As a child, I possessed a somewhat fearful disposition toward the world. After a few years of tearful late-night sit-ins outside my biological father and his new wife’s locked bedroom door, or screaming near-weekly announcements to the employees of my…
We’ve misunderstood Darwin about who survives
Charles Darwin has done a real number on us, hasn’t he? But it’s not his evolutionary theory that is the problem. Fifteen billion years instead of 6,000 should be more evocative of anything divine than destructive of it. Who (besides…
Let’s stop covering up the enablers of racism in America
Back during the heated battle for control of the Southern Baptist Convention, Ed Young once chided the denominational press for seeking information about a fundamentalist leader who had done something untoward. I can’t remember who had committed the sin or…
America: Powered by haters, redeemed by lovers
In my little town in Oregon, I saw a car with two Confederate flags and a bumper sticker that said, “Powered by Haters.” My shock at the blatant declaration did not translate into any direct action, and I wondered what,…
Who wants the crown Jesus refused in the wilderness?
In a widely circulating op-ed in the New York Times, Elizabeth Dias describes a speech then presidential candidate Donald Trump gave at a small evangelical college, Dordt University in Center City, Iowa. The most famous, or infamous, remark in his…
How the ‘Suburban Lifestyle Dream’ and suburban church created Suburban Jesus
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson visited Charlotte, N.C., in January 2020 to announce changes to Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rules. AFFH was an Obama-era initiative that targeted ongoing racial segregation through exclusionary practices in the construction of affordable…
What Abe Lincoln tells us about Trump, Biden, guns, God and Falwell Jr.
In the land of the free and the home of the I-don’t-have-to-wear-a-mask-if-I-don’t-want-to-even-to-save-lives, we’re less than three months from the presidential election, and it’s getting nastier by the day. On the way to Nov. 3, apparently even God will not be…
America, these are self-inflicted wounds
The United States has now lost 150,000 people — almost three times the number of people we lost during the Vietnam War – due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic is spreading unchecked across the nation. Meanwhile, national, state and…
History will judge both John Lewis and Donald Trump
The death of John Lewis has once again brought into sharp focus the stark differences between the congressman and the president. The future congressman was born as one of 10 children of Alabama sharecroppers Eddie and Willie Mae Carter Lewis….