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...
The first time I saw Judy Mullins, everything shifted into filtered slow motion like a scene from a teen movie. I was a high school senior attending a combined high school and college Sunday school class when she — a…
When my two favorite singer-songwriters both released albums within a single week, I was reminded of the prophet Joel’s promise that “your old men will dream dreams.” Paul Simon will be 82 in October, and Bruce Cockburn just turned 78,…
As it relates to affirmative action, the underlying issue, which I have not heard anyone name, is the pervasive assumption that Black people are not/cannot be better or more qualified than any white person or a model minority. Black people…
On June 2, soccer coach Kelsey Morrison was fired and immediately escorted from the campus of Geneva College, an evangelical school near Pittsburgh. Her offense was two posts on Instagram. In this exclusive interview with me for Baptist News Global,…
Stanley Hauerwas is “considered by many to be one of the world’s most influential living theologians” and was named “America’s Best Theologian” by Time magazine in 2001. He shares a humorous memory in his autobiography, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir: The…
Losing something that once was valued and respected is painful. It doesn’t matter if it’s been circling the drain for years. When death finally comes, the grief is real. Such was the case for me recently with the Baptist General…
American Christians may think of Africa most often as a mission field, but the continent now plays a prominent role in global politics too. “Look, this forum is about building connections. It’s about closing deals. And above all, it’s about the…
Using Christian tradition and dogma to oppose women in ministry is like clinging to outdated technology to listen to music, author and pastor Otis Moss III said. “The problem is we have 8-track churches in a streaming world, and we…
In January 2015, seminarians in a 12-day January course on Appalachian religion sponsored by Wake Forest University Divinity School heard the “testimony” of a twenty-something Burnsville, N.C., resident named Adam who recounted a life of youthful “screw-ups” — cooking meth,…
Every summer, my brothers and I would attend vacation Bible school. We all marched into the sanctuary for opening assembly led by a processional of children holding the American flag, Christian flag and the Bible. In unison we recited the…
Marjorie Taylor Greene has photoshopped an image of herself in a military vehicle and “toting” a high-velocity rifle as she rolls into the United States Capitol. Has she any sense of the perception she has created of January 6, 2021?…
A tsunami of change is coming to the Baptist family of congregations. With the hard-right pivot of the Southern Baptist Convention in June, a significant number of centrist SBC congregations are facing a difficult decision about their future. These churches…
