Browse Archives
Check out news and opinion posts across the years
‘The Hollywood Project: A Look Into the Minds of the Makers of Spiritually Relevant Films’
With the recent publishing of Behind the Screen: Hollywood Insiders on Faith, Film, and Culture, it seems appropriate to look at a comparable book that escaped our review when first published. The Hollywood Project by...
Resegregating America’s Schools
One of the greatest accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement focused on a desegregated education. Until the 1950s, racial segregation in public schools was the norm throughout the United States. In Topeka, Kan., a...
Rescripting Wal-Mart
Theologian Walter Brueggemann uses the term "scripted" to describe the composite nature of our convictions, beliefs and social attitudes. It is a simple concept, but it is crucial for Christians to understand if we are...
Summing Up The Year With Left-Over Thoughts
This is the time of year when all the newspapers, magazines, television news shows go over and over what happened in 2005. All other news is forgotten as we look backward. America is a land of poll-takers. This year...
Joy to the Earth, the Lord is Come!
One benefit of retiring carols for most of the year is that when we return to them at Christmas we can hear them afresh despite their familiarity. This Christmas, as we sang Isaac Watts' classic carol "Joy to the...
Baptist Seminary President, Professors Defend Use of Torture
A president and three professors of Southern Baptist seminaries recently participated in an online symposium on developing a Christian response to the use of torture. Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist...
Columnist Says ID Ruling Should Prompt Exodus from Public Schools
A judge's decision banning the teaching of intelligent design in a Dover, Pa., school district should convince Christian parents to remove their children from public schools, conservative columnist Cal Thomas wrote...
Evangelism, Holy Living and Serving the Poor
The Micah Challenge campaign had a good year in 2005. It called on governments for more and better aid, trade justice and debt relief for the poor countries in our world. While many churches have enthusiastically...
Hope for the New Year
I have become fairly cynical about New Year's resolutions—at least as they pertain to me. Too many broken promises, too many false starts. Now instead of resolutions I make a New Year's wish list. Like, I wish I would...
The State of the Empire
The president of the Northern Kingdom strutted toward the podium. Tonight he would address the empire, sharing his impression of the state of the union. Overall, the news was good. True, at the fringes of the empire...
‘Munich’
Home has a cost. That simple yet frightening notion gives Steven Spielberg's "Munich" its everlasting power as a cinematic work. Beyond terrorism and killing, beyond ideology and doubt, the thought that home has a...
2005 Year in Review
EthicsDaily.com paid and volunteer writers produced more than 750 articles in 2005. They included news and feature stories; movie, book and music reviews; opinion columns and editorials. Here's our review of some of...
Sympathy for Advocates of Intelligent Design
Intelligent design proponents took a hard blow last week when U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III, a Bush appointee, denied a Pennsylvania school district the right to teach intelligent design alongside evolution....
Actors in Malick’s ‘New’ Film React Differently to Its Style
Terrence Malick, writer and director of "The New World," so shuns media attention that reporters rarely, if ever, get to ask him questions. Instead, we poke and prod those who work with him for clues about the man who...
Pursue Justice on Trafficking at Pentagon
The president issued a declaration. The Congress passed a law. The Pentagon turned a blind eye, ignoring defense contractors that engage in human trafficking—prostitution and slave labor. According to the Chicago...
British Baptists Pray for Hostages in Iraq
British Baptist leaders asked churches to pray during the Christmas season for a kidnapped British hostage and three fellow captives being held in Iraq. Norman Kember, 74, a longtime member of Harrow Baptist Church in...
Baptists of the Year: Paul Montacute
Time Magazine named Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates as their persons of year 2005, recognizing them as global Good Samaritans committed to ridding the world of poverty, disease and indifference. Baptists have their own...
‘The New World’
Grass waving, birds flocking and water rippling—those are stock shots in writer-director Terrence Malick's latest film, "The New World," which lays out the legendary story of Pocahontas, John Smith and John Rolfe with...
Wal-Mart Employees Denied Lunch Breaks Awarded $172 Million
Current and former Wal-Mart workers in California received an early Christmas present last Thursday when an Alameda County jury ordered the retailer to pay $172 million for denying lunch breaks as required by state...
The Challenge and Joys of the Micah Challenge
Our church has long sought to preach the gospel and put it into practice locally and around the world. Putting it into practice, which is the core of Christian ethics, has always been the harder part. We were looking...
‘The Gospel According to America’
The other volumes in the Westminster John Knox "Gospel According to…" series (the Simpsons, Tolkien, Disney, Oprah) have all had more focused subjects than David Dark's "The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on...