Browse Archives
Check out news and opinion posts across the years
An Election, A Million Marchers and a Mass Murder
Events in the Republic of Turkey have attracted recent media attention. Three events raise important questions for Turkey's political future, for the small minority of Christians who live and work there, and for every...
Tennessee Governor Lets Death Penalty Moratorium Expire
Tennessee's Democratic governor allowed a 90-day moratorium on the death penalty to expire Wednesday, clearing the way for next week's scheduled execution of death-row inmate Philip Workman. Gov. Phil Bredesen ordered...
Proposed 2007 SBC Resolution Seeks to Boost ‘Exodus’ Agenda
The call for an "exodus" from public schools continues to gain momentum in the Southern Baptist Convention, according to sponsors of a resolution being proposed at this summer's SBC annual meeting in San Antonio. Bruce...
Is Religious Freedom Dangerous?
Religious freedom, actually radical religious freedom, is in the DNA of all healthy Baptists. Truth to tell, religious freedom may be the only special theological contribution Baptists may claim to have made to the...
Alabama CBF Adopts Justice Initiative
Alabama's Cooperative Baptist Fellowship has launched a "Let Justice Roll Down" initiative to bring a goodwill Baptist public witness to bear on issues like racism, poverty, equality of women, education and...
SBC President Questions Motives of SNAP, Says Sex Abuse Everywhere
Southern Baptist Convention President Frank Page suggested an activist group pressing the denomination to confront the problem of sexual abuse by clergy may have a hidden agenda of setting up the nation's largest...
Sex Scandals Rock Republicans, Washington Elites
Money, sex and power have a moral toxicity when mixed and misused. All three components have contaminated the ethos at the World Bank, the institution intended to help the poor, reduce global poverty and raise the...
A Word For The 21st Century: Don’t Be Afraid
There is coming on the scene a more efficient, though expensive, way to wage war from the skies--the drone aircraft, the Predator. The Predator is the product of the small, privately owned San Diego General Atomics...
Prayer For Rain And The Prime Minister
On April 20 The Sydney Morning Herald reported the Australian prime minister's call to pray for rain in response to the dire state of the Murray-Darling Basin. This call was endorsed in a media release by Ross...
‘Dead Man Walking’ Author Touts Arts in Ethics
Along with education and religion, art is one of three ways to get people to reflect and change consciousness about moral and social issues, author and advocate for abolishing the death penalty Sister Helen Prejean...
The Good Book and Good Citizens
Stephen Prothero is chair of the Department of Religion at Boston University and author of the new book "Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--and Doesn't." He recently published an article in the...
Let’s Use a New Modifier in a New Century to Describe Baptists
Goodwill is an energetic, positive word. It's a proactively muscular word. It contains enough self-definition that further commentary is unnecessary in casual conversation. Let's start describing ourselves as the...
An Emerging Christianity
Christians may believe that they are participants in a "faith once delivered to the saints," but the shape of that faith has varied greatly through the centuries. From the stately and ornate forms of Orthodoxy and...
‘Buying the War’ Available on Webcast
Viewers who missed Wednesday's broadcast of Bill Moyers' "Buying the War" can still tune in on the PBS Web site. Robert Parham of the Baptist Center for Ethics called it "a must-watch for Christians who care about...
SBC Officer Faulted for Support of Killer
The Southern Poverty Law Center criticized the Southern Baptist Convention for electing a second vice president last June whose name appears on a "Declaration of Support for James Kopp," a man convicted of killing a...
Who’s To Blame?
If you have ever owned a computer, perhaps you can relate to my recent experience. Our laptop crashed over a month and a half ago and I am still, yep, without a computer! After sending it off to the Dell plant, we went...
Democratic Candidates Mostly Skip Faith in First TV Debate
Eight Democratic presidential candidates mostly skipped the issue of faith in their party's first national televised debate, a remarkable shift after the manic activity of national Democrats following recent elections...
Why We Can’t Wait on the Millennium Development Goals
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote to Alabama clergymen his open Letter from Birmingham Jail on April 16, 1963. The religious leaders questioned King's tactics and timing, arguing for negotiation over direct action,...
The Bible, Science and Homosexuality
For some time now a contentious battle over homosexuality has raged in our country. The war has been fought primarily on three fronts: religion, politics, and science. Religion and politics are by far the most...
Moyers Probes Role of Press in Invasion of Iraq
A 90-minute documentary probing the role of America's press in the lead-up to the invasion in Iraq marks the return of "Bill Moyers Journal" tonight on PBS. In "Buying the War," Moyers and producer Kathleen Hughes...
Christian Realism Necessitates Support for Bill to Withdraw Troops from Iraq
What are the results of President Bush's surge of more American troops into Iraq, beginning Feb. 1, 2007? Here's a snapshot of a few of the news reports from Monday and Tuesday: 9 U.S. soldiers were killed and 20 were...