It may now seem surprising to many United Methodists, and even more Baptists, that for most of our histories in the United States, all Methodists and Baptists were regularly designated as evangelical denominations. The most important reason is that both...
Demanding that women keep silent about abuse and submit to male headship is all about patriarchy and nothing about biblical values.
“Kyrios Christos!” (literally, “Lord Christ” or Christ is Lord!) The 81 percent of Evangelical Christians in America who voted for and still support Donald Trump are desperately in need of a reminder that “Kyrios Christos” is Christianity 101. It is the first central…
The enduring scandal of the Gospel—even in a land like ours, purportedly “under God” and crowded with spires and steeples—is Jesus’ rejection of redemptive violence.
The latest from our readers: • Abuse of women isn’t the result of theological systems. It’s the result of sin | Layne Wallace, Roanoke Rapids, N.C.
Recent volcanic eruptions have more than molten lava oozing to the surface on Hawaii’s Big Island. In addition to quakes and tremors and sulfuric acid poisoning the air, destroying homes and forcing some evacuations, nearly a month of heightened seismic activity also is exposing long simmering fissures between Christianity, and traditional Hawaiian religion.
Many SBC people have encouraged Patterson to retire for the sake of the SBC, which is incredibly tone deaf. He shouldn’t retire. He shouldn’t be moved to president emeritus, be given an indefinite teaching position and salary, housing for life, and be enshrined in an idolatrous stained-glass window. He should be forcefully terminated with cause, without severance pay, and be banned from campus for life for the sake of justice for those abused women he hurt with his misogyny, victim shaming, and silencing.
The hubris of Al Mohler, Paige Patterson, and the leaders of the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention has led to their own humiliation. The unfortunate fact is that their humiliation is a fraction of the humiliation that women, wives, sisters, daughters, aunts, and grandmothers have experienced at the hands of complementarian men.
As far as Southern Baptist leaders are concerned, the reputation and well-being of their male leaders far outweigh the rights and lives of abused women everywhere, statements about condemning “all forms of abuse” notwithstanding.
We millennials puzzle over the fact that religious identity seems to be overlooked in our conversations. While we routinely discuss cornerstones of modern identity politics such as race, gender, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status, we still tiptoe around religion.
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s new president emeritus offered no new apologies in his first words to the campus community since his removal as the school’s president.
Bruce Gourley is a Baptist from Georgia with a thing for history. And religion. And the American West. That passion — even calling — now has him penning and editing articles for the Yellowstone History Journal, a new scholarly publication of which he is the founder and editor.
That a Southern Baptist pastor made such disparaging remarks about women in not surprising given the Southern Baptist Convention’s theological treatment of women. What is surprising is how many Southern Baptists pushed back. Logic would suggest that if women don’t have to accept husbands who beat them, they do not have to accept a theology that beats them down, either.
