I headed out to vote yesterday in the Florida primary. We had contests for a number of local offices. I’m registered with no party affiliation, but there was one non-partisan race that needed thinning out and one race that would be settled by the Republican primary. It was a fairly easy task to fill out…
I reported some time ago that the United Methodist General Conference had passed some resolutions in support of evolution and opposing teaching faith based ideas in the public school science classroom. There’s a story in the Fort Wayne, Indiana Journal-Gazette about how this happened and the role of a local church member. I have observed…
Consider these situations: A Sunday School class for young adults is growing by leaps and bounds. Many young men and women who are not members of the church are showing up just for the class. The church leadership shuts the class down because it is not using denominationally approved curriculum. A speaker who is not…
I intended to get started on my response to the NLT Study Bible (Bible Nlt) written a bit earlier, but several things have kept me from getting started. I’m going to write two posts today and tomorrow. This first one is simply a quick, preliminary reaction to this new study edition based on the NLT…
I am not proposing answers at this point, because I haven’t had time to study the situation in any detail, but it seems to me the right time to point out some problems with the questions. It appears to me that almost everything I read about the situation with Georgia, Russia, and Ossetia involves ad…
I had thought about writing something on this, but I think this post says most of what I would say, only better. Especially considering that there has been no marital infidelity reported, and folks have been upfront in with this, it doesn’t seem to me to provide any new basis to judge Bentley’s ministry. I…
When I wrote much earlier about Jeremiah Wright, I tried just a little bit to put it in context of the African American church as I’ve experienced it. That effort was weakened by the fact that I’ve never attended TUCC, and thus anyone could say I was reflecting a very different experience based on those…
I’ve noticed in recent discussions both online and offline that there seems to be some fuzziness about the difference between these two concepts. I think that perhaps our human tendency is to either excuse or condemn. By “excusing” I mean either minimizing a transgression or perhaps even claiming it’s not a transgression at all. When…
My pastor (First United Methodist Church, Pensacola) today caught my attention in a special way two different times. The first was when he announced the reading for his sermon. We had already read the gospel lesson, and the Psalm was included in the call to worship. He then said that we needed to take the…
I have posted before on the sex scandals involving Larry Craig and David Vitter. Now with the admission of infidelity by John Edwards, we have yet another sex scandal. One response, as is often the case with marital infidelity, is to claim that this is strictly a personal issue, one between him and his wife….
