News & Commentary About All Things Baptist

My book – James M. Dunn and Soul Freedom – has been reviewed a few times in the last couple of months.  Check out a few snippets below. Review by Dr. Russell Moore, Dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary: Love him or hate him, Dunn was a powerful force [...]

This post is an excerpt from my this week’s column at Baptists Today.  Check it out. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal The repeal of the United States military’s policy banning gays and lesbians from serving openly went into effect this week.  In response, Richard Land, the SBC’s chief ethicist and lobbyist, had this to say: It’s [...]

Chris Hughes is a M.Div  student at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Hughes has penned an interesting column for Associated Baptist Press titled Telling a better Baptist story.  In his column Highes calls on the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship to changes its long-standing policy prohibiting the employment of “practicing homosexuals.”  Here’s [...]

Some interesting news out of Nashville tonight… There, Bryan Wright, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, announced the appointment of a presidential task force to study changing the name of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.  Unlike a number of other Baptist groups, the SBC has stuck with the same name since its [...]

Dominionism and Dominionist These terms have been thrown around quite a bit lately, hurled generally in the direction of Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.  Back in mid-August, Ryan Lizza tied Bachmann to “dominionism” in his controversial profile in The New Yorker of the Tea Party Queen. Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist for [...]

This post is my weekly wrap-up written for Baptists Today.  Read it there and check out my past wrap-up columns. The Houston Chronicle reported last week that Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention are sponsoring a four-year degree program at a state prison in Rosharon, Texas.  Heralded as the first [...]

Check out the latest column by Dr. Thomas Kidd, Associate Professor of History at Baylor University, over at the evangelical website Patheos.  Here is a snippet from Kidd’s column titled Thou Shalt Not Say “Jesus”: Tensions over church-state separation are mounting across America as courts increasingly require the erasure of religion from public spaces. A [...]

This is cross-posted from Baptists Today where I write a weekly wrap-up column.  Check out my past BT columns here. Australian Baptists & Same-Sex Marriage Australian Baptists recently voiced their opposition to same-sex marriage, urging the Prime Minister and other politicians to oppose efforts to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples.  A spokesperson for Australian Baptist [...]

Ken Camp offers a detailed look in the Baptist Standard at the influential and controversial fundamentalist watchdog Texas Baptists Committed.  Camp quotes Michael Bell, chairman of Texas Baptists Committed.  Bell explains that his organization has a role to play in the Baptist General Convention of Texas as long as there exists a second state convention competing for [...]

At the recent GOP presidential debate, conservative columnist Byron York posed this question to Rep. Michele Bachmann: In 2006, when you were running for Congress, you described a moment in your life when your husband said you should study for a degree in tax law. You said you hated the idea. And then you explained, [...]