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Issue 042
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043 Volume 9 No. 1 February 2003
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Table of Contents - February 2003
Newspaper Ethics and Theological Education
T. B. Maston challenged his Christian ethics students to live every day with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. By that he meant the Christian faith was, in his oft-stated phrase, “abidingly relevant.” I once proposed a course titled “Newspaper Ethics.” Students liked the idea better than administrators did. Using news stories as the basic starting point seemed appealing to seminarians (much easier than reading Niebuhr or Hauerwas), but to the Dean it seemed not academic. Actually however, to address the ethical issues raised in daily tabloids would demand of students their best skills in hermeneutics and moral decision making. In addition, it would prepare them to minister in the real world. Look at this past year. A
course in “Newspaper Ethics” in 2002 would have required students to grapple
with difficult and challenging issues. A brief review of the major ethical
questions of 2002 underscores the importance of Christian ethics. Learning the Lessons of Slavery
Slavery has proved to be the most challenging moral issue in the history of the United States. It prompted secession, which threatened to split the Union into competing nations. It precipitated the most costly war that we have ever fought, drenching our own soil in the blood, not of enemies, but of fellow Americans. Its aftermath gave rise to segregation, which poisoned the soul of the South for a century. Even now, the spectre of racism is the most powerful shaper of our regional identity. The institution of slavery posed the supreme challenge to Southern religion, a challenge that our ancestral faith miserably failed to meet. Here, as nowhere else, white southern evangelical
Protestantism was tried and found wanting at the judgment bar of history. For
our purposes today, the response of Southern religion to the sin of slavery
provides a haunting case study of a faith that failed to grow. For this was not
an instance of timidity or cowardice, as if the pulpit muted its denunciation of
a monstrous evil. On the contrary, the Southern clergy in one voice went to the
opposite extreme; vigorously defending slavery as divinely sanctioned. They
succeeded in making slavery an article of faith in Southern Christianity, an
essential component of its religious worldview. And yet this was a conviction
which all of us finds repulsive scarcely more than a century later. Because we
are agreed on how the slavery question should be settled, let us ask why our
forebears, based on the same Christian faith which many of us share, came to a
totally opposite conclusion. Second Baptist Church and the Little Rock HS Crisis
I proudly serve as pastor to a multiracial congregation today because of the courageous stand Second Baptist Church, Little Rock, took forty-five years ago under the leadership of its pastor, Dr. Dale Cowling. In early September 1957, a hostile crowd watched as Arkansas National Guard troops blocked the entrance of nine black students into the all-white Little Rock Central High School. Three weeks later, on September 25, 1957, after negotiations between Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus and President Dwight Eisenhower failed to resolve the stalemate, Eisenhower called in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to escort and protect the nine black students as they entered the school. In those early days of television news, dramatic images of the conflict in front of the impressive façade of Central High, the largest high school in the country when it was built in 1927, remain in people’s memories. The school was becoming the symbol for a greater lesson in education about equal rights and respect for all people regardless of race. There were really three
viewpoints in those days. The majority made an ugly scene for segregation. A
minority tried to make a reasoned case that the right thing to do was to obey
the law, which authorized the integration of the public schools. Finally, a very
few actually believed that integration itself was right.
The 1968 Statement
Concerning the Crisis in Our Nation For the average Southern Baptist living in the election year of 1968, the world seemed to be crumbling. The civil rights movement had resulted in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis that spring, and tensions were high. Kentucky state paper editor C.R. Daley wondered in an editorial, "Will Southern Baptists Fiddle While America Burns?" There were also fears that Southern Baptist college students might be on the march. When word came that students at the University of North Carolina had formed "Baptist Students Concerned" to "wake up" the SBC at Houston to "the vital issues," many Southern Baptists braced themselves for another takeover as had occurred at Columbia University.
Across the
convention, leaders were realizing that some kind of official SBC resolution,
with broad representation and view, was necessary. Daley again wrote: "Southern
Baptists in Houston should . . . come forth with a loud and clear voice sounding
our convictions on human rights. This voice should be so sharp and strong that
no one hearing it could ever doubt where we stand."
