The Signed Blank Check 
By Foy Valentine

A request from a good friend has been pressed on me to reprint this brief piece. I wrote it long ago; and it has been picked up and circulated in various ways since then. 

It was more than 53 years ago. I had just turned 21. A never-to-be-forgotten summer had come to an end. Clarence Jordan had invited me to spend the time between Baptist Student Week at Ridgecrest and the beginning of graduate school at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary with him and his family at Koinonia Farm out from Americus, Georgia. I had jumped at the chance. The then brand new enterprise was just in its earliest stages. Clarence's idealism was contagious. His courage was awesome. His Christian scholarship was impeccable. His impact for Christ was emphatically growing.
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The Sanctity of Moral Law
By Hans J. Morgenthau

In November 1959, Hans J. Morgenthau, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, published an article in The New York Times Magazine defending Columbia University for dismissing instructor Charles Van Doren for his part in the "Twenty-One" quiz show scandal. The article prompted a flood of anonymous letters from Columbia students, all of whom opposed Van Doren's firing. The following is Morgenthau's response to the students, which ran in the December 2, 1959, issue of The New Republic. It is as timely today as it was then.

You are stung by my assertion that you are unaware of the moral problem posed by the Van Doren case, and you assure me that you disapprove of his conduct. But my point is proved by the very arguments with which you try to reconcile your disapproval of Van Doren's conduct with your petition to rehire him. Your concern is primarily with the misfortune of an attractive teacher, your regret in losing him and the rigor of the university's decision. You support your position by five main arguments: The confession has swept the slate dean, Van Doren will not do it again, his teaching was above reproach, academic teaching is not concerned with substantive truth and the university acted with undue haste. These arguments, taken at face value and erected into general principles of conduct, lead of necessity to the complete destruction of morality.
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A Hal Haralson Trilogy 
By Hal Haralson

• A Sears and Roebuck Christmas
• Rusty Lard Bucket and One Spur
• Sunday Morning Suicide

I have spent most of my professional life working for better marriages and better families, in a total of sixty-one countries of the world. I have been in at the early beginning of marriage and family counseling. I have tried to study the family closely, and to keep up with the literature in the field.

Now, in my later years, I have come to see that much of what I have been doing and thinking has been secondary and peripheral. I have become deeply convinced that we have been ignoring the vital, central reality about the business of living together in families. We have made tremendous efforts to improve the social environment of the family, and I hope we shall continue to do so. We have made great advances in identifying the areas in which families manifest functional dislocation, and I am very happy about that deeper understanding. We have vastly improved our skills in offering help to families in serious trouble, and trained hundreds of thousands of professionals to use these skills.

However, I believe that behind all these studies and efforts there is something vital and essential that we have missed. Let me try to spell it out, very simply, under four headings:
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Updated Monday, November 26, 2001

Jephthah's Daughter 
By William L. Hendricks

Today we're reading a passage of Scripture that is perfectly terrible. It's really ghastly. Why on earth would I choose a text like that? Because it's in the Bible And the Bible is not a sanitized book. Let me rehearse the story with you with a few embellishments. You remember Jephthah. He was the mighty judge in Israel. He was right after Zair who had thirty sons and a mule for each to ride on. At some point I should speak of the ministry and wealth, but we'll save that for another time. After Jephthah was Ibzan who had 30 sons and 30 daughters, which seems a bit much. And he married each of them to someone else so that there were 120 of them. But as for Jephthah, he had one daughter. The story didn't begin well. Jephthah father was a mighty man in Israel, but his mother was a harlot. Does that simply mean that she was not an Israelite? No, I think it means what it says. ...
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Henlee Hulix Barnette: A Special Salute

• Henlee Hulix Barnette - An Activist By Frank Stagg - Issue 012 p.15
• Henlee Barnette - Gentle Prophet By Bill Leonard - Issue 012 p. 20
• The Whitsitt Courage Award - A Response By Henlee Barnette - Issue 012 p. 21

Christian Ethics Today readers will be pleased to see here presented a special salute to Dr. Henlee Barnette. The dean of Christian ethicists, for 26 years he taught Christian ethics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The latest occasion for many of us to rise up and call him blessed was in Louisville on June 26 where a host of friends and admirers, former students and colleagues gathered, prior to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship's annual convention, for the Whitsitt Society's presentation to him of its prestigious Baptist Courage Award. The following fanfare has three parts: (1) an article about Dr. Barnette by Dr. Frank Stagg reprinted by permission of the editor, Dr. Rolin Armour, from Perspectives on Religious Studies; (2) the introduction and award presentation remarks by the Whitsitt Society's President, Dr. Bill Leonard, who now serves as the dean of the Wake Forest University Divinity School; and (3) the response given by Dr. Barnette.

Ecumenical Ethics? 
By John M. Swomley

Is it possible to develop an ecumenical ethics, given the romanticism about church unity in some Protestant churches and the intractable demand of the Catholic hierarchy that ecumenism requires a return to Rome?

The Second Vatican Council under the leadership of Pope John Paul XXIII, 1962-1965, was so successful in making people think that the Roman church had reformed itself and was adapting to the modern world that virtually no Protestant theologians or bishops since then have criticized the Vatican or its subsequent repressive actions. Instead there is a widespread worldwide reform movement of Roman Catholics themselves protesting numerous actions of the Vatican. Their protest is based on the absence of religious liberty, the hierarchy's preoccupation with sexual issues such as opposition to birth control and abortion, the attitude of the papacy toward women and married priests, and the doctrine of papal infallibility.
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Just as I Am 
By Billy Graham 

Book Review By Darold H. Morgan

The most difficult literary genre to review is an autobiography. The reasons are plain. Many of these personal volumes are far from objective, and the writing styles are often uneven. Billy Graham's 740-page life story is an exception because of his genuine humility as well as his acknowledged dependence on a corps of experienced journalists who have helped him.

Few Americans in the twentieth century are more widely known than this North Carolina Baptist evangelist who has preached to more people than anyone else in Christian history. The mere listing of his worldwide crusades is phenomenal. Add to this chapter after chapter of references to world leaders he has met; and he is elevated to a rare and heady category. "Why did You choose a farmboy from North Carolina to preach to so many people?" This is the quote on the jacket which sets the tone of the volume all the way through. A major strength of the book is his in-depth relating of his life and work to his background on that dairy farm near Charlotte. His deeply religious parents, the fervently religious environment of the deep South, and the earliest developments in his Christian experience preparing him for the work of an evangelist are all documented with authentic spiritual insights.
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Watching the World Go By 
By Ralph Lynn

• Education for All the Children of All the People
• Vice, Virtue, and Cats
• On Prayer in Public Schools