Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis is at it again with new federal request

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Associated Press

Kim Davis, the clerk of Rowan County, has asked a federal appeals court to scrap a series of rulings issued by the district judge who sent her to jail for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In a filing late Monday with the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Ms. Davis’s lawyers called the order by Judge David L. Bunning that Ms. Davis license same-sex marriages a “rush to judgment” that trampled her religious liberty. [link]

Mormons say duty to uphold the law on gay marriage trumps faith

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Jack Healy

COLORADO---Despite its deep opposition to same-sex marriage, the Mormon Church is setting itself apart from religious conservatives who rallied behind a Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis, who cited her religious beliefs as justification for refusing to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In a speech this week about the boundaries between church and state, Dallin Oaks, a high-ranking apostle in the church, said that public officials like Ms. Davis, the clerk in Rowan County, Ky., had a duty to follow the law, despite their religious convictions. [link]

Kim Davis sparks the religious freedom of political cartoonists

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS

Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis cries out after being released from the Carter County Detention Center, Tuesday, September 8, 2015, in Grayson, Kentucky (The Charlotte Observer)

Kim Davis has become the target of a good number of political cartoonists, and now she's also drawn the attention of the anti-gay Westboro Church. However, Westboro is not siding with Kim Davis, the Kentucky Clerk who made national headlines for denying same-sex marriages licenses. Instead, they've condemned her as an "adulterer" (Jeremiah 3:20), according to NBC News for "three divorces."

Museum director carefully curates a home in a former Methodist church

STLYE BLUE PRINT 
By Heidi Potter

A first glance into the great room

KENTUCKY---Walk down East Main Street in Louisville and you will notice a beautiful church on the corner of Main and Shelby streets. It’s no longer a working church and is currently being used for commercial and residential space following a $3 million renovation. Three apartments and an event space can be found inside the beautiful Gothic Marcus Lindsey United Methodist Church at 801 Main St. It is this space that Speed Art Museum Director Ghislain d’Humieres decided to call home when he moved here almost two years ago. [link]

Watch Christians build the new Noah's Ark in Kentucky for $10 per person

WLWT | Channel 5

The Ark, measuring in at more than 500 feet, is the longest timber frame structure in the world, according to developers.

KENTUCKY---The Christian ministry building an attraction based on the huge ark that was built in the biblical story of Noah is inviting the public to the construction site in Northern Kentucky. Answers in Genesis says tourists can come and watch the work going on at the site in Grant County. Workers have completed the foundation and wood for the giant ark is beginning to arrive at the site. A viewing spot has been set up in the area. Answers in Genesis is charging $20 per vehicle or $10 for members of its nearby Creation Museum in Petersburg. [link]

Kentucky Elementary Turned Arts Magnet in High Demand

THE COURIER-JOURNAL
By Elizabeth Kramer

KENTUCKY---Just seven years ago, the Jefferson County Board of Education voted to create new magnet programs at more than 20 elementary schools. For Lincoln Elementary, the plan was to become Kentucky’s only public elementary arts magnet. That move set Lincoln on a path that is now a far cry from when it was under threat of closure in 2003. Then-Superintendent Stephen Daeschner had proposed closing the school, which faced declining enrollment and where nearly 90 percent of the 265 students qualified for free or reduced lunches. Half of its 265 students lived in the Clarksdale housing complex that was razed in 2004 to make way for mixed-income homes. Today, Lincoln Elementary has 546 students, with about 58 percent receiving free or reduced lunches. It is home to a diverse mix of students — 39 percent white, 43 percent African American and 12 percent Hispanic, with 6 percent identified as other ethnicities. [link]

U.S. Supreme Court schedules oral arguments for Kentucky's same-sex marriage case

THE LEXINGTON HERALD

By John Cheves

KENTUCKY--- The U.S. Supreme Court has set April 28 as the date for oral arguments in historic cases claiming a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, with Kentucky playing a key role. The other suits involve challenges to gay marriage bans in Tennessee, Ohio and Michigan. The court's decision is expected this summer. [link]

Noah's Ark Park Officials Plan to Sue Kentucky

USA TODAY
By Chris Kenning and Tom Loftus, The Courier-Journal

KENTUCKY---The group seeking to build a Noah's Ark theme park in Kentucky said Tuesday it will file a federal discrimination lawsuit against the state for rejecting its application for tax incentives to help finance the park. Tourism officials in December denied tax incentives worth roughly $18 million for the Ark Encounter — a biblical theme park to include a 510-foot-long wooden ship — over concerns that it had evolved from a tourist attraction to an effort to advance a religion and that developers planned to discriminate in hiring based on religion.[link]

