In his 2016 landmark book, America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America, Jim Wallis reveals: “The most controversial sentence I ever wrote was not about abortion, gay marriage, the wars in Vietnam or Iraq, elections, or…
Listen more, speak less, dispel anger with love
Our country is politically torn apart. This is the reality that greets us every day in the national media, regardless of which network, website or newspaper we follow. Our states are labeled by their Republican or Democratic governors, eliciting opinions…
What I’ve learned about agreeing to disagree in contentious times
As a teacher for most of my adult life, I knew not everyone would — or should — blindly agree with my perspective. For at least two decades, I chose to teach my seminary graduate courses around conference tables rather…
Donald Trump and the 10 Commandments
Recently, watching an old movie about a trial in a small American town, I noted the wooden panel displaying the Ten Commandments placed on the back wall of the courtroom. Visible, just for the moment when the protagonist walked across…
How a Muslim beggar taught me about dignity
Perhaps I had grown too accustomed to seeing people dig through the garbage containers at the edge of the street in my residential neighborhood in Semarang, Indonesia. Then, one day I prepared a sermon for the small English-language congregation I…
History will judge both John Lewis and Donald Trump
The death of John Lewis has once again brought into sharp focus the stark differences between the congressman and the president. The future congressman was born as one of 10 children of Alabama sharecroppers Eddie and Willie Mae Carter Lewis….
What a bad horror movie taught me about reopening schools
For more than a decade, I taught a seminary course in religion and film. Occasionally, students would elect to take the course, assuming we would be viewing and discussing faith-based, Christian-message movies. Looking at the syllabus on the first class…
Lessons learned on a journey of interfaith friendship
Interfaith friendship is my passion. How did a lifelong Christian — born and reared in the family of a Southern Baptist pastor, who holds three degrees from a Baptist university and seminary, and is an ordained Baptist minister and 25-year…
How do we effectively present Jesus to the world? Two contrasting approaches.
For one Baptist mission organization in the U.S., evangelism is the goal and method considered superior to all other mission strategies. For another, the primary way of presenting Jesus to the world is through a benevolent response to human need.