By Bill Leonard Gardner C. Taylor died on Easter Sunday 2015. Those who knew him weren’t surprised that as one friend said, “he held on till Easter.” Taylor, a spiritual icon inside and beyond the African-American community, was civil rights…
Rediscovering the space in which can God show up
By Amy Butler “From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.” I’m pretty sure James Joyce wasn’t thinking of the minister’s experience of Holy Week when he wrote that sentence filled with deep and resounding truth, but any…
Setting the table
By Scott Dickison With the arrival of our first son about a year and a half ago, my wife and I have been more intentional about creating our own family holiday traditions. So last Easter, our first together as a…
A tribute to Dean Alan Culpepper: The man and the myth
By Brett Younger For four years at the Mercer Preaching Consultation, Alan Culpepper and I have led a discussion on each year’s Advent texts. The first year I compared us to Simon and Garfunkel. The dean responded that it was…
A new church is coming
By Molly T. Marshall I regularly read the Abbey Banner, which is the publication of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn. I spent a fruitful sabbatical there in 2000, and this Benedictine community remains of interest to me because of…
Technology and a quality life: a delicate balance
By Nora O. Lozano Some Sundays ago I went to pick my son up from his church youth meeting. I was not paying much attention to the time, and until I opened the building door, I realized that I had…
What ‘religious freedom’ used to mean
By Corey Fields At the turn of the 17th century, an English lawyer named Thomas Helwys had become part of a separatist congregation in Lincolnshire (it is to this congregation that many Baptists trace their roots). They were dissenters from…
Bapticostals and Episcojewbus: Hybridity, unity and faith
By Jason Coker Identity is a tricky thing! Religious identity in particular can be a hard one to figure out. I grew up in the Mississippi Delta, which actually has quite a bit of racial, ethnic and religious diversity, but…
Top 10 reasons people cite for not attending church services
Bill Wilson The photo below is of a perfect attendance pin for Sunday school. Many of you have never seen one. There was a day when it was a regular feature in churches all across America. If a person attended…