By Bill Leonard As Advent turns to Christmas and the reality of a New Year looms, we revisit that often overlooked post-nativity saga portrayed by innumerable artists as “the flight to Egypt.” Matthew 2:12-14 says that after the Magi left…
When Jesus had a pacifier
By Bill Leonard For more years than anyone remembers First Baptist Church, Highland Avenue, in Winston-Salem, N.C., has marked Advent with “The Nativity,” a living reenactment of the birth of Jesus presented in worship on the second Sunday of the…
Always reforming
By Bill Leonard Ecclesia Semper Reformanda, so the saying goes, “the church is always reforming.” Those words came to mind last week when I heard sociologist-prophet-iconoclast Tony Campolo preach at the New Baptist Covenant II meeting, that multiracial effort at…
Separate and unequal
By Bill Leonard When Jim Crow segregation laws ruled the American South, their classic defense lay in the phrase, “Separate but Equal,” meaning that while the races were divided, their facilities and services were supposedly the same. Of course everybody…
It’s just war
By Bill Leonard “It’s just war.” That phrase often describes our society’s implicit response to the war in Afghanistan, begun in 2001, the longest combat conflict in American military history. The “other war” in Iraq, begun in 2003, continues with…
Green as a cabbage patch
By Bill Leonard Forty years ago this fall I became pastor of First Community Church in Southborough, Mass. I actually started as their interim pastor and wound up staying four years. It was a great place for one who had…
The sociology of Sunday school
By Bill Leonard These days, clergy and laity, professors and students alike generally agree that basic knowledge of the Bible is fast disappearing among Americans conservative, moderate and liberal. Indeed, in recent years I have occasionally received notes from undergraduate…
Running on faith
By Bill Leonard In Faith of Our Fathers, Edwin Gaustad wrote that, “In 1800 when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson engaged in the first wide open presidential campaign in American history, Jefferson’s political enemies seized the occasion to abuse and…
Unanticipated courage: A 9/11 retrospective
By Bill Leonard In the days ahead, we revisit graphic images that no doubt haunt survivors and families of the dead continually: A commercial airliner crashes into the World Trade Center in what seemed at first a horrible accident. A…