“My boys all look like me. And I want my children to grow up in a country where they’re not minorities,” William Wolfe said out loud in a video now posted online. “I want my boys to grow up in…
5 things I wish every U.S. citizen knew
It’s hard to believe 14 months into Donald Trump’s Reign of Terror 2.0 anyone still believes the administration’s rhetoric around its immigration enforcement practices. I’m a female pastor in a progressive Baptist church in Texas. It isn’t as if I’m…
Fighting fear and dehumanization in Richmond
Actions speak loudly, but words also count in a time when many who should be speaking out about injustice remain silent. A public statement read by a group of Christian leaders Feb. 27 on the steps of First Baptist Church…
Pondering David Foster Wallace, lobsters and The Twilight Zone
I did not expect David Foster Wallace to unsettle my dinner plate. I have read enough of him to know he rarely leaves the reader unchanged, but Consider the Lobster struck me in a way I did not anticipate. It…
Vietnam War tactics are back in Trump’s America
When I saw the cellphone videos of U.S. Border Patrol agents executing Alex Pretti on a snowy street in Minneapolis, the shameless brutality of the shooting reminded me of another execution 58 years earlier on a war-torn street in Saigon….
What can we learn from First Baptist Orlando?
A story BNG first reported more than three weeks ago came to a disheartening conclusion Sunday, March 8, when Chris Ogden resigned as campus pastor for First Baptist Church of Orlando’s Horizon West campus. Ogden, who by all accounts was…
Are US military commanders really talking about Armageddon?
Are U.S. military commanders really telling the soldiers fighting in Iran that President Donald Trump has been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”? In a piece published…
Meredith Miller calls the church to wonder
In May 2020, many pastors held their breath as they released statements and stumbled over how to respond to the murder of George Floyd. Meredith Miller responded with formation. Making her Instagram account public, Miller began to write about faith…
The comedown: The Psychedelic Renaissance in sober light
I never will forget my first psychedelic trip. Visions of Christ, my childhood and forgotten dreams flooded through my mind. When that river of thought slowed to a trickle, I sat on the edge of my bed and knew I…
Dispensationalism is going to get us all killed
I remember the exact moment the world ended for me. It was November 2008, and as a third grader at Worth Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, I was inconsolable. What was the cause of my dismay? Barack Obama had…
Understanding the legacy of Roots after 50 years
As we approach the 50th anniversary of Alex Haley’s novel Roots, we are not merely commemorating a book and a subsequent television event, we are revisiting a cultural earthquake. Before the bright lights of Hollywood casting calls in 1976 —…
The end-times theology driving US intervention in Iran
President Donald Trump, who campaigned on a platform of peace, announced in the middle of the night March 1 that he had initiated “major combat operations” against Iran called Operation Epic Fury. By morning, Trump claimed that these strikes had…