By Bill Leonard As Advent turns to Christmas and the reality of a New Year looms, we revisit that often overlooked post-nativity saga portrayed by innumerable artists as “the flight to Egypt.” Matthew 2:12-14 says that after the Magi left…
How could something so good have been such a bust?
By Jim White How could the New Baptist Covenant II — supported philosophically and theologically by so many Baptists — draw such meager attendance? Some NBC II optimists initially placed the combined attendance potential for the Nov. 17-20 meeting in…
Separate and unequal
By Bill Leonard When Jim Crow segregation laws ruled the American South, their classic defense lay in the phrase, “Separate but Equal,” meaning that while the races were divided, their facilities and services were supposedly the same. Of course everybody…
What do we do before ‘I do?’
By William Roberts “You know of all the weddings we’ve attended this year, statistically, at least one will end in divorce.” It was an odd thing for my fiancé to lean over and tell me as we watch one of…
Was Jesus an object of childhood bullying?
By Steven Harmon Reflecting on Scripture, the fourth-century church father Gregory of Nyssa insists that in the Incarnation the Son of God embraced fully the human condition, including “the advance from infancy to adulthood,” and experienced from others the alienation…
Too much stuff
By Amy Butler I have too many things. I realized this just the other day. Standing in front of an empty closet I thought off-hand, “I could never fit all my stuff in here!” Just one day back from a…
Cancer awareness and hell-wishing
By Christa Brown The American Cancer Society estimates that the year 2011 will bring 230,480 new cases of invasive breast cancer among women in the United States. I’m one of those cases. For me, what was even worse than learning…
The sacredness of human life
By David Gushee I am entering the final stage of a seven-year journey as I make last edits on a book exploring the historic Christian conviction that human life is sacred. The manuscript will be at Eerdmans by month’s end,…
No one did more to kill Jim Crow than Fred Shuttlesworth
By Alan Bean Fred Shuttlesworth is dead at 89. He never thought he would survive the civil rights struggle in Birmingham. Far less protective of his personal safety than men like Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers, Shuttlesworth attributed his…