According to a front page, above-the-fold, article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has launched a 12-year project that will see 69 heroes of the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention celebrated in stained-glass. This ambitious…
Advent: the scenic route to Christmas
In the 1970’s when Interstate 20 opened between Atlanta and Birmingham, many local residents were looking forward to faster travel on the new freeway. For years, my family had traveled to Birmingham from Anniston on old highway 78, a two-lane…
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. …
Practicing peace
By Brett Younger The tree in my living room, which went up the day after Thanksgiving, is starting to shed like Charlie Brown’s. I only enjoyed singing “Last Christmas (I Gave You My Heart)” the first time it came on…
Duck Dynasty, free speech, and persecution
By now you have heard about controversy involving ‘Duck Dynasty’ A&E star Phil Robertson. Robertson, recently spoke to GQ about his personal beliefs: Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there… Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman…
What makes a Christmas card a Christmas card?
Since about 10 days before Thanksgiving, our festive household has received a regular collection of colorful greeting cards appropriate for the various holidays that occur during the last six weeks of the year. The first to come were the greetings…
God’s way of saving the world
As part of an Advent service, I was asked to speak on a question: “What is the significance of Christ?” Ideally, my presentation needed to take about three or four minutes. Here’s what I wrote. What is the significance of…
Go tell it, clearly and simply, experts say
By Vicki Brown “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and other popular Christmas songs encourage Christians to share the gospel with joy, but theologians say that in a society increasingly unfamiliar with the Bible, clarity is key. “We need greater…
Not afraid of miracles
By Amy Butler I don’t really believe in miracles, at least the kind my siblings and I used to watch with fascination on Christian television when our parents told us to amuse ourselves and there was nothing else on. This…
Wait! Advent 2013
Celebrating Advent means being able to wait. Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes…
Calvinists plan student mission confab
By Bob Allen Students of the New Calvinism movement identified by titles including “young, restless and reformed” will head to Louisville, Ky., during Christmas break for a missions conference organized “for the global purpose of magnifying the kingly majesty of…
Time to wake up
I recently sat down with Ian Morgan Cron’s memoir, Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me. For those who aren’t familiar with Ian Morgan Cron, he is an Episcopal priest with a gift for writing, and his story is a…