By Suzanah D. Raffield I’ve just returned from Tanzania and four weeks with a maternal health women’s sewing cooperative. My time there was remarkable. Joy and sadness seemed exaggerated by the lives and needs of those around me. As a…
MBC lawsuits’ winners and losers
By Bob Perry The lawsuits filed by the Missouri Baptist Convention against the five institutions that began selecting their own trustees in 2000 and 2001 have gone on for about seven years now. Only the one against Windermere Baptist Conference…
Racial profiling continues to be the norm
By Miguel De La Torre Maybe the Cambridge police did not act “stupidly,” but did they act typically? Maybe the renowned historian overreacted, but if you lived a lifetime of racial profiling, would you have acted differently? Maybe the police…
A free press essential for free Baptists
By David Currie I had the pleasure of meeting Walter Cronkite, who died July 17 at age 92, several times in my service on the board of The Interfaith Alliance. He supported our work out of a deep commitment to…
Truly valuing freedom of conscience
By David Gushee Moderate Baptists have distinguished themselves from their more conservative and fundamentalist brothers and sisters for a generation through their elevation of freedom of conscience to a near-absolute good. While the conservatives who came to dominate the Southern…
A Christian and a conservative
By David Sanders By the 1970s, many Christian conservatives had rightly decided that the counterculture revolutions of the previous decade had taken a moral toll on the country. Something, they reasoned, had to be done about it. What started as…
Kingdom theology makes a comeback
By David Gushee The past decade or so has witnessed a surge of Christian theological work that features the kingdom of God as its central theme. This is certainly not the only current trend in theology or ethics. On the…
Truly supporting our troops
By Miguel De La Torre Regardless of one’s feelings about the war in Iraq, it is important to provide support to the young men and women who put their lives on the line in obedience to their country’s call. One…
Losing the Bible
By Bruce Gourley The “Battle for the Bible” is over, and the Bible lost. Sometime within the past 33 years since Harold Lindsell fired the first public shot in the Bible battle, fundamentalist Christians (including not a few Baptists) quietly placed…