By Bill Leonard In his 1736 treatise, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, Jonathan Edwards described conversion as “a great and glorious work of God’s power, at once changing the heart of infusing life into the dead…
Debtors!
By Bill Leonard We recently purchased a new car, the first we’ve bought since 2005. “Sticker shock” is an understatement in 2014. That’s why St. Paul caught my attention with his advice to the Roman Christians: “Leave no debt outstanding,…
If they are black
By Bill Leonard Our pastor, the Reverend Dr. Darryl Aaron, is black. He and his family live about two blocks from our family, in a neighborhood that is predominately white. When an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown was shot…
Protecting Christians and Yazidis: Elusive religious freedom
By Bill Leonard When the storm troopers of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) took Mosul, they marked the homes of Christians with a red Arabic “N” for “Nazarene,” targeting those families for “extermination or expropriation.” That’s what…
Wars and rumors of … religion
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…