By Bob Allen The head of Southern Baptists’ agency for moral and religious liberty concerns says an upcoming Sunday observing the sanctity of life is not just about politics or bemoaning a culture in decline, but an issue of private…
Baptists, culture agree about smoking: Stop it
By Bob Allen Under a prevailing Premillennialist theology that holds things on Earth will keep getting worse and worse for believers until Christ returns, coupled with a Calvinism that teaches mankind is totally depraved, it is not unusual to hear…
Texas minister helps bring abuser in Kenya to justice
By Ken Camp When Calvary Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, commissioned Chris Pillsbury to serve in Kenya a year and a half ago, he expected to help women market fair-trade handcrafts, work with a humanitarian medical program and maybe start a…
Mohler: Evolution poll results blow to secularists
By Bob Allen A Southern Baptist seminary president says recent poll numbers showing that one third of Americans reject evolution is bad news for secularists. “Over the course of the 20th century, the worldview of evolution was supposed to replace…
Discerning what is – and isn’t – persecution
By Jeff Brumley In America, a reality TV star gets suspended for controversial remarks on race and homosexuality and conservative Christians claim victim and martyr status in the media. In Egypt, churches are torched by Islamic mobs and those Christians…
Choose ye this day diversity
A strong, natural, cultural tendency among humankind—even those committed to loving all people—is to be in community with those considered to be “our kind of people”. The tendency is to swarm with people with whom there is the least diversity…
Study says race perception gap widening
By Bob Allen Fifty years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech envisioned unity between blacks and whites, a new study finds a growing gap in racial attitudes and experiences in America. “We do not live in a…
Duck Dynasty and the Struggle Over Christianity
There is no such thing as Christianity. I’ll repeat myself so you know I really meant to say it: there is no such thing as Christianity. Instead what we have are reifications and definitions. As with all definitions, the various…
Mary’s baby bump: a divine scandal?
Every year preachers try to make the Christmas story anew. How do you tell the same story in a different way? One angle that many try to stay away from is on Mary’s “situation”: an unwed mother who is pregnant. …