Today on Kresta - March 7, 2011

Talking about the "things that matter most" on March 7

4:00 – While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age during the Civil Rights Movement
The nation's collective memory of the civil rights movement depends largely on journalists and biographers who witnessed the snarling dogs and brutal racist tactics used to enforce and defend segregation in the South. In a more personal account, Carolyn McKinstry, a survivor of the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., offers the rare perspective of both a child and an eyewitness to some of the most jarring aspects of blacks' fight for civil rights. Her tale of surviving the bombing, which killed four of her friends on September 15, 1963, vividly describes the force of water from fire hoses that left a hole in her sweater; the ominous call moments before the bomb exploded; and the clouds that formed in her mental sky when she realized that the childhood innocence her parents had relied on to shield her from racism was gone. She joins us to tell her story.

4:40 – Al on 40 Days for Life Speech
This evening Al will be speaking at the kick-off event for the Ann Arbor, MI 40 Days for Life. 40 Days for Life The mission of the campaign is to bring together the body of Christ in a spirit of unity during a focused 40 day campaign of prayer, fasting, and peaceful activism, with the purpose of repentance, to seek God’s favor to turn hearts and minds from a culture of death to a culture of life, thus bringing an end to abortion in America. Al shares some of what he will be speaking on tonight.

5:00 – Anniversary of the Death of St. Thomas Aquinas
Saint Thomas Aquinas, was an Italian priest and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of the Thomistic school of philosophy and theology. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy was conceived as a reaction against, or as an agreement with, his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law and political theory. One of the 33 Doctors of the Church, he is considered by many to be the Church's greatest theologian and philosopher. On this, the anniversary of his death, we discuss his life and contributions with Aquinas scholar, Dr. Roger Nutt of Ave Maria University

5:40 – Militants kill Christian minister in Pakistan
Militants gunned down the only Christian in Pakistan's government outside his widowed mother's home last week, the second assassination in two months of a high-profile opponent of laws that impose the death penalty for insulting Islam. Shahbaz Bhatti was aware of the danger he faced, saying in a videotaped message that he had received death threats from al-Qaida and the Taliban. In it, the 42-year-old Roman Catholic said he was "ready to die" for the country's often persecuted Christian and other non-Muslim minorities. Leonard Leo of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom joins us.