On Tuesday, Sept.18, 2001, poet/prophet/writer Maya Angelou, professor of humanities at Wake Forest University, spoke to students and faculty at the Wake Forest School of Divinity. We had scheduled her visit months before, never knowing that it would occur exactly…
‘The meanness of this moment’ in America (and its churches)
Recently, a friend asked, “Has American culture gone completely mad?” Today, I’d add to that troubling question this troubled response: “It’s not just that American culture has gone mad, it’s also gone mean. Meanness, to quote a Bette Midler song,…
Celebrating a new generation of ministers overtaken by ‘the call’
In the 50th year of my ordination to “the gospel ministry,” I can’t recall the exact time when I first experienced “the call” from God to do that. Given that I was Texas Baptist born and bred, I may have…
COVID vaccinations, firearms and martyrs: Another American epidemic
Semen est sanguis Christianorum. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Those words, attributed to the third century theologian Tertullian, appear in an Apologeticum written to defend against the many charges — cannibalism, incest, atheism, sedition,…
Three reasons 2021 looks like 1961 in voter suppression
John Lewis spent his 21st birthday in a Nashville jail, Feb. 21, 1961. Lewis was arrested with 25 others after leading a public demonstration to gain admission to a whites-only movie theater. Several protesters, Lewis included, were students at American…
The Jesus story is not a conspiracy theory, honest!
In a June 30, 2021, essay in The Atlantic, “The Senator Who Decided to Tell the Truth,” reporter Tim Alberta describes the work of Ed McBroom, a Michigan state senator who “spent eight months searching for evidence of election fraud,…
Samuel Hill was prophetic in 1966 when he predicted Southern churches in crisis
In his monumental work, Southern Churches in Crisis, published in 1966, Samuel S. Hill Jr, then chair of the religion department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, wrote: The cultural-social complex in which revivalism-fundamentalism came to birth and…
Critical Race Theory, voter suppression and historical negation: The irony of it all
In his Key into the Language of America (1643), the earliest Native American/English grammar, Roger Williams, that colonial disquieter of the religio-political peace, described his experiences with the Narragansets and other Northeastern native tribes: They were hospitable to everybody, whomsoever…
Re-forming a post-COVID church in a post-churchly nation
“You’ve come far, pilgrim,” actor Will Geer’s character, Bear Claw Chris Lapp, says to the younger mountain man who occupies the other side of their shared campfire. “Feels like far,” Jeremiah Johnson replies, the firelight dancing off Robert Redford’s tired…