I’ve been diving deep on forgiveness lately. A few weeks back, my friend Ralph Douglas West and I led a Janterm retreat for Truett Seminary students and pastors where we read works including Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies (home to the…
My father’s faith
My dad had a plan for everything and a chart for most things. He had charts for the miles he walked, his weight and the glasses of water he drank. He did not have a chart, but he did have…
The apology that never came at Bubba-Doo’s
Pastors often find themselves serving well beyond their congregations. Some are cynical about this. For this reason or that, they think serving the community at large is beneath them. But most of us find it meaningful when people who aren’t…
Trump and his allegedly disloyal white evangelical supporters
In a recent interview, David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network asked former President Donald Trump what he thought about the reticence of some white evangelical Protestant leaders, such as Southern Baptist megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, to endorse his candidacy…
Doom-scrolling, sourdough starter and three kinds of kin
During a late-night doom-scrolling session on my phone, those all-knowing algorithms of social media converged and hacked up a hairball-like collection of my recent online search results. Cosmic Creepers, our jumpy black cat, a master of regurgitating all things grossly…
Putin needs to be taken down
Someone needs to take down Vladimir Putin. Last week’s brazen attack on a residential building in Dnipro, Ukraine, is only the latest in a year’s worth of horrifying atrocities set in motion by one man alone — Putin. And for…
How my eyes were opened to America’s broken immigration system
“The system is broken.” This was the most common phrase I heard during my week at the T.B. Maston Foundation’s Young Maston Scholars Retreat focused on immigration in San Antonio, Texas. From executive directors, professors, pastors, missionaries, volunteers and the…
Meditating with Buddhists and other Asian lessons
During the 1988-89 school year, our family lived in Fukuoka, Japan, on a sabbatical leave from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. During that time, we served as Mission Service Corps volunteers sponsored by what was then called the Foreign Mission Board…
The Black resistance tradition and its fight for U.S. democracy
Black America flipped the script on a racialized democratic state to make it more perfect. It is Black people’s fight that makes the United States exceptional. —Randal Jelks (2022) Many of us are profoundly worried about the health of…