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...
Something very strange happens when I visit Walgreens. I feel it as I cross the threshold: a subtle pull like undertow, a siren call from the rocky shores of aisle three. I try to fight it by heading for the…
That first year at seminary — or any year at seminary, for that matter — can be extremely stressful. Many students face financial challenges. They worry about upending their families, finding new schools for the kids. re-arranging family schedules and adjusting to…
A Texas Baptist pastor aiding the Donald Trump campaign in its outreach to Hispanic voters endorsed the Republican presidential candidate during an interview aired in three parts on The Jim Bakker Show in late July. “Let me go ahead and…
Please submit transitions — including staff changes, ordinations, anniversaries or deaths — to Barbara Francis. This page will be updated weekly. STAFF CHANGES Steve Ackerman, to Grace Baptist Church, Asheville, N.C., as interim pastor. Stephen Allen, to Tabernacle Baptist Church, Carrollton,…
What else is the national anthem but a hymn to the nation, and what else did Kaepernick do but thumb his nose at American civil religion by sitting down in church while the choir sung?
The rise of concealed carry is about safety, self-protection, and security. Even if we don’t own a gun, we are represented by state legislatures that agree that carrying a gun provides the safety and security we seek.
When I was introduced to God some 20 years ago, God had it together. God was in control. God was sovereign. God had a plan. I needed only to believe. My, how times have changed. Today, I am viewed primarily…
Years ago when attendance was pretty low, Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, N.Y., brought in a consultant who said, “You can either be a museum or a church.” The consultant had been going to the wrong museums. A good church is…
New research reporting American teens have more respect and use for the Bible than some might think comes as no real surprise to Gavin Rogers. The “2016 Teen State of the Bible” project, commissioned by the American Bible Society and…
Campus Pride, an advocacy organization for LGBT students at colleges and universities, identified 102 campuses said to openly discriminate in the group’s 2016 “Shame List” released Aug. 29. Last year’s inaugural Shame List identified 57 campuses that had applied for…
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit Aug. 30 on behalf of a Christian woman forced to remove her headscarf for a driver’s license photo in violation of her religious convictions. The lawsuit says Yvonne Allen of Tuskegee,…
Notre-Dame taught me – and still teaches me – that the physical, tangible things of this good earth have the power to mediate something transcendent.
