As the Southern Baptist Convention in its recent annual meeting has proved itself unreliably Baptist, it gives me pause to think about how quickly the transmogrification of this Baptist denomination into its ecclesiastical opposite has happened. Baptist folk often have...
A lot of ministers and congregations frown on the use of humor in the pulpit — or anywhere else in the church. Many consider it to be sacrilegious, blasphemous or, at best, disrespectful to crack a joke to open a sermon….
The old adage “the family that prays together stays together” is statistically sound, according to a new study by a Harvard University professor. Couples who attend religious services are 47 percent less likely to subsequently divorce than other couples, according…
Messengers to the Louisiana Baptist Convention annual meeting Nov. 14-15 in Alexandria, La., asked state convention leadership to study recent actions of the Southern Baptist Convention agency entrusted with public policy concerns. Clark Stewart, pastor of New Zion Baptist Church…
The federal government’s decision to pursue Dylann Roof’s execution is widely questioned, and it is in defiance of the wishes and recommendations of survivors of the attack, many family members of the dead and some Justice Department officials.
Objectively speaking, there has been very little in the political world that one might call good about the months leading up to the election. Now that the election is over (sort of), for Christian leaders everywhere there is at least…
The Gospel reading for the first Sunday of Advent (Matt. 24:36-44) is one I remember from the days I clutched a Scofield Reference Bible. Along with Scofield’s infallible notes I carried around a copy of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great…
Advocates of church-state separation found little comfort in Donald Trump’s Nov. 23 announcement that he plans to nominate DeVos, a leader in the self-described school reform movement for more than two decades, to head up the U.S. Department of Education.
Growing numbers of synagogues and churches as well as two dozen U.S. cities are offering protection amid the threat of deportation under the Trump administration.
Whatever the final result of the huge, long-running protests by native Americans against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the demonstrations will surely be remembered as a landmark in relations between organized religion, Christianity in particular, and indigenous people.
A federal judge on Friday ruled that Dylann Roof, the 22-year-old accused of killing nine parishioners in a Charleston, S.C., church last year, is competent to stand trial.
Most of what we think we know about the earliest Christians comes from later traditions, Hollywood epics and, sadly, “The Da Vinci Code.”
In the past month we have seen one set of fears replaced by another, which has made the deep division within American society even more visceral. President-elect Donald Trump recognized the fear in many Americans and leveraged that fear for…
