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Issue
32 <previous< Issue 033
Volume 7 No 2 April 2001 >next>
Issue 034 |
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They All Nourished Me
My long-time personal friend Chuck Doremus sent me a wonderful story from his Bakersfield home. It seems a church attender wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper complaining that it made no sense to go to church every Sunday. “I’ve gone for 30 years now,” he wrote, “and in that time I have heard something like 3,000 sermons. But for the life of me I can’t remember a single one of them. So I think I’m wasting my time and the pastors are wasting theirs by giving sermons at all.” This started a
real controversy in the “Letters” column, much to the delight of the editor.
For weeks the debate continued until someone wrote this clincher: Religious Liberty as a Baptist Distinctive
There is an unbroken chain from the historical and theological starting point for Baptists: soul freedom, to religious liberty for all and its necessary corollary, separation of church and state. See three
concentric circles like the movement in water when a pebble hits a pond. The
center circle is the point of impact, representing the experience of one person
with the Divine, the central event of one’s life, an Act of God’s Grace, the
immediate engagement of heaven with earth: soul freedom. GWB VISITS FBC - The First Faith-Based
Programs Meeting The picture on the front page of the Austin-American was eye-catching. President elect George W. Bush in a metal folding chair, encircled by thirty dignitaries. Behind was a multi-colored bulletin board emblazoned with pictures of youth groups, a cross decorated with a fish symbol, posters advertising “Angels Over Austin,” and names like Mary Kathryn, Jeff, and Jean. What were these national leaders doing in the Youth Department of FBC, Austin? Two days earlier
President-elect Bush invited these thirty ministers and religious leaders to
meet with him to discuss his plans to expand greatly the role of churches and
charities in federal welfare programs. The closed meeting at FBC Austin lasted
more than an hour. Bush reportedly asked the leaders how his administration
should proceed with “faith based” initiatives, a catch-phrase for providing
funds for churches and private charities to take over government welfare
functions and for using tax breaks and incentives to spur charitable donations. What Is Really New About The President's
Faith-Based Proposals? © 2000 President Bush made good on his campaign promise and created a White House Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He wants more federal dollars to flow to those religious groups that supply community services. In Kentucky, those federal dollars will come hard on the heels of state money already pouring into the treasuries of churches, hospitals, colleges, and various religiously-affiliated organizations. The Commonwealth of Kentucky gives money to the children's homes, such as those run by Baptists and Methodists. This is a per diem amount intended to support children referred to these organizations by state and local
courts Should This Marriage Continue? The young woman who sat before me had called the day before to ask advice about getting a divorce. I told her I didn’t give legal advice over the phone but would be glad to meet with her at my office. Since I don’t charge for an initial consultation we could talk and I could help her decide what to do. This was a practice I started almost 30 years ago. It enabled the client to determine whether they wanted me to represent them. It also gave me an opportunity to decide if I wanted them as a client. I get lots of calls wanting to know what my fee is for a certain legal problem. Same
answer. If it’s not important enough for us to sit down and talk, then I
can’t help you. The First First-Lady Perspective Three decades past
I skipped along beside She was some twenty years before you. She was there when my father left—when the bombs shattered the balmy air above faraway Hawaii. With her covey of little ones and no means of support except her two good hands, her strong intention was to serve. She vowed that her life would give life to her brood of nine. I don’t know that
she was brave, but I remember her as fearless. I believe she saw fear as an
unnecessary tremulous contagion. Fear was always contracted in dread and spread
by those who volunteered to quake. If she was afraid, I never knew it. In her
confident presence, I grew up braver that I might have been. Brann
vs the Baptists - Violence in Southern Religion
Mainstream
Southern religion has rarely been distinguished by either restraint or lethargy.
Historically Southerners have, at least partly, agreed with Augustus
Longstreet’s “honest Georgian” who preferred “his whiskey straight
and his politics and relligion red hot.”[i]
The
result has often been scenes of conflict, usually verbal but sometimes violent,
within the ranks of the predominant southern religious groups. The current
arguments dividing Southern Baptists are but the latest in a long series of
disputes, going back in history to the days before the Civil War, when Southern
Baptists split with their northern brethren, largely over the issue of slavery.
