Reading the recently released Supreme Court verdict in the case of Trump v. United States, I couldn’t help thinking that before we put the Ten Commandments in “every classroom,” nationwide, we’d best post them in every room of the White…
Church, state and the ‘Christian agenda’
“With Louisiana Leading Way, More States Are Likely to Take Up Christian Agenda.” That’s how The New York Times began a June 22 story detailing that the governor of Louisiana “signed bill after bill this week on public education in…
Lying does count!
There’s an old story that goes something like this: At the end of the age, billions of souls from across eternity are gathered at the Great-White-Throne-Judgment awaiting divine adjudication. At some point, the multitudes at the rear hear tumultuous hoorahs…
Wine, women and gospel: A perilous inerrancy
In Primitive Baptists of the Wiregrass South, author John G. Crowley writes that for those Appalachian Baptists, “the use of fermented wine, usually made by the deacons” is standard in their celebration of the Lord’s Supper, a biblical mandate they…
‘O Freedom’
O Freedom, O Freedom Freedom over me And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord, And be free. I first heard that poignant spiritual (author unknown) in the 1960s,…
Finding the gospel amid a ‘churchgoing bust’
In a recent Atlantic essay titled “The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust,” columnist Derek Thompson writes that “more Americans today have ‘converted’ out of religion than have converted to all forms of Christianity, Judaism and Islam combined. No faith’s…
‘Broken Churches, Broken Nation?’ A crisis of our times
“The very worst omen of the times is the fact that the religious (people) of the country stand apart to so great an extent in this hour of trial. Most of the Churches have split on the very rock upon…
What keeps me awake at night: ‘Bystander’ is both a noun and a verb
“At this moment in American religious and political life, what question should we let disturb us and keep us up all night?” That’s the query Tripp Fuller put to Corey Walker and me at the end of a two-hour Homebrewed…
Would today’s Christian nationalists exile Roger Williams — again?
In October 1635, five years after arriving in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Puritan Separatist minister Roger Williams was brought before the colony’s General Court, charged with insisting that magistrates stay out of church affairs; that Native Americans were the real…