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…
What’s a Baptist to do on Maundy Thursday?
By Benjamin Cole One of the unfortunate realities about being Baptist is that you seldom understand or observe the Christian festival calendar. In fact, many who are reading this column will not know what a “festival calendar” is. For most…
What marriage is — and what it isn’t
By Benjamin Cole In late February, David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch co-authored a provocative op-ed in the New York Times, titled “A Reconciliation on Gay Marriage.” In the piece, Blankenhorn, the conservative president of the Institute for American Values, and…
Whither — or wither — conservatism?
By Benjamin Cole Last month, I joined more than 8,000 other conservatives from across the country for the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. Throughout its three-day program, disempowered and occasionally distraught conservatives plotted endlessly…
Of God and guns
By Benjamin Cole Count me among those Baptists who are about as likely to carry a leather-bound King James Bible as we are to carry a stainless-steel Colt Python .357. Etched with almost equal prominence in my memories of childhood…