In the 1920s, amid controversy similar in some respects to the present
situation, several leading professors at Southern Baptist seminaries were driven
from their posts and went to other institutions, just as many teachers have been
forced to do today. Such internecine struggles have often amazed outside
observers. The Scopes “monkey trial” in Tennessee and the flamboyant antics
of the Reverend J. Frank Norris[ii]
in Texas strike many people as exaggerated, overly dramatic, and foggily
emotional. Yet to dismiss such personalities and events as mere aberrations in
the history of Southern religion is unjustified. They are indicative, albeit in
a grotesque way, of the deep roots of “Bible Belt” religion in the American
frontier culture. The
emergence of the American South as the “Bible Belt” was profoundly shaped by
the unique experiences of the early 19th century Second Awakening camp meetings
in Kentucky and surrounding areas. The revivalistic style of Christian
conversion,
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Reviewed by Mimi Haddad, Executive Director of Christians for Biblical Equality Woman in the Pulpit
President of the Women’s Christian Temperance
Union (WCTU), Frances Willard (1839-1898) was one of the most influential women
in the US in her day. The WCTU, deemed one of the largest 19th century women's
organizations with two million members, had a three-prong mission of abolition,
suffrage and temperance. Comprised of an army of women, the WCTU had an outreach
ministry to workers of many trades. Willard, a convert of a Methodist revival,
was a coworker of D. L. Moody. Book Review by David Gushee, Union University Making Room: Recovering
Hospitality as a Christian Tradition In a time in which many scholarly works are both hastily written and of dubious significance, Christine Pohl's fine work on hospitality is quite the opposite on both counts. It will stand as the benchmark work on this subject for a long time to come. This is a work in ethical archaeology. Pohl digs
through the centuries' layers and discovers hospitality as a way of living out
the Gospel that was once central to Christian experience, but for several
centuries has been marginalized. She argues convincingly that the church needs
to recover the practice of hospitality, not only because it meets the needs of
the poor but also for the church's own sake. Book Review by David Gushee, Union University The Twentieth Century: A Theological Overview The editor, Gregory Baum, attempts in this work to bring a team together that can reflect theologically on the monumental and oftentimes disastrous events of the twentieth century. It is a project that only succeeds in part. The
work is divided into two parts. The first seeks to trace “the impact of
historical events on theology.” The second part offers “theological evaluation
of events and movements.” Book Review by David Gushee Goebbels This is an engrossing biography of one of Adolf Hitler's closest henchmen. As such, it is predictably enraging and depressing. For in Joseph
Goebbels, as Ralf Georg Reuth depicts him, we have in many ways a prototypical Nazi functionary, the kind of man Hitler needed by his side to help destroy the soul of a nation and consume millions of lives.
In Defense of
Multiculturalism
My wife and I spent almost a quarter century living
among the peoples of Colombia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. For more than
two decades we were Baptist missionaries on the Indonesian island of Java, one
of the most densely populated places in the world, with 100 million people
living in an area the size of Tennessee. Our home for 13 years was the
cosmopolitan mega city of Jakarta, with its multicultural collage of 10 million
faces drawn from Indonesia’s 300 or more ethnolinguistic people groups. Later
we lived in the Central Javanese seaport of Semarang, a bustling “country town”
with only one and a quarter million inhabitants. All around us we observed
striking reminders of the ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity of our
adopted homeland. TURNING BREAD INTO STONES Text: Matthew 15: 32-16:1, 5-12; 4:1-4 Have you ever noticed how many stories there are in the Bible related to bread? The preceding are two of my favorites, but there are many others. On 384 occasions in the Old Testament, seven different Hebrew words are translated bread or food, although one word, lechem, appears in almost 300 of the instances. In the New Testament 3 Greek words for bread are used 108 times, while there, too, one word, artos, predominates with nearly100 occurrences, bringing the biblical total to roughly 500 citations. Ah, but man cannot live on literal
bread alone; he must have metaphor. So from Moses to Messiah bread holds a
symbolic and religious significance, as well as literal. Diatribe on Cybernetics The hottest places in the Hereafter, it has occurred to me, may be reserved for the purveyors and promulgators of the cybernetic revolution.
And its vocabulary
paralyzes me: hard drive, floppy disks, bytes, megabytes, gigabytes, dot com,
dot org, web page, download, software, on line, chat room. All this and
more—much, much more, ad infinitum. |
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