Charleston Murders a Call for Prayer Power

I learned about the killings in Charleston Thursday. I could not believe it was possible. I know and love South Carolina and spend much of the year in Greenville. I have never seen more harmonious race relations anywhere. But it was true. A deranged 21 year old with a brutal paranoia and a brutal gun had killed nine people just as they sat and prayed.

So, it’s a story about kids and guns, about drugs, about hate. It’s just a horrible story. When I got back to my apartment at the Watergate, along with my friend Bob, I told our night manager, Mrs. Colbert, a black woman, how humiliated and ashamed I was about the killings. “They were just praising God,” she said. “How could he have shot them?” “We just have to stay prayed up,” Mrs. Colbert said, so writes Ben Stein in The American Spectator.

Ben Stein is a writer, actor, and lawyer, who served as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration as the Watergate scandal unfolded. He began his unlikely road to stardom when director John Hughes cast him as the numbingly dull economics teacher in the urban comedy, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Read more reports from Ben Stein — Click Here Now.