WASHINGTON (ABP) — A Baptist historian and his wife have given a Baptist religious-liberty group a large gift to establish a lectureship on church-state issues.
The Washington-based Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty announced the $100,000 gift from Walter and Kay Shurden of Macon, Ga., Oct. 18. The gift will endow the Walter B. and Kay W. Shurden Lectures on Religious Liberty and Separation of Church and State.
According to BJC officials, the lectures will be given at Mercer University every three years and at other Baptist colleges or seminaries in the intervening years.
Walter Shurden directs Mercer's Center for Baptist Studies. Kay Shurden served as a professor of marriage and family therapy in the medical school for 17 years and now is a counselor in private practice.
The first lectureship is planned for 2006 or 2007 at the Georgia school.
According to a statement released by the Baptist Joint Committee, the Shurdens endowed the lectureship out of a concern for the future of church-state separation and religious freedom.
“We believe that the threat to religious liberty and the separation of church and state is epidemic in America today,” the couple said. “This threat comes from the courthouse, the White House and the church house.
“No potatoes are hotter in public discourse than issues of church and state: [school] vouchers, prayer in public schools, faith-based charities and the posting of the Ten Commandments [on government property],” the statement continued. “The BJC is in the kitchen where those potatoes are being baked. We, therefore, believe that the BJC is one of the most crucial religious organizations in this republic.”
Brent Walker, BJC's executive director, called the Shurdens “champions of religious liberty” for the gift and said it would create “an annual forum for cutting-edge scholarship and healthy dialogue on church-state separation.”
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