By Jeff Brumley Some congregational coaches hope to see a return to Christ-centered values in the American church, while some Baptist scholars are eager for Christians in the United States to hear and feel the pain suffered by persecuted counterparts…
Epiphanic moments
By Bill Leonard “When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were 2 years old and under, according to the…
A nation confronted by conscience
By Bill Leonard “Our enemies act without conscience. We must not. This executive summary of the [Senate Intelligence] Committee’s report makes clear that acting without conscience isn’t necessary, it isn’t even helpful, in winning this strange and long war we’re…
Advent: Jesus’ DNA?
By Bill Leonard “What was Jesus’ DNA?” That’s a question my Wake Forest University colleague, physics professor Jed Macosko, says someone once asked him. Macosko mentioned it while concluding a superb lecture on DNA, Darwinism and evolution offered in the…
Weekly communion heals, unites N.C. church and community
By Jeff Brumley It was back around 2008, during a monthly Friday Lenten service at First Baptist Church on Highland Avenue in Winston-Salem, N.C., that Pastor Darryl Aaron made an unsettling observation. “The economy was real bad, tilting into the…
Religion’s killing fields: When will we ever learn?
By Bill Leonard “Afterwards it happened, before I had ever heard of the existence of [Anabaptist] brethren, that a godfearing, pious man, named Sicke Snyder, was beheaded at Leeuwarden, for being rebaptized. It sounded strange to me, to hear a…
Conversion crisis?
By Bill Leonard Of his 1821 conversion, evangelist Charles Finney wrote: “As I went in and shut the door after me, it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face. … No words can express the…
The ‘Dogma of Revelation’ revisited (again)
By Bill Leonard In The Galileo Affair, George Johnston quotes Cardinal John Henry Newman’s 19th-century assessment of Galileo’s 16th-century “crusade” to establish the veracity of the heliocentric Copernican idea that the earth revolves around the sun. Writing long after Galileo…
2 seminaries with Baptist ties join others adding science curricula
By Jeff Brumley As high-profile, science-versus-faith debates rage across the nation, a handful of American seminaries, including two with Baptist ties, are pursuing the notion that reason and religion are compatible and even complementary. Andover Newton Theological School and Wake…