Updated Monday, January 03, 2005 |
Feeling Like A Black Man
Hearing the
melodies,
The contexts of
our lives The Ethics of Horsetrading
Not much happened in Haskell County, Texas during the year 1900...There were some rules that were always observed in Horsetrading:
Politically Correct Language and The “War on Terrorism”
Paraphrasing an aphorism from a nineteenth century sermon by Hugh Price Hughes, what is ethically wrong cannot be politically correct.[1] Conversely, to be authentically correct politically requires correspondence with sound ethics. One might suppose, then, that political correctness would be sought after, as indeed it is by many sensitive people. But other people, some calling themselves “conservatives,” ridicule and mock it, even flouting their desire to be politically incorrect, as Ralph Reed did.[2] Both words and deeds—the talk and the walk—may be politically correct or incorrect depending on how they meet ethical standards. Politics does not allow any neutral ground in such matters. We must use some language; we must make decisions about actions; and whatever language we use or actions we take or fail to take, we change the world we live in for better if we are correct or worse if we are not. In this essay we start our
examination of political correctness with words—the talk. Next we shall consider
some actions—the walk. We conclude with special attention to the issue of war
and peace as that matter hung in the balance last October when Congress
authorized a second Iraqi war.
The Concept of a Just War Momentum seems to be building for a war with Iraq. The Bush Administration has been strategically leaking information for some time now. These leaks serve several purposes, one of which is to measure public opinion about the idea. Administration officials are anxious to know what questions a war with Iraq is likely to provoke. What questions should it provoke? Should we question anything at all? Does being a loyal citizen and patriot require we accept without question whatever our government decides to do—especially in a time of war? This is a hard matter for anyone to resolve and even more so for people of faith. Communities of faith often find themselves in the difficult position of having to choose between conflicting loyalties.
Christianity has a long-standing uneasiness about war. This uneasiness is rooted
in Jesus’ identity and teachings. Jesus was, after all, hailed as “the Prince of
Peace.” It was also Jesus who said, “Love your enemy” and “Turn the other
cheek.”
The American Military Empire: A Threat to Human Rights? America’s
role as the world’s only “superpower” is obvious, and many Americans take pride
in that role. Few, however, are aware that America’s armed forces have built a
worldwide empire that has led millions of people to fear and even hate the
presence of uniformed American personnel. American journalists and the media do
not describe life in the satellites, colonies, and bases that are a part of the
imperial complex, or report the disregard of human rights, environmental damage,
land seizures and other abuses that characterize the American presence. Wall Between Church and State Teeters Under Bush’s Faith Initiatives
The nation will just have to take it on faith that President Bush’s one-man decision to start giving more tax money to religious charities won’t steamroll the wall separating church and state. With a series of executive orders, the president has installed the faith-based initiative that was one of his campaign promises. In doing so, he at least undermined the historic principle that in most situations has wisely withheld public funding from religious activities, and he did so without legislative guidance or the safeguards that any enabling legislation presumably would include. The president was unable to get his program through a chary Congress split among red hots, ice colds and would-be compromisers who couldn’t cobble together a majority for any program. That legislative hesitation
seems prudent, in part because federal law already permits substantial public
funding for religious social work under reasonable restrictions. The overly
picky requirements of the past were repealed several years ago. (Though the
federal granting agencies didn’t always get the word.) Separation of Church and State Philip Hamburger Reviewed By J. Brent Walker Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam John Esposito Reviewed by Darold Morgan No Offense, But Apology Isn’t Necessary By Doug Marlette
The Joy of Eating A motley crew of Positive Thinkers have taken it upon themselves to write books aplenty and articles more than aplenty about The Joy of Cooking, The Joy of Sex, The Joy of This, The Joy of That, and The Joy of Nearly Everything Else Under the Sun, just barely short of The Joy of Having a Root Canal. Over the recent holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, however, the Joy of Eating has washed over my psyche time and again. Why not extol the virtues of this special joy ere the days come on, as the author of Ecclesiastes says, when “I shall have no pleasure in them” (12:1)? Holiday feasts are really wonderful events. Why
let the Blue Noses of this world play the grinch to steal the pleasure from this
wonderful experience? I think, therefore, that I want to slip with you into a
small season of reverie about the Joy of Eating. |
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