By Bill Leonard “On July 28, 1914, World War I began when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.” That’s how the “Today in History” column in the Winston-Salem Journal referenced the centennial of World War I. The “Great War” lasted from…
Apocalyptic sex: Lest we forget
By Bill Leonard “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; so they stitched fig-leaves together and made themselves loincloths” (Gen. 3:7). In the beginning: sex. These days we might remember that when so…
A sense of the heart
By Bill Leonard In his Treatise on Religious Affections (1746), Jonathan Edwards wrote: “We come necessarily to this conclusion, concerning that wherein spiritual understanding consists; viz. that it consists in a sense of the heart, of the supreme beauty and…
Flower fights
By Bill Leonard In his 18th-century journal entitled, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution, Anglican Parson Charles Woodmason offered this assessment of the people called Baptists: “They don’t all agree in one Tune. For one sings this…
Holy woman
By Bill Leonard She did not speak for five years. Raped by her mother’s boyfriend, “Mr. Freeman,” when she was 8 years old, Maya Angelou stopped speaking until she was 13, traumatized by sexual assault and her fear that Freeman’s…
A meditation on inequality
By Bill Leonard A “magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality.” That’s what Nobel laureate and economist Paul Krugman calls Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the runaway bestseller and culture commentary first published in France, now electrifying economic, academic and…
Ceremonial prayer
By Bill Leonard “Ceremonial prayer” — that’s what Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy called the rite that the high court approved by a 5-4 vote in the case of Town of Greece v. Galloway, a ruling that allowed the town…
The Clansman
By Bill Leonard “This is an institution of Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy, and Patriotism: embodying in its genius and principles all that is chivalric in conduct, noble in sentiment, generous in manhood, and patriotic in purpose.” With those words Thomas Dixon…
The War on Poverty: A young Baptist’s experience
By Bill Leonard In the year that Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, I worked for the War on Poverty in Dallas County, Texas. It was 1968, the summer after I graduated from Texas Wesleyan and took…