By Bill Leonard Sometimes I think I’d love a good mystical vision, when God told me exactly what is right and wrong; how to believe and behave. Surely then I could sort out all the theological and ethical dilemmas of…
Among the not-yet-housed
By Bill Leonard Each January for several years, I’ve joined a group of theology students for a Wednesday visit to the Haywood Street Congregation in Asheville, N.C. I can’t help but write about it, since the experience is always “transforming,”…
Contending with texts
By Bill Leonard In a 2006 New Yorker story on writer Gertrude Stein, Janet Malcom wrote: “The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties. Almost everything we know we know incompletely at best. And almost nothing we are…
Reckless rhetoric
By Bill Leonard In a diatribe entitled, The Jews and their Lies (1543), Protestant Reformer Martin Luther offered German Christians his shocking recommendations for dealing with what he called that “miserable and accursed people.” The list was long and violent,…
Apologies
By Bill Leonard In an essay posted on Christianhistory.net on July 1, 2007, Scott Manetsch writes: “Before dawn on the morning of August 24, 1572, church bells tolled in the Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois quarter of Paris. Just moments earlier, soldiers under…
Gold, frankincense and espresso
By Bill Leonard When the church’s Christmas witness wanes, let’s blame Starbucks. When our Advent hope falters, let’s fault the “war on Christmas.” When the “Gospel of Wealth” (Andrew Carnegie, 1889) fails to undergird our Bethlehem-borne faith, let’s whine about…
Gawking is not seeing
By Bill Leonard In scene one of Bertolt Brecht’s play Galileo, a boy named Andrea enters the scientist’s room carrying “a big astronomical model” showing earth at the center of the galaxy, an idea attributed to the ancient philosopher Ptolemy….
Hard sayings, unexpected grace
By Bill Leonard Fifty years ago my parents got divorced after almost 30 years of marriage. A decade or so later, my dad remarried, this time to a “widow woman,” as Southerners say, whom he’d known since childhood. They remained…
‘He’s in the classroom’
By Bill Leonard “He’s in the classroom.” That’s what the 911 caller said to the operator in Roseburg, Ore., around 10:30 a.m. on Oct. 1, 2015. The caller alerted authorities to the brutal presence of a shooter at the Umpqua…
Making more ‘nones’ (ASAP)
“If you vote for Al Smith, [the Roman Catholic presidential candidate] you’re voting against Christ and you’ll all be damned.” (Billy Sunday, 1928) The election of a Catholic president would mean the end of religious freedom in America.” (W. A….
The Scopes Trial, then and now
By Bill Leonard “The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists.” — W.J….
Jimmy Carter: Faith as verb
By Bill Leonard Jimmy Carter was president of the United States. Jimmy Carter has built Habitat for Humanity dwellings for 33 years. Jimmy Carter led the Carter Center in eradicating much of the Guinea worm plague in West Africa. Jimmy…