America has a gun problem, but gun control legislation isn’t enough; we need a 12-step program. Since the tragic shootings in Newtown CT, we have been buried in a welter of statistics. Support for gun control is rising, we are…
A house divided still
Stephen Spielberg’s “Lincoln” pulled in $34 million over the Thanksgiving weekend, running a distant but respectable third behind the new Twilight and James Bond movies. When I saw the film over the weekend, the audience applauded as the credits rolled….
Talking politics in church
When 4-year-old Abigail Evans burst into tears for no apparent reason, her mother asked what was making her so sad. “I’m tired of Bronco Bama and Mitt Romney,” Abigail wailed between sniffles. Mamma Evans didn’t switch off NPR, but she assured her daughter that…
Giving God a bad name?
By Alan Bean Republicans and Democrats are fighting about God. The GOP scored points by publicizing the fact that the blue team’s platform doesn’t mention the Almighty. Democrats responded by putting God back in their policy document and ensuring that…
CBF a candle in search of darkness
By Alan Bean I was a graduate student at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville when the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship was founded in 1991. I left Southern Baptist life to become an American Baptist minister in 1994, and last…
Messy narratives
By Alan Bean The Trayvon Martin case is following a predictable trajectory. Calls for the arrest of George Zimmerman centered on the self-appointed neighborhood watch captain’s unprovoked vigilante pursuit of an unarmed citizen. Now comes the inevitable backlash as the…
No one did more to kill Jim Crow than Fred Shuttlesworth
By Alan Bean Fred Shuttlesworth is dead at 89. He never thought he would survive the civil rights struggle in Birmingham. Far less protective of his personal safety than men like Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers, Shuttlesworth attributed his…
Jena, five years later
By Alan Bean Reed Walters, the prosecutor at the center of a national controversy five years ago over incidents in a small town Louisiana schoolyard, doesn’t think he did a very good job explaining his prosecution of what became known…
Why can’t Americans be honest about the Civil War?
By Alan Bean As we commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, a new Harris Interactive Poll suggests that 54 percent of Americans believe the South seceded over states rights, not slavery.That would have been news to the folks…