By Bill Leonard “You know we can hear you, right?” That’s what Daily Show “reporter” Aasif Mandvi recently asked Don Yelton in response to the Buncombe County Republican’s assessment of voter ID regulations imposed this year by the North Carolina…
Billy Graham and the ‘old, old story’
By Bill Leonard “Billy Graham is the most famous evangelist in the world and his power of persuasion has softened the skeptics who used to call him the hot-gospeller from the Bible Belt.” That’s how legendary (cigarette-puffing) CBS newsman Edward…
Can I get a witness — again?
By Bill Leonard This month Mercer University Press will release Can I Get a Witness?: Essays, Sermons and Reflections, a collection of materials that I have written during the last few years. Most are previously unpublished, except for a few…
Prison songs
By Bill Leonard In God’s Long Summer, Charles Marsh describes the summer of 1963 when Fannie Lou Hamer and other representatives of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were arrested in Winona, Miss., for attempting to be served at a “whites…
This IS America
By Bill Leonard In an interview after the Sept. 16 mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, Dr. Janis Orlowski, senior clinician at the hospital where most victims were treated, declared: “I would like not to be an expert on…
Memories of a mountain preacher
By Bill Leonard When he preached his last sermon on July 7, 2013, 80-year-old Rev. Harold McKinnish urged the congregation to “get saved,” or reclaim their Christian faith, then “pass it on.” Steadying himself on the pulpit of the Holly…
Memories of a mountain preacher
By Bill Leonard When he preached his last sermon on July 7, 2013, 80-year-old Rev. Harold McKinnish urged the congregation to “get saved,” or reclaim their Christian faith, then “pass it on.” Steadying himself on the pulpit of the Holly…
Things that make for freedom
By Bill Leonard “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.” We recall the words of that spiritual a half-century after Martin Luther King, Jr. sounded them across the Lincoln Memorial, a hallmark of the…
Things that make for freedom
By Bill Leonard “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.” We recall the words of that spiritual a half-century after Martin Luther King Jr. sounded them across the Lincoln Memorial, a hallmark of the…
Enlightened pagans
By Bill Leonard “We have been taught that Christ is First-begotten of God and . . . that He is the Word (Logos) of whom all humanity partakes. Those who lived by reason are Christians, even though they have been…
On the margins
By Bill Leonard “No amount of pacification will be able to last, nor will harmony and happiness be attained in a society that ignores, pushes to the margins or excludes part of itself.” That’s what Pope Francis said July 25…
New strides toward freedom
By Bill Leonard With the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case and the storm of Internet racism it unleashed, I can’t get Sojourner Truth out of my head. Freed in 1827, the ex-slave woman spent her life demanding an end…