My father gave me a .22 rifle for my 16th birthday. We shot it together at empty plastic milk containers for target practice far out of town. After heading off to college, my birthday rifle sat on a shelf for…
A Methodist church leads an interfaith response to Texas outlet mall shooting
A United Methodist congregation in Allen, Texas, is leading an interfaith response to the May 6 mass shooting at a local outlet mall that ended with eight deaths and multiple injuries. Suncreek United Methodist Church kicked off its interfaith effort,…
Our weekly gun massacres mark a devastating cultural failure
Our weekly gun massacres in the United States are shocking in the extreme. They set us apart from other nations in the worst possible sense. I have not yet been in or near one of these massacres. The closest I…
The good news and bad news of our latest mass murder
The good news is, it’s still against the law in Texas to kill an entire family in cold blood. The bad news is, it’s just fine in Texas for an unstable man to possess an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle and…
The other epidemic: Fear
The more I read the news, the more I become convinced there’s another epidemic currently facing the nation. It seems to be particularly acute in churches right now, too. And while it’s an epidemic largely of our own making, it…
Expelling dissent: America from Roger Williams to the ‘Tennessee Three’
On March 29 in the year of our Lord(?) 2023, hundreds of young people, many of junior and senior high school age, descended on the Tennessee state house in Nashville to demand government action to reduce the threat of school…
Honeycutts’ son-in-law among dead in Louisville shooting
One of the victims of Monday’s mass shooting in downtown Louisville, Ky., is the son-in-law of Roy and June Honeycutt and a member of a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship church. Roy Honeycutt, who died in 2005, was the last moderate president…
Hypocrisy
When we boil down all the assorted examples of how evangelicals have sold themselves to Donald Trump for 30 pieces of silver, one word summarizes it all: Hypocrisy. Call it irony. Call it opportunism. Call it greed. Call it a…
In the Nashville shooting, talk of gender and mental health interrupt the conversation about guns
Confusion over the gender identity of the Nashville school shooter has allowed some commentators to flip the script and blame mental illness, not guns, for the death of three 9-year-olds and three adults at Covenant Day School last week. U.S….