By Harry Lucenay March 17, 2003, Nancy and I arrived in Hong Kong. As we were taking our bags into the place where we would be lodging for the next few weeks, a cell phone rang. The caller told our…
Ban the bomb?
By Norman Jameson Remember when you had to duck under your school desk for a nuclear attack drill? It made me wonder what all the fuss a nuclear bomb was about if hiding under my desk would protect me from…
Unholy smoke
By Benjamin Cole Can anything good come out of Mexico? That’s the central question in the minds of millions of Americans who have favored protectionism over of free trade, gun-toting Minutemen at the border instead of substantive immigration reform and…
Torture, human dignity, and Christian failure
By David Gushee The recent release of four key memos from President Bush’s Justice Department does not exhaust the revelations that are still to come related to the brutal interrogation policies of our government in the years following the 9/11…
Book review: Wade Burleson’s Hardball Religion
By Benjamin Cole Hardball Religion: Feeling the Fury of Fundamentalism, by Wade Burleson. Paperback/288 pages. Published by Smyth & Helwys. Hardball Religion is the personal story of Oklahoma pastor Wade Burleson and the two tumultuous years he served as…
What’s a Baptist to do on Maundy Thursday?
By Benjamin Cole One of the unfortunate realities about being Baptist is that you seldom understand or observe the Christian festival calendar. In fact, many who are reading this column will not know what a “festival calendar” is. For most…
A cross-shaped world
By David Gushee The Christian faith presents as its central image a bleeding man dying a cruel death on a Roman cross. We say that this Friday-afternoon misery was the central event in both human and divine history. We most…
On marriage, time to separate civil from ecclesiastical
By Jonathan Lindsey In this 400th-anniversary year of Baptist history it’s time for Baptists to take the lead — and invite other ecclesiastical bodies to join them — in removing one of the final vestiges of theocracy in the United…
Culture war without end
By David Gushee Over the last ten years I have written two books and countless articles in which I suggested and hoped that the culture war between cultural conservatives and cultural liberals would — and should — end. I now…