Will there be a place in CBF life for folks like me? Armed for bear, a skeptical pastor sits down for coffee and conversation with the new leader of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Here’s what she discovered.
Why all Christians, not just Baptists, are profoundly indebted to Glenn Hinson
A weekend of lectures on the life and teaching of Baptist historian E. Glenn Hinson prompts further reflection on Hinson’s contributions over six decades. These are just four of his many gifts to the Christian community.
Teaching and learning dissent: the witness of the minority
Learning dissent is never easy. One person’s prophet is another’s anti-Christ. One person’s conscience is another’s bigotry. Sometimes dissent can get you damned. Sometimes (like now?) silence can too.
‘Anticipatory mourning’: America’s youth on death, guns and dissent
We’ve ritualized death away from the young in this culture, in funeral homes and hospice facilities, but it has overtaken them with a vengeance in what were once safe spaces for learning.
Baptist brokenness: Reconciliation and revolution
I am sick to death of decades of our ceaseless inability to avoid personal, spiritual and communal schism in our churches and ourselves. Truth to tell, however, 2,000 years of Christian history illustrate that the same Jesus Story that unites all Christ’s church often drives it apart. I’ve often teased that “Baptists multiply by dividing.” It’s not funny anymore. Never was.
Consciences: distressed and dissenting
In Dissent in American Religion, the great historian Edwin Scott Gaustad wrote, “Should a society actually succeed … in suffocating all contrary opinion, then its own vital juices no longer flow and the shadow of death begins to fall across…
Whining, dissenting and knowing the difference
By Bill Leonard Do you ever whine? Chiding turns to complaining, and morphs into whining before you know it. I feel completely qualified to talk about whining since this month marks my 40th year of teaching students in American higher…
Vatican II, 50 years later: a Baptist appreciation
Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council by Pope John XXIII on October 11, 1962. My service as a member of the Baptist World Alliance delegation to a series of bilateral ecumenical conversations with…