Note: This article discusses suicide, child sexual abuse and domestic violence. It may be distressing for some readers. On June 30, child liberation theologian and abuse survivor advocate Ryan Stollar died by suicide, following a lengthy struggle with his...
Raise your hand if the U.S. Supreme Court decided whether or not you could marry. I see you, folks in interracial marriages and you queer folks. Now raise your hand if justices on the current Supreme Court want to invalidate…
Listen now, for this is the way of the world: Blessed are the rich, for they can buy the earth. Blessed are the powerful, for they will control the people. Blessed are the war makers, for they will conquer the…
I’ve always hated Halloween. I didn’t like it as a kid. The creepy faces, the scary clowns. It was all too unnerving. That didn’t change when I became an adult. The Halloween after my college graduation, sitting at the desk…
The ethical issues surrounding development of a COVID-19 vaccine are complex but pale in comparison to the deaths that would be necessary to reach so-called “herd immunity” in the United States. Questions get raised about the feared use of fetal tissue from…
Author, speaker and Baptist minister Alan Rudnick said he’s considered writing a column asking if God sent the coronavirus to plague humankind. “And, of course I would end by saying ‘no,’” said Rudnick, senior minister-elect at DeWitt Community Church in…
“Go to seminary, but don’t let them teach you anything.” That’s what I remember from my conversation with my beloved Southern Baptist pastor when, about to graduate from college, I told him I was heading to seminary. I don’t remember…
It didn’t surprise me in recent weeks to read articles like the essay Gene Weingarten wrote for the Washington Post in which he lamented the fact that “I find myself profoundly disliking and disrespecting almost half of my countrymen and…
September 11, 2001. Although post-graduate theological diplomas decorated my book-stuffed office and 40 years of pastoral ministry were under my belt, I was speechless that Tuesday morning when hijacked airplanes demolished more than national icons. What was I to say…
While members of the LGBTQ community and their allies expressed fear and outrage over the rushed appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court this week, new polling data shows the American public is on their side —…
Contentious, high-stakes elections are nothing new to Darryl Warren Aaron or his members at Providence Baptist Church in Greensboro, N.C. But there is a different feel surrounding the 2020 general election, said the pastor of the city’s oldest Black congregation….
One simple question may be the most reliable predictor of the strength of a conservative person’s political views in this hotly contested election year. That question: Do you trust Fox News? From religion to immigration to race to the economy…
When he traveled, Martin Luther King Jr. often carried with him Jesus and the Disinherited, a small book by Howard Thurman, one of the spiritual guides of the Civil Rights Movement. In it, Thurman teaches that as a poor Jewish…
