The New York Times takes a positive look at the benefits of prayer in public schools.

"On the first day of the new school year, the schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, stood in an elementary school classroom in Queens beaming at a hushed room full of fourth-grade children sitting cross-legged on the floor. 'Please let your eyes close,' said a small boy named Davinder, from his spot on the linoleum. Davinder gently struck a shallow bronze bowl. Gong! 'Take three mindful breaths,' he said, and the room fell silent.... "

In schools in New York City and in pockets around the country, the use of inward-looking practices like mindfulness and meditation is starting to grow. Though evidence is thin on how well they might work in the classroom, proponents say they can help students focus and cope with stress....

“It used to be that you wouldn’t say ‘meditation’ in polite company,” said Bob Roth, executive director of the David Lynch Foundation, a charitable foundation founded by the director of “Blue Velvet,” that promotes and teaches transcendental meditation to adults and children, including those at Brooklyn Urban Garden. “Now we’re working with all the large banks, we’re working with hedge funds, we’re working with media companies. People are having us come in as part of their wellness programs, and that wasn’t the case even two years ago.”

It's the religion corporations love! Remove the pesky "God" character, and you're good to go.

“We’re putting it in a lot of our schools,” Ms. Fariña said about mindfulness, on the first day of school, “because kids are under a lot of stress.”...

Last year, [Public School 212 in Jackson Heights, Queens] converted a large closet in a subbasement into a room devoted to mindfulness, complete with dim illumination and a string of rainbow Christmas-tree lights, allowing users to switch off the harsh fluorescent light overhead.

Oh! We're still saying "Christmas"? I guess it's good for balance when the religion you're practicing in public school is not Christian.

IN THE COMMENTS: About that Bob Roth quote — "It used to be that you wouldn’t say ‘meditation’ in polite company" — Terry says: "When was that? Just another bit of liberal fantasy." And I say: "After the Beatles had their bout with the Maharishi, being into TM marked you as a bit of a flake." That's why we all got the joke in "Annie Hall" in 1977, when Jeff Goldblum (unknown at the time) made that phone call:

"In Paul Theroux’s new book, 'Deep South,' the superficial stereotypes pile up at once."

"In the first scene, it’s a 'hot Sunday morning' in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and there’s mention of snake-handling and talking in tongues, poverty, holy-roller churches, a black barbershop, gun shows, college football, the requisite Faulkner quote ('The past is not dead . . . ') and even a sassy black lady ('You lost, baby?'). So far, I haven’t left the first page."

Jack Hitt hits the rueful Theroux.

That's all very interesting, but I'm just going to say a couple things about that Faulkner quote, which, Hitt slightly misses, putting "not" where the dramatic and time-related word "never" belongs: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

This line is often paraphrased, as it was by then-Senator Barack Obama in his speech "A More Perfect Union."  In 2012, Faulkner Literary Rights LLC filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Sony Pictures Classics over a scene in the film Midnight in Paris, in which a time-traveling character says, "The past is not dead! Actually, it's not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party." In 2013, the judge dismissed Faulkner Literary Rights LLC's claim, ruling that the use of the quote in the film was de minimis and constituted "fair use." 

Obama's paraphrase was: "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past."