By ABPnews/Herald Staff
A Baptist ethicist who has written widely on Christianity and culture will return to the ranks of columnists for ABPnews/Herald Feb. 4, in a collaboration designed to stimulate more interactive engagement between readers and opinion writers.
David P. Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University and director of the school’s Center for Theology and Public Life, will write once a week as senior columnist for faith, politics and culture.
“I plan to talk about faith and culture, broadly considered, which includes church life, ethical concerns, public policy and cultural developments and explore where God is in all that,” said Gushee, who also teaches at Mercer’s McAfee School of Theology and previously wrote for ABP. “I’m also hoping to be able to interact with readers through Twitter and posted comments. I want to dialogue with people and want to be a major destination point for conversation.”
Typically his columns will post on Tuesdays but may appear on other days of the week as events warrant it.
“This is a terrific opportunity for us to experiment with enhancing reader engagement and perhaps providing a model to apply across all our opinion platforms,” said Robert Dilday, ABPnews/Herald editor in chief.
Gushee is author or editor of 17 books. He has been a columnist for the Huffington Post, a contributing editor for Christianity Today, and an active voice on social media. In January he began a one-year relationship with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship as theologian in residence.
He joins a highly regarded group of ABPnews/Herald columnists who write regularly on the news organization’s website. They include Amy Butler, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Washington; Bill Leonard, the James and Marilyn Dunn Professor of Church History and Baptist Studies at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C.; Molly T. Marshall, president and professor of theology and spiritual formation at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in suburban Kansas City, Kan.; Bill Wilson, director of the Center for Healthy Churches in Winston-Salem; and Brett Younger, associate professor of preaching at McAfee School of Theology in Atlanta.
A recent addition to the lineup of columnists is John Chandler, leader of the Spence Network, a leadership development organization in Richmond, Va.
ABPnews/Herald also features an array of frequent contributors to ABPnews/Herald commentaries and to the ABPnews/Herald blog.
“David Gushee’s addition to this stellar collection of writers will expand our already broad examination of key issues in Christian and Baptist life,” said Dilday.