It may now seem surprising to many United Methodists, and even more Baptists, that for most of our histories in the United States, all Methodists and Baptists were regularly designated as evangelical denominations. The most important reason is that both...
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…
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…
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…
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.,…
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…
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…
Nearly half of Americans believe the nation’s moral values are in poor condition, and a significantly higher percentage predict those standards are only going to get worse, a newly released Gallup poll has found. But the survey also found political…
Hands always have fascinated me, not only as an artist where we put something of ourselves in a new and visible form, but also as a manner of human connection. My interest might have begun long ago in kindergarten when…
It’s probably wrong to think this, but it feels good to hear that groups other than Baptists are fighting about stuff. Catholics are all in a snit about allowing the president to share Communion since he is a supporter of…
People of faith must rise up against capital punishment as a system of legalized lynching and retribution designed to suppress people of color through intimidation, torture and death, according to a recent panel of legal experts and anti-death penalty advocates….
A federal judge’s June 21 ruling to protect former Trump administration officials from lawsuits stemming from their actions to forcibly clear Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020, illustrates the near-impossibility of any government official being held responsible for acting in…
When the largest Protestant denomination in the United States recently met in Nashville, it was notable what thousands of Southern Baptists did not think were major concerns. An armed insurrection took place at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,…
