Browse Archives
Check out news and opinion posts across the years
August 29, 2017
More Than 3,000 Rescues After Harvey Hits Texas (CBS News) Religious Groups, With More to Come, Are Already Assisting Harvey Victims (Baptist News Global) Joel Osteen Slammed for Closing Megachurch in Aftermath of...
Sacrificing Jesus for short-sighted, self-serving gains
By John D. Pierce It is odd and sad seeing so many American evangelicals giving up on Jesus and choosing a course that affirms their prejudices and justifies their fears and anger. What a strange time to be Christian...
When Faith Leaders Must Make a Crucial ‘Pivot’
I would imagine that students of "leadership" are having a field day with the current public drama in the U.S. Weekly, sometimes daily, issues and policies from local to global scale are flying back and forth like...
Your Church’s Senior Adult Ministry Is About to Change
The declining number of folks from the Builder Generation will have a significant impact on local churches over the next decade. Local churches and denominations have talked for a long time about the overwhelming...
Teenage Deaths from Drug Overdose on the Rise
The number of U.S. teens dying from drug overdose is on the rise, according to a report released in mid-August by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). From 1999 to 2007, the CDC tracked a steady and...
August 26, 2017
Confederate Flag Sales are Booming After Charlottesville (CBS News) After a UN Warning Over Racism, America’s Self-Image Begins to Crack (The Guardian) Virginia Governor Sets Up Commission to Study Racism (WSET) The...
Light Shines In The Darkness
By Ginger Hughes As evening fell, my husband sat with our two-year-old in the middle of his bedroom floor, reading books before bedtime. A small lamp offered a soft glow in the otherwise dark room. Closing the last...
A time that can inform our time, if we let it
By John D. Pierce Like cities around the nation in 1960, Atlanta had two daily newspapers. On Tuesday, March 15 of that year, the evening paper, The Atlanta Journal, gave front-page coverage to the arrest of 79 of the...
Confederate Monuments ‘Keep Open the Sores of War’
I'm from the South - Arkansas to be exact. When I was young, I never understood how the emotional and ideological divisions of the U.S. Civil War continued to cause divide. Sure, when I went off to college in Texas, my...
How Heavenly Citizens Should Affect Earthly Governments
I am a native Lebanese citizen. I was born and raised in Lebanon. I love Lebanon, despite the insecurity, uncertainty and corruption that characterize the country, and despite having grown up during the civil war....
When Churches Appreciate Their Unity in Diversity
Baptists are a "people of the book." That book, of course, is the Bible. Through the years, however, Baptists have had blind spots when it comes to what exactly the Scripture says to us. The Bible is an extremely...
August 25, 2017
Church Coalition Launches Unity Campaign in Response to Hate (Indianapolis Recorder) In Detroit, NAACP Discusses Racism, Voting Rights (Detroit News) Trump’s Spiritual Advisor Claims Challenging the President is...
Not so fast
One frustrating aspect of archaeology is that it takes time: no matter how large the team, you can't descend on a promising tel and uncover all of its secrets in one season -- or even in twenty. Archaeology is a...
Protecting Religious Freedom for People of All Faiths
A community in Quebec has done an interesting thing. The people of Saint-Apollinaire voted to not allow a Muslim cemetery in town. They did so for a rather high-minded reason. As reported by Peter Stockland in The...
4 Traps for Ministers and Their New Congregations
A minister asked me during a recent conversation what I thought were the major traps that most often snared ministers when they moved to a new congregation. Healthy churches and ministers pay attention to potential...
Why Debating the Bible is Good for Your Soul
Lillian Daniel, in a recent sermon on Genesis, told of an Israeli program that required rabbis to study the Torah in groups and learn how to debate its meaning. Debate was not something to avoid, but significant...
August 24, 2017
‘White Supremacist by Default’: How Ordinary People Made Charlottesville Possible (CNN) New Confederate Monuments are Going Up and These are the People Behind Them (CNN) KKK Leader Claims Hate Group Has Grown at Record...
Profiles in Goodwill: Renee Embree
Renee Embree is director of youth and family ministries with the Canadian Baptists of Atlantic Canada and the director of Youth and Young Adult Ministry Studies at Acadia Divinity School in Nova Scotia. 1. Where did...
Women Ministers – Called By God, Gifted by God
I grew up in a form of Christian life that had women pastors, evangelists, church planters and, of course, missionaries. The only thing women could not do in church life was, apparently, serve as denominational...
‘The Invisible Women’
"The Invisible Women: Naming and Proclaiming the Forgotten Women in Scripture and Church Law" is a book of great consequence. Through Sister Sandra Makowski's superb writing, research and scholarship, the poor...
August 23, 2017
‘Don’t Take the Bible Literally’ Says Scholar Who Brought to Light the Earliest Latin Analysis of the Gospels (Telegraph) Historically Black College to Become Home to CBF Seminary (Baptist News Global) Minister...