By Steven Harmon Reflecting on Scripture, the fourth-century church father Gregory of Nyssa insists that in the Incarnation the Son of God embraced fully the human condition, including “the advance from infancy to adulthood,” and experienced from others the alienation…
About the Baptist sexuality conference
By David Gushee Next April the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University are organizing and hosting a conference on sexuality and covenant. Naturally, people are already talking about what they think the…
A pastor’s prayer for parishioners
By Barry Howard Good and gracious God, I come to you praying for those who are members, formally or informally, in the congregation I serve. I pray for the young and the elderly, the sick and healthy, the employed and…
Too much stuff
By Amy Butler I have too many things. I realized this just the other day. Standing in front of an empty closet I thought off-hand, “I could never fit all my stuff in here!” Just one day back from a…
Cancer awareness and hell-wishing
By Christa Brown The American Cancer Society estimates that the year 2011 will bring 230,480 new cases of invasive breast cancer among women in the United States. I’m one of those cases. For me, what was even worse than learning…
What Twitter can teach the church
By Elizabeth Evans Hagan “You should try Twitter, Elizabeth; it would be a good networking tool for the church.” For months those words uttered by a communications specialist friend of mine fell on deaf ears. My distant impression of Twitter…
Are we Greece?
By Jim Denison There is a transportation strike going on here as I write from a hotel room in Athens. I come to Greece often and have never seen such gridlock. Today’s traffic is a metaphor for the politics of…
No tweet time
By Natalie Aho People say the wrong thing on social networking sites all the time. After an interview at Cisco Systems, Connor Riley (aka @theconnor) confessed in a tweet: “Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh…
Jeffress flap illustrates wisdom of ‘no religious test’
By Brent Walker We have been instructed over and over again of this folly: — In 1789, when in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution our nation’s founders declared “no religious Test shall ever be required as a qualification to…
Are you ill?
By Bill Wilson My grandmother often used a word to describe herself or other people. It was the word “ill.” She did not use it to describe someone who was sick with a cold or the flu. She used it…
Green as a cabbage patch
By Bill Leonard Forty years ago this fall I became pastor of First Community Church in Southborough, Mass. I actually started as their interim pastor and wound up staying four years. It was a great place for one who had…
Fred Shuttlesworth and Steve Jobs
By Bill Webb They both died on Wednesday, Oct. 3. One man was well-known for his creativity and technological innovation. But many people might not have known the other individual, who stood with Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy…