By Bill Leonard The Blessed Virgin Mary scares me. It happens every Advent. She questions my ways and means, confronts me with mystery, gives me guilt and makes me think twice before driving to the mall. Listening to the Blessed…
You know we can hear you
By Bill Leonard “You know we can hear you, right?” That’s what Daily Show “reporter” Aasif Mandvi recently asked Don Yelton in response to the Buncombe County Republican’s assessment of voter ID regulations imposed this year by the North Carolina…
Billy Graham and the ‘old, old story’
By Bill Leonard “Billy Graham is the most famous evangelist in the world and his power of persuasion has softened the skeptics who used to call him the hot-gospeller from the Bible Belt.” That’s how legendary (cigarette-puffing) CBS newsman Edward…
Can I get a witness — again?
By Bill Leonard This month Mercer University Press will release Can I Get a Witness?: Essays, Sermons and Reflections, a collection of materials that I have written during the last few years. Most are previously unpublished, except for a few…
Prison songs
By Bill Leonard In God’s Long Summer, Charles Marsh describes the summer of 1963 when Fannie Lou Hamer and other representatives of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were arrested in Winona, Miss., for attempting to be served at a “whites…
This IS America
By Bill Leonard In an interview after the Sept. 16 mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, Dr. Janis Orlowski, senior clinician at the hospital where most victims were treated, declared: “I would like not to be an expert on…
Memories of a mountain preacher
By Bill Leonard When he preached his last sermon on July 7, 2013, 80-year-old Rev. Harold McKinnish urged the congregation to “get saved,” or reclaim their Christian faith, then “pass it on.” Steadying himself on the pulpit of the Holly…
Memories of a mountain preacher
By Bill Leonard When he preached his last sermon on July 7, 2013, 80-year-old Rev. Harold McKinnish urged the congregation to “get saved,” or reclaim their Christian faith, then “pass it on.” Steadying himself on the pulpit of the Holly…
Things that make for freedom
By Bill Leonard “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.” We recall the words of that spiritual a half-century after Martin Luther King Jr. sounded them across the Lincoln Memorial, a hallmark of the…