A Monk’s Interests Captured on Camera

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Eve M. Kahn

Thomas Merton is the subject of a centennial exhibition coming to Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library next month. Credit Estate of John Howard Griffin

KENTUCKY---A forgotten camera said to have been used by the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton will appear in public for the first time on Feb. 2 in a Merton centennial exhibition at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Merton, who died in 1968, at 53, had taken vows at a Kentucky monastery that decreed he could own few possessions. With borrowed camera equipment, he took about 1,800 photos, creating meditative abstract compositions out of rocks, leaves, wagon wheels and barn siding. [link]

It's High Noon for the U.S. Supreme Court on Gay Marriage

USA TODAY
By Richard Wolf

WASHINGTON, DC---Gay and lesbian couples from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico are making persuasive cases that without the high court's intervention, marriage laws will change at state borders for years to come, and what's legal for now in 36 states could remain illegal in up to 14 others. [link]

Proponents of Kentucky's Noah's Ark Project Launch Billboard Campaign

THE ALPHA OMEGA ARTS 
By TAHLIB

Proponents of the Ark Encounter hope their billboards will direct people to their website.

KENTUCKY---This month, Creationists outside of Cincinnati released new billboards in response to the news reports rejecting tax support for the Ark Encounter project under construction in northern Kentucky. The new billboards state, “To all our intolerant liberal friends: Thank God You Can’t Sink This Ship.” The billboards are similar to previous campaigns. Website: www.arkencounter.com.

Rabbi's Going the Distance to Lead the Faithful Across America

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Emily Jane Fox

Rabbi Raysh Weiss will be leading services on Cape Cod during the High Holy Days.

Rabbi Rami Schwartzer, a Connecticut-born fourth-year rabbinical student at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, won’t be spending the High Holy Days as he usually does. Instead, he has traveled nearly 1,600 miles to spend the Jewish New Year, which began Wednesday evening, in Cypress, Tex., leading services for a bunch of strangers with a borrowed Torah in a rented clubhouse. Cypress is among the many communities throughout the country with no full-time rabbi of their own. About 40 percent of the 350 Jewish congregations in the 11 Southern states (plus Oklahoma and Kentucky) do not have a full-time rabbi on staff, according to a 2011 study by the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, a nonprofit organization based in Jackson, Miss. [link]

Sleeping Overnight Inside the Art Museum

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Christian Ajudua

SLEEP IN ART Clockwise from top left: "Asleep in the Cyclone" at the 21c Museum Hotel; Antony Gormley's suite at the Beaumont; "A House for Essex"; "Al's Grand Hotel" at Frieze New York.Credit Clockwise from top left: Ryan Kurtz/Courtesy of 21c Museum Hotel; Stephen White, London; Dave King/Channel 4 Television; "Al's Grand Hotel" (1971) with public fiction (2014)/Photography by Marco Scozzaro/Courtesy of Frieze.

Hotels dotted with paintings and prints are hardly rare, but taking a cue from “Al’s Grand Hotel” — Allen Ruppersberg’s bookable, seven-room installation, which popped up on Sunset Boulevard for six weeks in 1971 and was restaged at this year’s Frieze New York — more and more properties are blurring the lines between artwork and accommodation. The 21c Museum Hotel in Louisville, Ky., recently commissioned Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe to create “Asleep in the Cyclone,” an immersive “architectural collage” that doubles as a 500-square-foot guest room. [link]

Excavation is Under Way in Kentucky to Build Noah's Ark Encounter

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS NEWS
By TAHLIB

KENTUCKY---Huge earth-moving machines were delivered to the Ark Encounter site, and the excavation for the life-size Noah’s Ark project has begun. The first wave of equipment made its way up I-75 from Lexington, Kentucky and arrived at the Ark’s Williamstown site on August 7, 2014. Now that the funding is in place for the Ark Encounter construction to begin, our construction management team, The Troyer Group, will begin the bidding process for the different facets of the project. Considerable funding has been raised through bonds, donations, and memberships towards the $73 million first phase of the Ark Encounter. The park’s centerpiece will be a 510-foot-long Noah’s Ark off busy I-75 at exit 154. It is anticipated that the Ark will open in the summer of 2016 with up to two million vistors in the first year.

