Perhaps the signers are really mourning the loss of a post-Constantinian culture in a society where Protestant privilege wanes and churches must give witness to Christ’s gospel, not depending on principalities and powers to assist them.
Flaming heretics and anathemas galore
The Baptist orthodoxy wars taught me this: When ideologues decide you are a heretic, they’ll raise the doctrinal ante until they prove it — if not to you, at least to themselves.
‘The Cross and the Lynching Tree’: A broken gospel
It was a killing field, and accounts of those brutal murders make for heart-rending but necessary reading.
An Apostolic Care Act
What if health care legislation becomes so draconian and human need so great that churches have to initiate or expand community clinics, not because Obamacare is repealed, but because Jesus requires it?
The Church, the pain and the opioid crisis
Substance abuse is a complex issue because pain is multilayered, taking on parallel and distinct configurations in every human being. Can persons enmeshed in pain and Percocet feel safe enough in our congregations to seek physical, mental and, yes, spiritual assistance?
‘Don’t shoot! You’re all getting A’s!’
What if campus carry is simply the most dangerous of an unceasing set of classroom distractions, existing alongside tweets, texts, Google, Wikipedia and Facebook, diversions that thwart both instruction and provocation, disengaging students from ideas that might form or re-form them?
Churches are struggling: Should government help?
Do numerical, financial and cultural declines compel churches to seek expanded assistance from the secular government? As culture-privilege deteriorates, does government-privilege become increasingly essential?
History, the Church and sexuality: The final exam
My “HIS 502 Intro to Christian History” class took their final examination this week: Three essay questions, choose 2, three hours. One of the questions was as follows: Jesus said: “At the resurrection, they will neither marry nor be given…
American religion post-Easter: The permanent transition continues
This Easter, the New York Times’ Sunday Review section was packed with op-ed columns related to American religion — more specifically American Christianity. Here’s a small summary. Nicholas Kristof interviewed former president and perpetual Baptist-Sunday-school-teacher Jimmy Carter (Carter even taught…