When I saw the recent headlines of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos being reunited with his father after being held in a Texas detention facility for more than a week, I softened at the sight of the blue bunny hat. And…
What your faith community needs to know for Suicide Awareness Month
This article discusses suicide and suicidal ideation. If you are in crisis, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You know someone, even if you don’t know it. You work with someone. Go to school with someone….
What will you do with your Daniel scar?
Today, I did something I’ve never done before at a funeral. Something so ill-advised that pastoral care professors reading this likely will flinch on hearing it. Something that’s the wrong thing except when it is suddenly very necessary. I told…
‘By the Time You Read This,’ a mother’s quest to tell the rest of her daughter’s story
January 30, 2022, will forever be etched into the mind of April Simpkins. She continues to grieve the loss of her daughter, Cheslie Kryst, who by all outside appearances had been living a perfect life. Cheslie was Miss USA in…
A pastor’s wife’s questionable suicide sparks suspicion and highlights the fruit of abusive theologies
Mica Miller’s body was found at 3:03 p.m. April 27 in Robeson County, N.C., with a gunshot wound to the head, an hour and a half drive away from her home in Myrtle Beach, S.C., two days after serving her…
Nex Benedict death ruled suicide, setting off a new round of suspicions and denials
Nex Benedict died by suicide a day after a fight with bullies at their high school, according to a medical examiner’s report released March 13. The 16-year-old nonbinary student’s death has drawn international headlines for a month now, cited by…
God (suffers) with us
As we laid Phyllis, my paternal grandmother, to rest Dec. 11, 2019, I looked around and saw my family trying to piece themselves together. It was an intense funeral, the kind that comes after an unexpected loss; the kind where…
Making sense of the senseless death of an Alabama pastor
I did not know F.L. “Bubba” Copeland, but I probably have more insights into his tragic story than most Baptist pastors. Copeland, mayor of Smiths Station, Ala., and pastor of First Baptist Church in nearby Phenix City, took his own…
Now I know my grandmother was a person, not just an event
Note: This article includes graphic descriptions of suicide. In my life, she wasn’t a person. She was an event. My mother’s mother ended her own life with a shotgun blow to the head. It’s a conversation stopper if there ever…
Anti-LGBTQ legislation is bad science, bad politics and bad theology, and it’s going to get people killed
Needing yet another wedge issue for election season, Republicans in many states are at work attempting to pass legislation that targets LGBTQ people, with a special emphasis on the T. The year 2022 already has surpassed the record-breaking 2021 as…
Racism-induced trauma creates hopelessness in Black communities, scholars say
As he consults with Black congregations, Black church scholar Lewis Brogdon often advises them to prioritize adding a mental health professional to their staffs. That’s because Brogdon, director of the Institute for Black Church Studies at Baptist Seminary of Kentucky,…
How 29 syllables changed my heart about God and gay people
“For the last 20 years, I thought if there was a God, he probably hated me for making me the way I am.” I can’t communicate the destructive power those words had on me. Back then, I was a conservative,…