In the aftermath of the presidential election, the “N” word (a vicious reference to African-American human beings) is making a public comeback. In a Nov. 14 essay, the online journal, Fusion, documented multiple N-word postings, many related to schools, including…
‘Exsurge Domine’: Pursuing Re-formation
“Arise, O Lord (Exsurge Domine), and judge thy cause. A wild boar is loose in thy vineyard.” That’s how Pope Leo X introduced his denunciation of Martin Luther in a papal encyclical released 15 June 1520. The document condemned a…
High (tech) priest
Baptists are well known for our belief in the priesthood of all believers. This is a deep seated conviction that individuals do not need another person to intervene between the human and divine. Every human has the capacity and responsibility…
‘Locker room banter’: Nightmare for the Religious Right
“You can’t endorse me … but I endorse you and what you are doing.” That memorable phrase, delivered by presidential candidate Ronald Reagan at the Religious Roundtable National Affairs Briefing in Dallas in August 1980, highlighted the public beginnings of…
At home in a foreign land
Last Sunday I taught a class at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Winston-Salem, N.C., the second of a two-part conversation entitled, “Retelling the Jesus Story in a Post-Modern, Pluralistic, Post-Protestant-Privileged World: Who’s Listening?”The topic, sent in weeks earlier, was of…
The civility of discourse
“They’ll tell anything on you down in town.” So the serpent-handling woman says as she sits on her Appalachian front porch, killing flies and defending her church’s approach to the sixteenth chapter of Mark’s Gospel. Whether in cheap novels, academic…
Consciences: distressed and dissenting
In Dissent in American Religion, the great historian Edwin Scott Gaustad wrote, “Should a society actually succeed … in suffocating all contrary opinion, then its own vital juices no longer flow and the shadow of death begins to fall across…
Speaking from the edge of inside: Where is evangelism in CBF life?
A question I have been asking myself lately is, “Does evangelism have a place in Cooperative Baptist Fellowship life?” I couldn’t help but feel the passion around so many issues at this year’s CBF General Assembly. LGBTQ, women in ministry,…
The importance of being carnal
The gospels are full of stories in which the “incarnate Christ” opens the interior life of human beings by giving attention to their carnal presence, their broken, hungry, naked, hurting bodies.