By David Gushee I have spent much of the summer reading the massive Fortress Press critical edition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. Insights drawn from that reading will show up in this column now and again in days to come. Here’s…
Democrats wooing of evangelicals
By David Sanders For years, Democrats and secular leftists accused the religious right and their friends in the Republican Party of blurring the lines between church and state and using God to achieve a political advantage. But more recently, Democrats…
Billboards a blow to U.S. history
By Brent Walker For the next six months, people on the roads of Pinellas and Hillsborough counties in Florida will rumble past billboard ads making false claims and misleading assertions about our country’s history and commitment to religious freedom. One…
Tanzanian women reap what they sew
By Suzanah D. Raffield I’ve just returned from Tanzania and four weeks with a maternal health women’s sewing cooperative. My time there was remarkable. Joy and sadness seemed exaggerated by the lives and needs of those around me. As a…
MBC lawsuits’ winners and losers
By Bob Perry The lawsuits filed by the Missouri Baptist Convention against the five institutions that began selecting their own trustees in 2000 and 2001 have gone on for about seven years now. Only the one against Windermere Baptist Conference…
Racial profiling continues to be the norm
By Miguel De La Torre Maybe the Cambridge police did not act “stupidly,” but did they act typically? Maybe the renowned historian overreacted, but if you lived a lifetime of racial profiling, would you have acted differently? Maybe the police…
A free press essential for free Baptists
By David Currie I had the pleasure of meeting Walter Cronkite, who died July 17 at age 92, several times in my service on the board of The Interfaith Alliance. He supported our work out of a deep commitment to…
Truly valuing freedom of conscience
By David Gushee Moderate Baptists have distinguished themselves from their more conservative and fundamentalist brothers and sisters for a generation through their elevation of freedom of conscience to a near-absolute good. While the conservatives who came to dominate the Southern…
A Christian and a conservative
By David Sanders By the 1970s, many Christian conservatives had rightly decided that the counterculture revolutions of the previous decade had taken a moral toll on the country. Something, they reasoned, had to be done about it. What started as…