By Bob Allen The widow of a Southern Baptist pastor fatally shot during a botched 2009 drug sting has asked that prospective jurors be polled about pretrial publicity of an incident that divided a small north Georgia community as the…
Keep the gov’mint in our bizness
By Joe Phelps Sunrise Children’s Services, the Kentucky Baptist Convention’s agency for at-risk children, receives $26 million of its $27 million budget — over 96 percent — from government funding, according to an Oct. 31 Courier-Journal report about its ongoing…
Who owns the land?
By Miguel De La Torre Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata coined the slogan, “la tierra es de quien la trabaja” — the land belongs to those who work it. The Bible seems to agree. The story of King Ahab, Queen Jezebel and…
The pastoral prophetic edge
By Mahan Siler Prophetic is such a vigorous word. It brings to mind the courageous actions of an Amos, Shiphrah and Puah, Ghandi, Day or King. Prophets stand up, stick out with their actions for justice in the face of…
Is America a culture or an idea?
Is America an idea about “liberty and justice for all” that can be embraced by an endless assortment of people from a wild array of cultures; or is America a uniquely White Western cultural phenomenon that only works when White…
Presumed guilty
Not long ago, my wife Helms and I were having one of those mornings where nothing is going quite right. We were late for everything, we weren’t getting things done, and to top it off, we had forgotten to grab…
Baptist heads farmworker ministry
By Bob Allen Lindsay Comstock, an ordained Baptist minister and former human-trafficking specialist for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, is new executive director of the National Farm Worker Ministry, a faith-based organization advocating justice and empowerment for an estimated 3 million…
Baptist group to ‘wage peace’ in Palestine
By Bob Allen A pastor who ministers among a shrinking Palestinian Christian population in the city where Jesus was born is the scheduled keynote speaker for a Nov. 8-10 conference titled Waging Peace and Justice in Palestine at Calvary Baptist Church…
Still marching
The 40 in the room sit entranced. Most of them are children, and they unusually are silent. The young adults are rapt. Our Freedom School site has always channeled the energy and inspiration of the Civil Rights movement for our…