Movie Review: With the End of Days Near, a Sect Is Torn

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Jeanette Catsoulis

Chris Nelson, as a prophet's hand-picked successor to a small religious sect. Credit Cinema Purgatorio

HOLLYWOOD---“As It Is in Heaven” opens quietly yet with unmistakable joy as the camera tracks a white-robed young woman through gracious rooms and lush gardens to the banks of a sparkling river. Joining the other members of her small religious sect, she watches their prophet (John Lina) baptize a new recruit (Chris Nelson) and give him the name David. Shot in just 17 days with the help of students and equipment at Asbury University, a Christian school in Kentucky, this low-budget debut by Joshua Overbay cooks a surprising amount of tension from the barest minimum of ingredients. Examining the rewards and consequences of faith with empathy and without judgment, Mr. Overbay (who wrote the story with his wife, Ginny Lee Overbay) maintains tight control of the sect’s darkening mood and waning strength. [link]

Federal judge in Kentucky Strikes Down Marriage Ban for #23 in 1 Year

FREEDOM TO MARRY
By Adam Polaski

KENTUCKY---Today, July 1, 2014, U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II ruled in favor of the freedom to marry, striking down a constitutional amendment in the state that restricts marriage to different-sex couples. The Kentucky cases were filed last summer (with the intervening couples granted permission in February) by private lawyers from Clay Daniel Walton & Adams and Fauver Law Office in Louisville, KY. Bourke v. Beshear will be considered by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit this summer, with oral arguments scheduled for August 6, 2014, the same day that oral arguments will be heard in marriage cases from Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. For more information about the 6th Circuit marriage cases, click here. [link]

Bill Nye "Creation Debate" Spurs Noah's Ark Park Funding

THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER
By Jim Hannah

An illustration of Noah's Ark coming to rest on the mountains of Ararat at the Ark Encounter.

KENTUCKY---The apologetics ministry behind the Creation Museum announced Thursday that it has raised enough money to begin construction of its long-delayed and controversial Noah’s Ark-themed amusement park in Northern Kentucky. [Ken] Ham said phase one would cost at estimated $73 million during the tightly scripted presentation that featured a miniature model of the park, to be named the Ark Encounter. Ham said his debate with Bill Nye over creationism versus evolution, watched by more than 7 million people online, helped raise money for the project. Ham blamed delays in getting the funding in place on non-believers and misinformation disseminated by the media and atheist blogs. [link]

Happy Valentine's Day: Sad Week For Same-Sex Marriage Foes

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By TAHLIB

Buddhist Monk "Kukai" by Ryan Grant Long. Courtesy of Jesus In Love Blog

INDIANA---Buddhists, Christians, Jews and other people of faith are celebrating marriage this week because of major victories against the opponents of same-sex marriage. Residents in Indiana, Virginia and Kentucky are all celebrating after major legislative or judicial victories leading to the national Freedom to Marry. Howe Chin, a gay Buddhist activist in Indiana credited the mobilization of people of faith who "deployed special rituals of the body, speech, and mind, including the use of symbolic gestures, mystical prayers, and spiritually centered concentration" reminiscent of the gay monk Kukai (774–835). The monk, also known as Kōbō-Daishi, founded Shingon Buddhism in Japan and credited with everything from inventing the kana alphabet to introducing homosexuality to Japan. [See IndyStar]

270 Noah Legends, $24 Million Ark, And a Creationism Debate Floods The News

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By TAHLIB

KENTUCKY--A campaign to build a $24 million replica of Noah's Ark near the Ohio River, across from Cincinnati has stalled, and so the project's founder Ken Ham @aigkenham hosted a Media Event this week with Bill Nye the @TheScienceGuy to debate "Creationism." Originally scheduled to open in 2014, the "Ark Encounter" campaign added just $2 million since last February to reach $14.39 million (42% short of goal). The campaign needs a major push to close the gap, so this past week's debate with Bill Nye; coming on the heels of the release of a bestselling new book; and an upcoming Hollywood film "Noah" should all help. [Watch Debate]

Philip Campbell's "Burning Boats" Sailing Into the Unknown Ends on January 31

ARTS LOUISVILLE
By Keith Waits

One of "100 Burning Boats" at the Garner Narrative gallery in Louisville (Ends Jan. 31)

KENTUCKY---At a glance Philip Campbell’s “100 Burning Boats” might strike one as rather ordinary objects: design lacking detail and craft lacking flourish. But the longer you examine the armada of hand-carved vessels making their way across a simple wooden flow of river, the more the deceptively simple, elemental shapes suggest deeper connotations. As...the burning vessels sail away from us into the unknown, the fire devouring the earthly remains now that they have no place among the living. Those left behind on the river bank continue to seek wisdom and understanding, but the souls of the departed have moved beyond such concerns, or so we imagine. [link]