By Bill Leonard Some things never change, even as the times “get out of hand.” In the 1640s, Puritans Roger Williams and John Cotton engaged in a “tractarian debate,” fit for tomorrow’s “Morning Joe,” over politics, culture and of course…
Dunn deals
By Bill Leonard At a Baptist gathering several years ago I was approached by an intense, well-meaning, recent seminary graduate (aren’t they all intense and well-meaning?) who rushed up and declared: “I’ve just seen Dr. James Dunn and he looked…
The irony of it all
By Bill Leonard Like most everyone in the United States, I find myself struggling to sort out the events of the last few weeks — terrible tragedy in the massacre of nine African-American Methodists, “thunderbolt” Supreme Court decisions (President Obama’s…
Sunday’s coming: Freedom from Racism
He shot them at prayer meeting. On June 17, in the year of our Lord 2015, a 21-year-old white supremacist millennial named Dylann Roof shot nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in cold blood…
Watershed moments
By Bill Leonard On June 15, 1215, eight hundred years ago, on Runnymede field between Windsor and the River Thames, King John of England placed his seal on a parchment document soon known as Magna Carta, the Great Charter. In…
Learning to pray — again
By Bill Leonard “Abba Macarius was asked, ‘How should one pray?’ The old man said, ‘There is no need at all to make long discourses; it is enough to stretch out one’s hands and say, ‘Lord, as you will, and…
Callings
By Bill Leonard “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share…
Sifting the conscience
By Bill Leonard “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves…
Surrogates of the gospel
By Bill Leonard Gardner C. Taylor died on Easter Sunday 2015. Those who knew him weren’t surprised that as one friend said, “he held on till Easter.” Taylor, a spiritual icon inside and beyond the African-American community, was civil rights…