I was fifteen-years old when the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday first became the law of the land. Having lived my entire childhood in Georgia, also Dr. King’s birthplace, I knew his story and heroics well. I also knew that he was often maligned – sometimes viciously so.
When the first official King Day rolled around on the calendar, it produced some brisk conversations within my extended family, community, and yes, my church. Never can I forget standing outside the church building on a cold Sunday night, a nosey and curious …

“Love others as much as you love yourself,” Jesus told his followers. These words are considerably more than a sugary Sunday School story. For those who take these words to heart, “love others” has profound, life-altering implications, not all of which are warm and fuzzy. Consider the life of Bernard Lichtenberg, arrested seventy years ago this month. His crime: He loved.
Lichtenberg was a Catholic priest serving in Berlin before the outbreak of World War 2. When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power, he recognized the coming terror …

“Here I stand! I can do no other,” Martin Luther reportedly said as he stood before the papal commission that was investigating his radical beliefs. Taking a “stand” has been the Protestant rage ever since. We children of the Reformation, and I include myself in that family, just love to tell others what we believe.
When such telling begins, it doesn’t take long for words like doctrine, creed, tradition, and orthodoxy to get thrown around. Or, we use the opposite of these: Error, heresy, and sacrilege. We take our “stand” with …

Sometimes I just have to clap at the end of a film in a movie theater. I did that one recent Saturday at the end of the showing of  ”The Help,” and it started a modest clapping by others at a Harkins theater in Chandler. You just have to clap when insidious human practices are so wonderfully exposed.  Blatant racism of the Old South is showcased.
“The Help,” which has finished three weeks in a row at the top of  film ticket receipts, demonstrates why movies are made, why they need to be …

What if it were possible for us to travel back in time some hundred or so years? What if we could do that, and upon meeting our not so distant ancestors, we said to them, “We are here to reveal the future! In the coming century you will enjoy incredible technological advancement: Personal computers, mobile phones, and air conditioning. Everyone will have gasoline powered automobiles. Commercial airlines will carry people all over the world. There will be automated machines that will wash and …

I have been guilty at times of misleading the congregations to which I have spoken. Truth be told, every man or woman who has ever preached a sermon or led a church has been guilty of the same. None of us are perfect, not even “the clergy;” maybe, especially the clergy. We all have blind spots and myopic presuppositions, so “rightly dividing the word of truth,” as the old Apostle put it, is not as easy as it appears.
My mistake, one of many, …

Recently my father gave me a superb little book that contains three great speeches by past Native American chieftains. One speech was by Chief Joseph; one by Chief Seattle – both leaders of tribes in the American northwest; and the third was by a lesser known man named Chief Red Jacket.
Red Jacket was of the Seneca tribe, who lived in what is now New York State and regions of Canada. Red Jacket was once called to a council in 1805 by Christian missionaries from New England. The purpose of this …

Buford Pusser was born and raised in Adamsville, Tennessee. As a young man he moved to Chicago and began an aspiring career as a wrestler. He was known as “Buford the Bull” in the ring, and somehow the Bull gained the attention of Ms. Pauline Mullins, another small-town immigrant from the hills of West Virginia.
The two fell in love and were married, and Buford traded in his wrestling tights for something that better paid the bills. He and his family moved back to Adamsville, Tennessee where he took his first …

Over the years writing  religion articles for newspapers, I have been skeptical about faiths with claims of possessing authentic fragments of Christ’s experiences on earth.  The Roman Catholic Church is said to possess an incredible range of items from the scene of  Christ’s crucifixion, including particles of the cross, Jesus’  loin cloth and Mary’s cloak.   There’s a dizzying list of relics in the bowels and vaults of the Vatican and in possession of Catholic churches. “Jesus’ baby blanket” is said to be in Aachen, Germany. There are many claims of having nails or fragments of nails from …

Life is so good when we experience  justice. This day, we bask in the progress of an American president signing into law a new national military policy that anyone, regardless of sexual identity, may serve his or her nation authentically.  We revel in Congress’ passage of the legislation to remove the ignoble ”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
I think back to my U.S. Army days in 1971 when the clerk in Company A-2-3 told me he was gay on the night before his discharge. He had to head off to New York …