Rev. Tim Sizemore’s deep southern accent reflects his Alabama roots. Tall, clean cut and blonde, with a wife and three kids, he fits the image of a white Southern Baptist preacher, living in the conservative central Florida town of Lakeland….
Come ye sinners
Happy birthday, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the crisis of liberal belief
George Marsden is an evangelical Christian who is deeply troubled by the current state of American evangelicalism. But in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment the celebrated historian turns his attention to the failed quest for an American religious consensus in the…
Four emerging trends in small town churches
Today kicks off a new series of blog posts called “What’s Trending,” where I will specifically discuss cutting edge trends that might push a few boundaries for many rural churches. The trends I will name in this series will range…
Remembering Thomas Merton
Growing up in rural northwest Missouri, I didn’t have much opportunity to know people who belonged to the Catholic Church. And then during my years in two Baptist colleges and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, that didn’t afford much possibility…
Christianity at a crossroads in America
Christianity, along with other faith traditions, is at a crossroads in American life. Many sociologists see the road leading us to a European secularism, where mostly-empty churches are monuments to the hollowed-out faith of the masses, and serve as reminders…
The painful inevitability of moral conflict
Mars and beyond—expanding our theology of God’s universe
We now have definitive evidence for organic molecules, both in the atmosphere and in the rocks of Mars. On Earth, organic molecules are the stuff of life. This could mean life—microbial life, that is—exists now on Mars, or it could…