In December 1992, I graduated from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. It was the last full year of Roy Honeycutt’s storied career as president of Southern Baptists’ first seminary. It has been 30 years since the transition to…
Tennessee Legislature passes another bill promoting atheism
I graduated high school in East Tennessee in 1984. My senior thesis was about George Orwell’s haunting apocalyptic novel 1984. In the 1940s, Orwell projected a future where an oppressive empire exercised authoritarian control presided over by an entity known…
Dear Tennessee legislators: You are driving people away from faith
Dear Tennessee representatives who voted to expel two of the Tennessee Three: I know most of you profess Christianity. I hope you and yours had a joyous Easter. I wish our state could have. Alas, the venomous viper of power…
If you’re going to quote 1 Timothy 3:2, be sure to read Exodus 20:17
It’s gone on for millennia. Heck, it’s part of the first story. Adam blamed Eve for his indulgence in a snack that was high in fiber but also the knowledge of good and evil. The Apostle Paul, in 1 Timothy…
A privileged white Southern dad reflects on racism and the legacy of MLK
“I was born a poor Black child.” So begins Steve Martin’s movie The Jerk — the first R-rated movie I saw. I was 13 and begged my college-professor father to take me. As we were leaving his office, he asked…
A New Year’s resolution from Gandhi and a three-word movie subtitle
Gandhi helped free me from prison. Now there’s some fun with syntax and the ambiguity of a preposition. That sentence has two potential meanings: Either Gandhi helped me get out of prison, or, while he was in prison, Gandhi helped…
A Matrix Thanksgiving: The red pill, the blue pill or… ?
“We’re thankful God protected us.” When I was in seminary in the early 1990s, Mount Pinatubo erupted, devastating Luzon, the largest and most populated island in the Philippines. In the 1980s, I twice had served as a summer missionary on…
The Kentucky youth group brainsaw massacre — a ghost story for All Hallows Eve and Reformation
“Can we go camping tonight, Brad? Pleeeeeease?” During seminary in Kentucky in the early 1990s, I served as youth minister at a small country church in the rolling pastureland 25 miles south of Louisville, Ky., in Elk Creek. Spencer County…
A Gen-Xer reflects on the progressive-conservative divorce in the former Southern Baptist Convention
I grew up in a family that worshipped the trinity: God, the Southern Baptist Convention and the Dallas Cowboys. I was born in Fort Worth, Texas, while my father was a student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. By the time…