soldiers. You may listen to the interview here. In the following piece, “Flight to Salerno,” Leche takes us behind the scenes of this powerful new book. The trying journey described here is only the beginning of military life in Afghanistan.

I had been on FOB (forward operating base) Salerno a week. Until then, I had been teaching most of my classes—English, Creative Writing, and Speech—to Army, Marine, and Air Force soldiers, and even a few Navy seamen, on Bagram Airbase. But soldiers on remote FOBs need a diversion, and want a chance to earn some college hours while deployed, too, so I had volunteered and now sat slouched in a metal folding chair in the freezing, cement-floored Bagram PAX terminal all night with seventy or so ragged, exhausted, depressed soldiers waiting for connecting flights on a helicopter, Cessna, or C-130, we never knew which, to remote FOBs. We snacked on potato chips and pasty chocolate chip cookies from vending machines while late ‘90s movies threw flickers of light in our faces. The actors’ voices were hollowed into garble by the metal roof and cement floor of the terminal, but the mouths, eyes, and hands continued gesticulating, and a fair number of us, glazed by the need for sleep, watched on.

When my name was finally called, I dragged my green sausage of a duffle bag to the back of the line behind a couple of corporals built like defensive linemen. We were led a block or so onto the flight line, then to the doorway of a six-seater Cessna. Each of us was scared, cold, and alone, and weighed down by a 30-pound camouflaged flak vest and Kevlar helmet. I hoisted myself up onto the single step and bent forward through the low metal doorway. The three of us crammed into undersized seats made smaller by our awkward flak vests, and through windows the size of dinner plates we watched an F-15 fighter rip down the gray, parallel runway only a few feet from us. Then a C-130 lumbered along behind it like a slug. It hummed that low, deep-throated groan—uummmm—the misery music that permeates Bagram Airbase twenty-four hours a day. Another instant, and the F-15 broke the sound barrier with that symbol of American might, a deafening, vibrating thud. I wondered where the bombs were headed.

On our Cessna’s steep “combat” takeoff, I thought about the nineteen- or twenty-year-old Private on the metal chair in front of me back in the PAX Terminal. He had been bent forward, one elbow on a knee, curled as if staring at a meaningless speck on the cement floor. He rocked just a little in his chair. His hair was that kind of clumped dirty that comes from having slept outside in the open, from sweat and wind. He combed his fingers through it, forehead to crown, in quick strokes, back and forth. Somebody’s son. He was bent over himself, elbows to knees–as if there was a thought he could not take. Something was wrong, real wrong. He had lost a parent, or his wife back in the states had cheated on him or spent all their money, or he was going to the Korengal Valley to a FOB so remote he would have to burn his own excrement, sleep covered in fleas, dodge tarantulas, and might die. Could very well die.

From the sky, Afghanistan is at peace. As the Cessna climbed its steep slope, Bagram’s cement runway became a hyphen in the dust. Soon the world below was a beige-toned infinity punctuated by clusters of mud-brick walls. Villages like tic-tac-toe boards drawn out on the earth, each mud square with a mud house huddled in a corner. After ten minutes or so the view became more rugged. If the earth’s crust had once been a primordial sea, here its hurricane-force waves had frozen into dirt. The infantry soldier across from me was raised on an Iowa farm, just touched down in-country the day before and said he was scared as hell of all planes never mind one the size of a tuna can. He kept tapping the butt of his M-16 on the metal floor and sighing. He was maybe twenty and flinched each time we hit an air pocket. The back of the pilot was only a couple feet in front of us. Inches in front of him came the dials the size of wristwatch faces that held our lives in the balance of their trembling arrows. Twenty minutes later we were crossing the snow-covered Hindu Kush, a field of chiseled daggers as far as the eye can see. The Cessna flew low, meandered between gray spikes draped in snow. Soon we were humming our way over foothills. Then the pilot pointed the plane nose down toward the gravel runway and took us combat-fast into Salerno.

I knew I had my work cut out for me. I caught a ride to my sleeping quarters with a couple of soldiers in a Humvee, dumped the personal stuff, then reported to the education building, a three-room bunker. I set up a table in front of the AFES (military) store that sold pillows and souvenir beer mugs, CDs, and Doritos, so I could first capture people’s attention and, I hoped, register some students, since none had yet signed up for either of my courses. I unpacked the enticement to earn some college credit: free pens and key chains with the university’s white-on-navy logo. There were stacks of catalogues and registration forms. I had brought along an Army green foot locker of English 101 and Library Skills textbooks. By noon I had registered fourteen soldiers. Class would begin in a small room built as a bunker at 1800.

Outside the Wire: American Soliders’ Voices from Afghanistan is available now.

Thursday, 3/21, 7 pm: Staunton Public Library, Staunton, VA
Saturday, 3/23, 4 pm: New Dominion Books,Charlottesville, VA (as part of Virginia Festival of the Book)
Friday, 3/29, 7 pm: Campbell Hall, Williamsville, VA
Saturday, 3/30, 7 pm: Old Dairy Barn, Warm Springs, VA
Sunday, 3/31, 4-6pm: Library, Monterey, VA
Saturday-Sunday, 4/6-4/7: Patrick Shannahan Clinic, Ellicott City, MD
Saturday, 4/13, 7 pm: Mcintyres Books, Fearrington, NC
Saturday, 4/14: 7:30 pm: Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh/Durham, NC
Wednesday-Saturday, 5/15-5/18: Bluegrass Stockdog Trial (SDT), Lexington, VA
Friday-Sunday, 5/24-5/26: Carolina SDT, Lawndale, NC
Tuesday-Thursday, 6/4-6/6: Slash J SDT, Clearmont, WY
Friday-Sunday, 6/7-6/9: Letcher Ranch SDT, Clearmont, WY
Thursday, 6/20: Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA
Thursday, 7/4: Cascade SDT, Bathe, NH
Thursday-Sunday, 8/7-8/11: Grass Creek SDT, Kingston, Ontario
Saturday-Monday, 8/31-9/2: Highland SDT, Williamsville, VA