The announcement of the death of Russian dissident Alexei A. Navalny on Feb. 16 sent me running to the iconic work, THE BLOODY THEATER OR MARTYRS MIRROR OF THE DEFENSELESS CHRISTIANS … COMPILED FROM VARIOUS AUTHENTIC CHRONICLES, MEMORIALS, AND TESTIMONIES,…
The gospel according to comeuppance
Sixty years ago this year, I experienced a profound sense of “Christian comeuppance,” at a student-oriented retreat sponsored by Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. It was my first semester at Texas Wesleyan College (now University), and the retreat…
Where have all the evangelical convictions gone?
Merriam-Webster Dictionary says it like this: A person of conviction means you seriously spend time considering whether what you are doing is right or wrong. People with weak convictions tend to wander into moral ambiguity and end up in a…
Identity, ideology and gospel 2024
They “drove them out.” That’s what the book of Acts says a certain religio-political contingent did to Paul and Barnabas in Antioch of Pisidia, a crossroads of Roman-controlled towns in first century Asia Minor. As the text tells it, they…
We are all ‘made of one blood,’ remember?
As Advent morphed into Christmas 2023, immigration, a poignant subplot of the Nativity stories, spilled literally and figuratively into the American public square. Immigrants by the thousands jam multiple border crossings in record numbers, creating untold humanitarian and logistical dilemmas…
A voice was heard in Ramah, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Uvalde …
These days the stark realities of American culture can overtake us anytime, anywhere. I learned that again at a recent lunch with Doug Bailey, Episcopal priest and former Wake Forest School of Divinity colleague. We’d not seen each other in…
Are our churches prepared for Christian autocracy?
A 1638 treatise titled A Discourse about Civil Government in a new Plantation whose design is Religion, written in response to the founding of New Haven, Conn., contained this definition of a properly Christianized government: Theocracy, or to make the…
November 22, then and now
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, spent the last night of his life in the iconic Texas Hotel in Fort Worth. On the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, he attended a Chamber of Commerce breakfast, then mounted…
Sometimes reforming: Martin Luther, the church and the rest of us
In short, I will preach it, teach it, write it, but I will constrain no one by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences … but never with force. I simply…