From the Department of What’s Old is New Again: The Southern Baptist Convention’s ethics agency is being accused of liberalism and creating a distraction from the work of evangelism and missions. During the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC that began…
Think you understand what it’s like to live on minimum wage? Here’s my story
Two weeks before I got married, I lost my job delivering pizzas because I had gotten three tickets for minor traffic violations over the previous two years. So when we got back from our honeymoon, I landed a job working…
From life experience, some thoughts on the need for legal abortion rights
So much comes into my mind and heart when I talk or write about abortion. I have to revisit the time I miscarried at 3-plus months in 1979. After a week of hemorrhaging blood clots the size of liver slices,…
Why herd immunity is worse than other potential ethical concerns about a COVID-19 vaccine
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…
My journey from being a young-earth Creationist, Dispensationalist Republican to seeing my neighbor as worthy of my vote
My body was tense as I sat in the white-walled classroom of my Baptist high school in Middle Georgia. With the sounds of pretend canons firing at the Civil War reenactment across the street, I listened to my teacher tell…
Mohler endorses Trump while Piper disses Trump and feels the backlash
Al Mohler already has voted for Donald Trump, but John Piper won’t vote for either Trump or Joe Biden. Two bits of significant national news within the last week from the Calvinist wing of evangelical Christianity. Mohler, president of Southern…
Being ‘pro-life’ means telling the truth about COVID-19
One of my neighbors put a new sign in the yard today that reads: “Vote Pro-Life.” I want to knock on the door and ask one question: “Do you mean you’re going to vote against abortion, or do you mean…
‘Pro-life evangelicals’ endorse Biden, Dobson rallies forces for Trump, and ‘MAGA Church’ debuts
More than 5,000 “pro-life evangelicals” have signed an online letter noting their opposition to abortion but the necessity of voting for Joe Biden in this year’s presidential contest. “As pro-life evangelicals, we disagree with Vice President Biden and the Democratic…
The complicated story of Trump’s COVID treatment, stem cells and abortion politics
The irony cannot be missed: A Rose Garden event to announce the nomination of a Supreme Court justice widely expected to tilt the court toward limiting access to abortion became a super-spreader event for coronavirus, which infected many of the…
Is this election all about abortion? It depends on who you ask
If you listen to the most conservative and most liberal activists, you would think the 2020 presidential election is all about abortion rights. It turns out that is not exactly true, although abortion remains a highly motivating factor for certain…
Would you let Donald Trump be your medical power of attorney?
One of the nice things we say about friends to others to indicate the level of trust we have in them is, “I would trust him with my life.” By this we usually mean we have so much confidence in…
‘Do you mean vote for the murder babies crowd?’
Last week I shared to Facebook a Washington Post story titled “White House directs federal agencies to cancel race-related training sessions it calls ‘un-American propaganda.’” I prefaced it with this: “At all levels of American society, we are confronted with…