Mission work and ministry are taking on a dizzying array of new looks in the 21st century. Just ask Greg and Sue Smith, Baptist missionaries who spent years performing traditional mission work in Latin America before opening a ministry serving…
How do we define the circle of we?
I took a rather forgettable class my junior year in college. The course was titled “American Intellectual History II,” although I do not ever recall seeing “American Intellectual History I” or “American Intellectual History III” ever offered in the course…
More than lies and immigration
La versión en español está disponible aquí. “Someone is lying,” I told my son last Wednesday night as I kept flipping channels between the U.S. news networks and the Mexican ones. The major news was Donald Trump’s day trip to…
Our political mantra: ‘Get out of here!’
On Saturday afternoon, walking through Harvard Square on the way to my church, I saw a Muslim woman in a long black garment and niqab. As I passed her, a man suddenly emerged from the crowd, aggressively shouting, “Get out of here! I said get out!”
The problem with not talking about politics at church
Here’s the problem with saying we must never talk about politics at church: We immediately cede to politicians the right to define what is political and what is theological. And then the church loses its voice on theology because important…
Brexit, Trump and the Stranger
The news of the British referendum shook the world this week, sending financial markets into turmoil, prompting rage from British Millennials, and inspiring no small amount of fear in an American public. Few waited very long to draw comparisons between…
Immigrants who aren’t supposed to be in the room
How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar? With these words,…
Legislation would bar religious discrimination in immigration
The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty joined 30 other religious and religious-liberty organizations in a broad coalition urging passage of legislation making it illegal for Donald Trump, if elected president, to bar Muslim immigration. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) unveiled the…
Comparing faith decline in U.S. with Europe, Japan misleading, says professor
Christians anxious about the troubles of the American church often look to Europe’s beautiful-but-empty cathedrals as signs of things to come. But a scholar who studies the connection between fertility, immigration rates and religion said American Christianity is at nowhere near the same place as its European counterpart.