The current MAGA evangelical attacks on science threaten to make America less safe, less healthy and much dumber. This anti-science compulsion is no surprise. Evangelical Christianity in the United States has rejected science at least since Charles Darwin. There is…
Getting over fundamentalism
Forty years after that long hot summer of 1925 in Dayton, Tenn., where the Scopes “Monkey Trial” was held, Southern Baptist preacher Carlyle Marney vividly recounted his memories. His parents were daily readers of the Knoxville News Sentinel, which claimed…
How a group of Presbyterians is trying to reshape the SBC
Imagine, if you will, an enormous wooden horse encamped outside the Southern Baptist Convention headquarters. Downtown Nashville’s bachelorettes, bar hoppers and backup singers stop and stare at the giant horse with “Center for Baptist Leadership” emblazoned on its barrel. William…
Intellectual virtue as the antidote for this moment
Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the…
2024 election explained in three metaphors
How Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, after exhaustive evaluations by pundits, pollsters and political scientists, remains an enigma. I read all the number-crunching explanations I could Google. The Pew Research quantitative analysis of the election results was the…
Orwellian ‘newspeak’ and political censorship on social media
Just days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, I wrote an analysis piece examining the rising sentiments of fascism in the U.S. political climate. Social media users felt they were in the musical “Cabaret” — a play that portrays the rise of…
John MacArthur met his own definition of a false prophet
How should we respond when someone who uses theology to promote ignorant, misogynistic, racist, power mongering authoritarianism dies? To use biblical language, we might call these people false prophets, ravenous wolves, deceivers, anti-Christs, evil men, seducers, lovers of self, foolish…
The Trump administration is using the arts to rewrite history
I’ve written elsewhere about the role the arts have played in both creating and confronting shared identity and ethics across time. Art is a powerful medium. It has the potential to both reflect and to shape collective memory — which…
Baylor rejects grant to study LGBTQ exclusion in the church
The president of Baylor University appears to have burned a final bridge with a Texas-based foundation that once was a critical funder of its Baptist identity. President Linda Livingstone has rescinded a $643,000 grant awarded to the Diana Garland School…
A critical assessment of the president’s ‘big beautiful bill’
Just days before President Donal Trump left office at the conclusion of his first term in office, a “1776 Commission” he created in 2020 issued its report, calling for “patriotic education” designed to counter what he claimed was a “twisted…
Bill Moyers: Fearless speaker of truth
When I saw the news of Bill Moyers dying, I felt all the oxygen left my office. Never has one person spoken more truth to power than Moyers. The tributes to him are prodigious and well-deserving. I add here some…
Prestonwood celebrates Trump and Supreme Court in morning worship
“This is a time for us to celebrate America,” Prestonwood Baptist Church Pastor Jack Graham declared in his all-white suit in a scene reminiscent of a Jesse Gemstone sermon in HBO Max’s The Righteous Gemstones. “Just because you love America…