By Jim Denison On Nov. 14 the Associated Baptist Press published an essay I wrote on Herman Cain and Joe Paterno. Here’s the background behind my article. I write a cultural commentary for our ministry each weekday morning based on…
Christ the King
By R. Kevin Johnson During Advent, we revisited the message of the prophets who told of the coming of the Messiah, the Savior of humankind. During the Christmas season, we joined with Christians around the world to celebrate the birth…
A new angle on Advent
By Ken Sehested Reformation Sunday generally has a hard time competing with Halloween — except, maybe, for our Lutheran friends. Six years before Luther commenced his Ninety-Five Theses’ complaint with the Roman church, an earlier but lesser-known reform movement took…
Trust the people
By Mike Smith Few words spark more immediate anxiety in a pastor than, “Preacher, we’ve found a great book, and we’re going to get a group together and teach it.” This came home when two women informed me they were…
Mormons: Southern Baptist zombies
Maybe it was the return of AMC’s “The Walking Dead” for a second season, but this Halloween it seemed zombies took the place of vampires as the favorite nightmare of the American imagination. To cite one example, thousands of people…
Is Mormonism a cult?
By Jim Denison Robert Jeffress made national headlines recently with his assertion that Mormonism is a “cult” and a “false religion.” Peter Wehner, a political commentator whose blog I read regularly, immediately criticized what he termed “the theological and political…
Reformation Day
By R. Kevin Johnson Reformation Day is Oct. 31. Considering this day in light of our Nov. 1 remembrance of All Saints, the Reformation takes on special meaning for Protestants as we remember the life and the ministry of Martin…
When Baptists voted for a heretic
By Thomas Kidd When Thomas Jefferson won the presidency in 1800, Baptists represented one of his most reliable constituencies. Jefferson’s Baptist supporters knew that the president did not share their evangelical faith, yet they saw him as a great friend…
Was Jesus an object of childhood bullying?
By Steven Harmon Reflecting on Scripture, the fourth-century church father Gregory of Nyssa insists that in the Incarnation the Son of God embraced fully the human condition, including “the advance from infancy to adulthood,” and experienced from others the alienation…