The nine individuals murdered last night in Mother Emmanuel Church are martyrs. Their lives bear faithful witness not just to a particular faith, but also to a segment of citizenry within both our country and the peaceable kingdom of Jesus…
Challenges today defy easy answers, demand best efforts of Baptists and others
By General Counsel K. Hollyn Hollman These are trying times to promote “religious liberty for all” as the BJC mission statement demands. Many of the current challenges on the legal and cultural fronts are not conducive to easy answers.
Jesus and our restrictive pools
It’s happened again. Fortunately, this time no one was shot or killed, so we can breathe a collective sigh of relief. That is, relief in the sense that innocent black children were “only” traumatized, their lives were “only” threatened and…
A tale of two commencement addresses
By Executive Director J. Brent Walker School is out, and summer vacation is here! Congratulations to our graduates – not just high school, college, seminary and graduate school but, nowadays, all the way down the line. My five-year-old grandson even…
Racism evident in response to Texas pool party
True confession: I am a 53-year-old white male raised primarily in the South, and I occasionally find myself involuntarily thinking racist thoughts. Not big, dangerous racist thoughts, just the kind of insipient stereotyping that comes as second nature to most…
Christians must cry for justice when lives are taken unjustly
José Antonio Elena Rodríguez was only 16 when he was killed, walking home from a basketball game in October 2012. According to what news reports have pieced together, the unarmed child was shot 10 times, 8 in the back, by…
On reading Malcolm X’s autobiography
Marking the 50th anniversary of its publication Malcolm X’s Autobiography was the first book that scared me. Here I was, in the transition from adolescence to young adulthood, secretly abandoning my pietist-revivalist rearing in favor of the more verdant fields…
The uncomfortable discipline of remembering
As a pastor serving in an active military community, I am privileged to serve alongside those who serve or have valiantly served our country. In recent days I have enjoyed conversations with two retired Army chaplains, I have dialogued with…
The culture of poverty
The term “culture of poverty” was introduced by Oscar Lewis in his seminal 1959 book Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. (If you don’t know about Lewis, 1914-1970, as I didn’t until very recently, he was…