This week, Robin Williams was trending on Twitter. He died by suicide in August 2014, five months after my late husband died the same way. Side note: When someone takes their own life, the correct verbiage is to say they…
Saddleback, women’s ordination and Jezebels: An open letter to Al Mohler
Dear Al, May I call you Al? We both have doctorates, so I would prefer we forgo honorifics; you can just call me Jonathan. I’m not sure we’ve met, although I’ve known you from a distance for years. I doubt…
Reflecting on a Baylor commencement 60 years later
“Oh, what a beautiful morning.” Those words obviously were made famous in the song by that title in the Broadway Musical Oklahoma!, which is my home state. I gladly loaned them to Texas on the morning of May 6 and…
Why the use of masculine God language matters at church
Throughout the English Bible, the normal pronouns assigned to God are “he” and “him.” Many references to God within church practice typically fit into this same assignment. However, when we look at the instances in the Bible where imagery for…
Ethics at the end of life: How medicine and technology have changed the context of dying
As the school year ends and I try to process the many agonies of the annus horribilus COVID year of 2020-21, I will remember many deaths, but most especially the death of my father in late December 2020. These posts,…
Let’s not forget about single mothers
When I think of the many sounds that came out of my house growing up in Orlando, Fla., I hear my mother yelling at the top of her lungs every morning in praying over my sister and me. In fact,…
Call your Momma
She died 20 years ago this month, on Mother’s Day. Shirley Ann Bridges, nee Solter. My mother. She died three months short of her 70th birthday, which was a pretty good span, considering she smoked Salem cigarettes one after another…
Charity versus justice
It’s an old saying but true: If you have to keep rescuing people out of a raging river, eventually you ought to walk upstream to see who’s throwing those people in the river. This is the difference between charity and…
The foolishness of WWJD
Charles Spurgeon, a famous British preacher in the latter half of the 1800s, used the phrase, “What would Jesus do?” in a sermon. If you’ve ever read any of Spurgeon’s sermons, you know he had a knack for turning a…
How second-chance hiring works for business
When I began my studies of people with criminal records as a potential workforce, I quickly learned that employment is a “necessary but not sufficient” condition. Even low-paying employment reduces recidivism by more than 20%, so a paycheck is critical…
Rethinking Mother’s Day
If you Google “Mother’s Day” looking for a gift your mother might actually like — this could be the year to move past the needlepoint pillow that says “Home is where the Mom is” to a promise to let her…
Four R’s for racial reckoning by the white church
“What does God need from white people now?” That’s the question our friend and brother, James Forbes, posed recently to a group of white ministers in the Alliance of Baptists. I was asked to give the first response. Stunned by…