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Two weeks ago, the Sunday Boston Globe magazine ran an essay — not a news story, I admit — that I have been thinking about ever since. It was called “What I Believe” and it was written by Charles Pierce, a staff writer at the publication.
It’s difficult to understand why only FOX News Radio and World Net Daily thought this was news. I gave it a few days to incubate. To no avail.
Believe it or not, not all evangelicals attend a megachurch. In fact, if you check out this top graph from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, you’ll see that 59 percent of churches nationwide have an attendance of seven to 99 people.
There’s a certain irony in the relationship between atheism and Christianity and this ABC News story highlights that. It’s about some subset of atheists adopting a debaptism rite modeled on the Christian baptism rite.
I’m down here in Houston where my church body — the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod — is having its 64th triennial convention. This is the second convention I’ve attended as an adult and it’s always a lot of fun to catch up with folks from across the country and have those in-depth conversations about theology and practice.
If one looks up “reform” in a dictionary, it’s obvious that, when used as a label, this is a pretty good finger-pointing word, a term that separates the good guys from the bad guys. For example, when used as a verb:
I have been on the road all week so I must confess that I am way behind on my Summer of Sex readings, which is that annual wave of mainstream-media coverage of debates in the oldline Protestant denominations about you know what.
One would have to conclude, after reading the latest Washington Post hymn to the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, that we are witnessing the end of an era in which old Southern Democrats walked the earth like complex, even troubled, men of the people.
