By Chuck Queen What are we to make of the Gospel story of the poor widow who put in the temple treasury all she had to live on (Mark 12:41-44)? In the previous Markan paragraph Jesus denounces the self-righteousness of…
The power of negative thinking
In some ways it has been the curse of my life, a genuine burden and even bane of my existence. For as long as I can remember I’ve tended to see problems everywhere I look. To my way of thinking,…
Brain trends, part 1: Enhancement
By John Chandler If you’ve ever heard a motivational speaker — or, heck, had a coach — you’ve been told that we only employ a tiny fraction of our vast mental capacity, and that we can tap into so much…
Things forgotten: The unexpected experience of ‘coming home’
Written by Deborah Foulkes, Ph.D. During the summer of 2015, I had the opportunity to travel to Africa for the first time as part of Biblical Seminary’s Global Trauma Recovery Institute program. As the plane touched the Tarmac, I was…
Never give up … Royals style
During a walk with my family yesterday afternoon, my eyes glanced over toward a wooded spot along the trail. It’s a place where my gaze frequently lingered the past few months. Early in the summer, my three-year-old son found a…
Givenness
By Scott Dickison Marilynne Robinson, the gifted writer, novelist and Christian apologist, argues in her new collection of essays that for all our modern questioning and search for meaning we often fail to appreciate the “givenness of things.” I’m taken…
How a Baptist preacher learned about mass incarceration
These days, everybody seems to agree that mass incarceration–the policy of fighting crime by locking up as many people as possible for as long as possible–was a really bad idea. Charles and David Koch, Ted Cruz, and a steadily lengthening…
Are Bible apps sapping the life from our faith?
By Jeff Brumley The Bible at your fingertips. A worship service in the palm of your hand and prayers and devotions streaming into your ears. The advent of the app has made all of that possible for any Christian with…
The art of the collapse
When I make a work, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse. — Andy Goldsworthy Churches are fragile things. Not the buildings, of course. We build those out of sturdy material. Heavy stone and thick timber…
Church history: Toward the future
This is the eighth of a nine-part series on empowering a faith community to impact the world. Already theology, hospitality, evangelism, missions, ethics, Bible, and spirituality have been explored. These articles can be found at the Perspectives tab at Baptist…
Moving into the future confidently
In his address to the U.S. Congress several weeks ago, Pope Francis noted that young people do not have a positive outlook for the future. “We live in a culture,” he said, “which pressures young people not to start a…
Southern communion
By Laura-Lee Kidwell Jones As a hospice chaplain, I am regularly asked, “Why do you visit with Alzheimer’s patients?” My standard answer includes, “Because perhaps they will know that someone is there and they will, possibly, for even a moment…