Baptist News Global

BNG webinar to feature Baptist supporters of Equality Act

Baptists who support the Equality Act currently pending in Congress — in contrast to a resolution recently passed by the Southern Baptist Convention — will be featured in Baptist News Global’s next webinar. The free event is scheduled for next…

United Methodists will welcome President Biden for Communion

Roman Catholic bishops may bar President Joe Biden from receiving Holy Communion because of his political beliefs, but United Methodists are ready to welcome him to the Lord‘s Supper without question. Anyone who has attended Communion in a United Methodist…

Churches united in action could bring healing to the nation, ABCUSA and NBC speakers declare

Churches unified in prophetic, compassionate action are needed to bring healing to the nation’s political, religious and racial wounds, according to participants in a June 23 New Baptist Covenant gathering. The virtual event, held in advance of this week’s American…

White hysteria, Critical Race Theory, and eyes that dare not see

The hysteria over Critical Race Theory right now means many things. Most immediately, it means that the relationship between skilled right-wing demagogues and their audience in the U.S. these days is positively Pavlovian. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, rinse and repeat. If Tucker…

What the Critical Race Theory debate has to do with Professor Harold Hill

I’m not an expert on Critical Race Theory, and neither are you. So let’s all stop pretending we know so much more than we do. This term, which refers to an academic construct that originated in law schools, has become…

America’s two largest Christian bodies continue to become more conservative

The continual shift of the Southern Baptist Convention to the right was echoed by the latest meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Last Friday, the USCCB voted to create a teaching document that could rebuke and exclude…

BJC general counsel sees little future guidance in Supreme Court’s latest religious liberty ruling

As with a 2018 ruling involving a baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, the U.S. Supreme Court’s latest foray into a free exercise of religion claim is so narrowly written as to offer little future…

Samuel Hill was prophetic in 1966 when he predicted Southern churches in crisis

In his monumental work, Southern Churches in Crisis, published in 1966, Samuel S. Hill Jr, then chair of the religion department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, wrote: The cultural-social complex in which revivalism-fundamentalism came to birth and…

Baptist-Catholic dialogue resumes despite challenges of pandemic

Despite the travel limitations imposed by COVID-19, a group of Baptist and Catholic scholars have continued their historic dialogue on ecumenical relationships. Conversations between the Baptist World Alliance and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity were put on hold…

Transitions for the week of 6-25-21

Please submit transitions — including staff changes, ordinations, anniversaries or deaths — to Barbara Francis. This page will be updated bi-weekly. STAFF CHANGES Todd Barnes, to Mayo Baptist Church, Spencer, Va., as pastor. Carter Barrow, to First Baptist Church, Manchester, Ga.,…

45 years after the Soweto uprising, religious leaders call for more racial harmony among South Africans

Forty-five years after a group of young Black students in Soweto, South Africa, took to the streets to protest an educational policy of the ruling South African apartheid government, leading to the death of more than 170 of them, the…

The role of seminaries in guiding ex-evangelicals like me through deconstruction

Over the past decade, evangelicals have had to come to terms with the fact that people are leaving the church in droves. According to a recent Gallup poll, just 47% of Americans are members of a church, falling from 70% in…

Supreme Court slides into partisanship

Before the fireworks, be careful what you drink

The contemptible case of Clarence Thomas

The permanent paradoxes of Christian thinking about war