Wendell Griffen seldom minces words. Especially when talking about the coronavirus pandemic and the role he believes former President Donald Trump — and his religious enablers — played in allowing it to spread rapidly and repeatedly across the United States….
Something doesn’t add up about the two Kentucky seminaries suing the federal government over vaccine mandates
“Pandemics unmask who we really are — our morals, our values, our ethics, our humanity. They test us in ways nothing else can.” — Sanjay Gupta, M.D., World War C, 2021 In a tutorial for doctor of ministry students at…
The loneliness epidemic
In 2020, the topic of loneliness was everywhere. Concern for seniors in retirement homes, for singles stuck in efficiency apartments, and for other groups of Americans rose as it became clear that the disease could overwhelm hospitals and interfere with…
Will the Coronavirus Omicron variant delay United Methodists’ split for a third time?
Prospects for The United Methodist Church’s twice-delayed General Conference — the only body that can make binding decisions for the entire 12-million-member worldwide denomination — dimmed considerably with the announcement of a new, more infectious variant of coronavirus now labeled…
Leaving church: So many Baptist resignations
This is the first in a series based on new research by Pam Durso and Carol McEntyre conducted among Baptist pastors who have left their congregations during the pandemic. In May 2020, during the early days of the global pandemic,…
Pew study offers some surprising insights to American views on suffering, salvation, heaven and hell
New research on American beliefs about some of faith’s hardest questions highlights both the nation’s biblical illiteracy and the chasm between what various Christian traditions teach. And it holds a few surprises about how people in the pew actually believe…
In Africa, the challenge is not just low vaccine numbers, there’s also vaccine hesitancy
While inequity has caused the African continent to have less access to COVID-19 vaccines than the rest of the world, vaccine hesitancy already is in full supply. That hesitancy is hampering the global effort to contain or defeat the coronavirus…
Let’s stop the average Sunday attendance freak out
Remember “average Sunday attendance”? If you are the lucky one in your church who completes forms to send to your denomination, you recognize this metric. During the modern era (up to around the year 2000), this metric was a fairly…
Faced with a health scare and a pandemic, Max Lucado is thinking about how to maximize the moment
It has been 36 years since Max Lucado debuted his first book, and even he is amazed how far he’s come since 1985. Just a few years prior to that, he was an associate pastor tasked with writing the church’s…