There’s an old Irish drinking song that was repopularized in the 1960s about a young soldier who ran off to South Asia to join the British armies fighting the Kandian War in modern day Sri Lanka. The lyrics capture the…
Here’s what’s wrong with the SBC’s trustee system
Every problem facing the Southern Baptist Convention, every new crisis and scandal and reported financial irregularity, can be reduced to a single and seemingly insoluble root cause: a bloated trustee system that is outdated, inefficient, unmanageable and hopelessly beset by…
A cautionary tale of celebrity pastors and family empires
Late last month, Liberty University and its former president, Jerry Falwell Jr., settled for an undisclosed amount to end a multi-year, sprawling set of multi-million dollar lawsuits brought by Falwell against the Lynchburg, Va.-based school. For the world’s “largest evangelical university,” the…
Pressler’s death brings overwhelming sadness
The formal death notice of Herman Paul Pressler III, a former Texas state appellate judge and the chief strategist behind a now 45-year rightward shift in the 14 million-member Southern Baptist Convention, hit me like a brick. For months, I…
Iorg gets a unanimous vote, and he’ll need that to do what must be done
By a unanimous vote of the 60 trustees attending today’s called meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, longtime Gateway Seminary president and one-time Home Mission Board-appointed church planter Jeff Preston Iorg was elected chief executive officer of the Nashville-based administrative arm of the SBC. Today’s meeting marked…
On becoming an ordinary Christian
By Benjamin Cole When you grow up in Grayson County, Texas, there are two events on your annual calendar that demand your attention. The first is the annual “Battle of the Ax” wherein the Sherman Bearcats take on the Denison…
Supreme remorse
By Benjamin Cole The elevation of David Hackett Souter to serve as the 105th justice of the United States Supreme Court was, to borrow a phrase from Eliot, the whimper that ended the world for conservatives. Confirmed by a 90-9…
Unholy smoke
By Benjamin Cole Can anything good come out of Mexico? That’s the central question in the minds of millions of Americans who have favored protectionism over of free trade, gun-toting Minutemen at the border instead of substantive immigration reform and…
Book review: Wade Burleson’s Hardball Religion
By Benjamin Cole Hardball Religion: Feeling the Fury of Fundamentalism, by Wade Burleson. Paperback/288 pages. Published by Smyth & Helwys. Hardball Religion is the personal story of Oklahoma pastor Wade Burleson and the two tumultuous years he served as…