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Issue 061 Volume 12 No. 4 Fall 2006 >next>
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Table of Contents - Fall 2006
Being An Oxymoron: A Liberal Evangelical
A few weeks ago I was a guest on Steven Colbert’s popular television show, The Colbert Report. He introduced me as an Evangelical who is liberal on social issues. Then he added, “He’s a living oxymoron!” Sadly, his words reflect the way Evangelicals are
regularly perceived. Here in the United States, evangelical Christians have
become so married to the Right Wing of the Republican Party that it is hard for
those outside our faith community to imagine that a significant minority of
Evangelicals have socially liberal politics. Yet over its history, evangelical
Christianity has championed some of our country’s most progressive social
movements. The Foy Valentine Memorial Fund—Still Growing! On July 24, the Dallas Morning News published a one column half-page story titled, “Friends of Foy keeping dream alive.” The article began with a picture of President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn, noting they were among the “Friends of Foy” supporting the effort to fulfill Foy’s dream of “an endowment large enough to guarantee [the Journal’s] future.”
Foy Valentine: A Friend For The Ages
The first time I met Foy Valentine was on the telephone. I
was in my faculty office at Louisiana State University late one afternoon when
the call came. When he identified himself I knew the name, remembering his
valiant leadership of Southern Baptists during the turbulent Civil Rights
Movement era. I could not imagine why he had called a criminologist like me,
and I could not imagine how he got my name and number. I was not at all
involved in Baptist life at that time, but I remember feeling honored to
receive a call from someone so important. Henlee Barnette: Prophetic Practitioner
Henlee Barnette spent more than seventy of his life seeking
to communicate and demonstrate the ethical imperatives of the gospel to
parishioners, students, and the larger scholarly world. It did not matter very
much where Henlee was—starting a new church in Kannapolis, NC as a new convert;
serving rural immigrants in the Haymarket neighborhood of inner city Louisville
as pastor/superintendent of the Union Gospel Mission; helping start the first
inner-racial pastor’s conference in Birmingham, AL in the 1940s; teaching
thousands of students in Howard College, Stetson University, and Southern
Seminary; or writing understandable books that translated the foundational
principles of the biblical story into ideas that would work in the modern
world. The Path of Most Resistance
The thrust of human ingenuity and innovation is to make
life easier, from the wheel to the microchip, from the printing press to
penicillin. It is hard to imagine life without air conditioning, microwave
ovens, iPods, cellular phones, ATMs, and flush toilets. (Everyone here can
remember a time when at least one of those inventions did not exist, and there
are even a few people here who can remember a time when none of those
inventions existed.) You could do without them, if you had to, but you wouldn’t
want to, would you? The Path of Most Resistance
The thrust of human ingenuity and innovation is to make
life easier, from the wheel to the microchip, from the printing press to
penicillin. It is hard to imagine life without air conditioning, microwave
ovens, iPods, cellular phones, ATMs, and flush toilets. (Everyone here can
remember a time when at least one of those inventions did not exist, and there
are even a few people here who can remember a time when none of those
inventions existed.) You could do without them, if you had to, but you wouldn’t
want to, would you? Can We Just Talk? I don’t know much about war. And I’m certainly no foreign policy wonk. I don’t even have a degree in political science. So maybe I don’t have much to contribute to the discussion of American policy toward Iraq, Iran, the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, or North Korea. I do, however, have some considerable expertise in
human relations. With a Ph.D. in Counseling and 25 years of experience working
with college students, I dare say that I know a thing or two about people and
how they respond to one another. That said, I am going to jump into the
discussion about what is going on in the world today, and our government’s
actions and reactions thereto.
Updated Friday, November 24, 2006 |
Religion and Government: A New Model
Needed?
When I wrote my doctoral dissertation on religion and politics thirty years ago, there was in the United States no Moral Majority, no Christian Coalition, no Religious Right, and no sense that Christians could vote only for one particular political party and remain true to their faith. I am not really sure what I wrote about. Today, the landscape is greatly altered, and there is much
to write about. Tensions between religion, government, and education have risen
to a fevered pitch. Today I Saw A Man
Today I saw a man. We agreed to meet at the nursing home.
His wife, Millie, has Alzheimer's disease. She requires twenty-four hour care.
I met him to make a medical visit with her. As we got off the elevator, he
bounded toward her room like he was headed to the ice cream counter, moving
down the hall at a fast pace on his way to see Millie. At the end of the hall
he entered the last door to the left. Today I saw a real man. Faith, Family, and Finances The pastor proposed an ambitious and far-reaching outreach plan. He presented it first to the deacon body, or the church board, and then to the congregation. Each group, especially the congregation, had some reservations about the plan, but it was adopted. Why was the plan adopted with these reservations? The
plan was adopted because both the board and the church body trusted the pastor.
The adoption of the plan was not due to the merits of the plan necessarily, nor
the overcoming of the reservations that some members had about the plan, or
even because all the questions were satisfactorily answered. The plan was
adopted because the people trusted the pastor. They trusted the pastor because
they believed that he was a person of integrity. Sunday—Marathon Day
Yesterday, 40,000 atheists, agnostics, Muslims, Jews,
and secularists gathered on the lakefront in our city for a sacred tribal rite.
And seventy-four days from now, thousands will gather at a huge theater near the
lakeshore to celebrate another rite. “You’re just kidding,” you might say. So
I’d better explain. Baptizing Illegal Aliens During the 1970s I taught at Southwestern Baptist
Theological Seminary. The Primera Iglesia Bautista Mexicana of Fort Worth on
the north side of the city was without a pastor. We knew some of the members
because when we arrived in Fort Worth from Argentina, we became members of the
church and they welcomed us very warmly. The Real Tradition of Women as Church Leaders
In claiming church tradition doesn’t allow women to be ordained priests, Vatican and Catholic officials would do well to consider the history of their tradition. According to Dorothy Irvin, a Catholic theologian and
archaeologist, the traditional Christian church had women priests and the
archaeological evidence of this is preserved for us to see today.
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