By Marv Knox The most delusional moment of my life occurred Nov. 4, 2008. For an hour or so after Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election, I believed the worst of America’s racism had subsided. America elected a black…
Recovering the “new evangelism”
Fifty years ago, in May 1964, a diverse group of Baptists from across North America gathered in Atlantic City to celebrate the culmination of a five-year evangelism campaign (1959-1964). With the participation of American Baptists, African-American Baptists, Canadian Baptists and…
Eyes wide open
By Amy Butler Last Sunday all over the world lectionary preachers were handed a challenging text from Matthew’s Gospel. The text was that little part of chapter 15, where Jesus is busy just doing his thing: using gardening metaphors to…
Ice bucket do-gooders
By Mark Wingfield Americans have heated up the Internet with the Ice Bucket Challenge in the last two weeks. Unless you’ve just flown in from the Arctic, you know exactly what I’m talking about: The social-media-fueled fundraising phenomenon that’s benefitting…
Pastors minister in Ferguson unrest
The continued unrest in Ferguson, MO which have featured protests, violence, and racial tensions, have the country waiting for new news of peace. The conflict revolves around Michael Brown’s murder by the hands of a police officer. Conflicting information from…
Learning from Mary
By Molly T. Marshall Baptists, and Protestants in general, have not known what to do with the Catholic preoccupation with Mary. We just do not get the nuances of the Immaculate Conception (different from the virginal conception of Jesus) and…
Freely chosen
By Sam Chaise Should people be free to choose their own religion? Yes. This, to me, seems like such an obvious answer that I am flabbergasted that in much of the world, the de facto reality on the ground is…
A matter of definition, part 2
In the first part of this blog I suggested that there is in fact a definition of the word love which can cover all the various forms of human and divine love. It is a definition which I believe gets…
Biblical inspiration, human interpretation: The LGBT issue, part 7
By David Gushee Follow David: @dpgushee The (Protestant) Bible has 66 books, 1,189 chapters and 31,273 verses, spoken, written and edited over more than a millennium, in three different languages, in multiple social settings, by dozens of authors, with the…