Across America this week, Baptist women are carrying a familiar weight. Some are pastors who have faithfully answered the call of God, only to watch the Southern Baptist Convention debate whether God possibly could have called them. Some are seminary...
April 8, 2024 Dear Editor: I am writing in response to “Netanyahu’s got to go but so do other obstacles to Mideast peace” by Erich Bridges, which itself is a response to Mark Wingfield’s “Netanyahu has turned Israel into an…
Back in 1987, the alternative rock band R.E.M. sang their hit song: “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” The song clamors of catastrophic events devastating the earth (such as earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, continental drifts and military…
A few years ago, my teenage son beat me at chess. Because I’m a horrible chess player, I took the defeat with aplomb. Later the same day, though, he beat me at Scrabble. Now, that just plain hurt. I rarely…
As if it were not enough to have Anne Graham Lotz and Marjorie Taylor Greene warning of God’s judgment on America through a solar eclipse, some in the Religious Right lost their minds over the weekend in two other social…
Hang up your tweed jackets and lower your spectacles, people, something big just rattled all us scholarly types. Richard B. Hays has changed his mind on LGBTQ inclusion, and there are layers to this conversation. In 1996, Hays released Moral…
“The very worst omen of the times is the fact that the religious (people) of the country stand apart to so great an extent in this hour of trial. Most of the Churches have split on the very rock upon…
This is the final in a five-part fictional story set in the early 1990s about Rev. Paul Graham and his congregation, Grace United Church of Christ. In previous episodes Tommy Branson, a gay man and a lifelong member of Paul’s…
I think I know why the women were too terrified to say anything that first Easter morning. It’s the Gospel of Mark’s year in the Lectionary, which means this Easter we were left with an unsatisfying ending to the resurrection…
Iowa’s governor signed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law April 3, thrilling religious conservatives who claim it protects religious liberties while worrying liberals who fear it will be used to favor religious claims over other rights and open the…
Religion won on the opposite side of an abortion case than usual April 4, part of a trend of those who favor access to abortion declaring they have a religious right to the procedure. That counters the more common narrative…
Imagine a Jewish family taking their eight-day-old boy to a mohel for circumcision and discovering the Jewish official is drunk and maims the child’s genitals. Would the family be able to sue the mohel and others involved in facilitating the…
Every March, millions of people locate their yellow highlighters and black pens as they compete against family, friends and coworkers for bragging rights in their March Madness bracket contest. It all started in a Staten Island bar in 1977, where…
