“They’ll tell anything on you down in town.” So the serpent-handling woman says as she sits on her Appalachian front porch, killing flies and defending her church’s approach to the sixteenth chapter of Mark’s Gospel. Whether in cheap novels, academic…
Consciences: distressed and dissenting
In Dissent in American Religion, the great historian Edwin Scott Gaustad wrote, “Should a society actually succeed … in suffocating all contrary opinion, then its own vital juices no longer flow and the shadow of death begins to fall across…
The importance of being carnal
The gospels are full of stories in which the “incarnate Christ” opens the interior life of human beings by giving attention to their carnal presence, their broken, hungry, naked, hurting bodies.
Pursuing reverence in a society that doesn’t recognize it
In a recent New York Times column, David Brooks offered an assessment of one of the presidential candidates, noting, “He appears to have no ability to experience reverence which is the foundation of any capacity to admire or serve anything…
Christian, Baptist, Evangelical — two out of three ain’t bad
Recently, someone who presents himself as “religiously unaffiliated” asked: “Aren’t you evangelicals really just the Republican Party at prayer?” We are good friends, so I responded: “Who’s ‘you evangelicals,’ you none?” For those readers who don’t have cable TV or…
No more Samaritanizing
When we Samaritanize others we imply that they are fatally flawed by identities like their race or religion, their ethnicity or their uniforms, and thus are unworthy of care, understanding or perhaps even life itself.
Elie Wiesel: cutting and keeping
Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, Nobel laureate, Andrew Mellow Professor of Humanities at Boston University, died July 2 at age 87. Had the Nazis had their way, he would never have survived past age 16, when the Allied troops liberated Buchenwald…
Being lost, being found
We were out visiting for the church, Brother Tommy and I, two Baptists prepared to “win the lost for Christ,” on a steamy summer Sunday afternoon in Fort Worth. Brother Tommy was church deacon and I was a high school…
Louisville and Orlando, 2016
On Nov. 17, 1999, I met Muhammad Ali. It was at the Cathedral of the Assumption on 5th Street in Louisville, Ky., in a Cathedral Heritage Series of ecumenical gatherings. I was the preacher for an interfaith Thanksgiving service, and…