What N.C. Southern Baptist fundamentalists want in an editor?

About the abrupt resignation of North Carolina Biblical Recorder Editor Norman Jameson John D. Pierce of Baptists Today writes

In 2000, Herb Hollinger retired from the helm of Baptist Press — the Southern Baptist Executive Committee public relations arm that masquerades as a legitimate news service. In a meeting shortly afterward, longtime editor of Louisiana's Baptist Message, Lynn Clayton, asked then-SBC Executive Committee President Morris Chapman what kind of person would be chosen to lead BP.

Without hesitation, Chapman responded: “Someone loyal to me and the conservative cause.” While he expanded on that response, there was no mention of competence or experience, just loyalty to those looking for help in carrying out their Fundamentalist agenda. Chapman found such a person in Will Hall. North Carolina will find one too.

Reality denial as a major U.S. industry

Reality denial as a major industry, pretending to be news and thoughtful commentary.

In a remarkable story, Steven Thomma of McClatchy Newspapers writes:

Reaching for an example of how bad socialism can be, former House of Representatives Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said recently that the people who settled Jamestown, Va., in 1607 were socialists and that their ideology doomed them.

"Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow," he said in a speech March 15 at the National Press Club.

It was a good, strong story, helping Armey, a former economics professor, illustrate the dangers of socialism, the same ideology that he and other conservatives say is at the core of Obama's agenda.

It was not, however, true.

The Jamestown settlement was a capitalist venture financed by the Virginia Company of London — a joint stock corporation — to make a profit. The colony nearly foundered owing to a harsh winter, brackish water and lack of food, but reinforcements enabled it to survive. It was never socialistic. In fact, in 1619, Jamestown planters imported the first African slaves to the 13 colonies that later formed the United States.

Please read the entire piece, which covers a long list of similarly eye-popping cases, here.

Using a killer's words to blame the victim

Abused by Baylor University when she had to courage to report being assaulted by "murdering minister" Matt Baker when he was a student there, Lora Wilson is still a target of reflexive abuse.

Blame the victim is a hideous American practice, not exclusively a Southern Baptist sin -- one at which Christa Brown fired back when Lora Wilson was maligned with Baker's words in a recent blog comment.

The smear continues in part because the Southern Baptist institutions which are at fault have failed to acknowledge their responsibility. Christa writes:

To this day, no Baylor official has made any public expression of remorse. No one at First Baptist of Waco, a church that had two reports of Baker’s abuse, has expressed any sorrow about letting the man move on without consequence. No one at the Baptist General Convention of Texas has offered any explanation for how someone with so many abuse and assault reports could move so easily through its affiliated churches and organizations. And no one in Baptistland has made even the feeblest of effort to reach out to the many more who were likely wounded by “murdering minister” Matt Baker -- the many who are probably still silent.

Lullaby for a sleeping conscience

Christa wants to sing sleeping Southern Baptist Convention consciences awake to their neglect of trusting Baptist Children.

Early Christians created the first health-care system

Historian Gary Ferngren writes in his book Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity:

Christians of the first five centuries held views regarding the use of medicine and the healing of disease that did not differ appreciably from those that were widely taken for granted in the Graeco-Roman world.

Those views underlie Christians' development of "the world's first health-care system," writes Rob Moll in his Christianity Today review of the book. That was a reflection of the Christian belief that love of God requires love of fellow man and that is reflected in charity.

As a result of these theological beliefs, Christians developed a robust system for caring for the poor, the ill, widows and orphans, and other members of society in need of care. When the plague struck, this system provided an opportunity for churches to quickly expand and care for those outside the church.

Moll concludes:

The best way to provide care to everyone in the country may be up for debate. We may argue over whether to prefer new regulation of insurers and health care providers or a government-run plan. The need to provide care for the poor, however, was settled centuries ago.

Read the entire review here.

Honoring Christian sanctuary, humanity and immigration

It was within the law to require Jose Juan Hernandez to leave church one Sunday in Texas to be arrested on suspicion of illegal re-entry after deportation. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was performing his sworn duty.

Yet such an arrest, unless to safeguard public safety, unnecessarily disregards the socially constructive tradition of churches as a place of both real and spiritual sanctuary.

Seven denominations have signed a Church World Service (CWS) letter [.pdf] of concern about the arrest to President Obama.

The letter makes three, reasonable requests:

First, make public the current “informal” ICE guidelines that have allowed agents to make arrests at churches under specific circumstances. These guidelines have been kept secret and thus have created fear among immigrants and the faith communities that serve them.

Second, revise these guidelines to prohibit the arrests of undocumented persons in churches and schools unless there is a direct and clear threat to community safety.

And third, work with Congress to pass immigration reform that unites families, provides a pathway for undocumented immigrants to earn legal status and eventual citizenship, and respects the God-given dignity of all persons.

While honoring and enforcing the law, let us not forget that we are fundamentally a nation of immigrants.

Despite the complex balances required by immigration law, do we not believe and wish to honor the promise inscribed on that iconic statue:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Is it not the door that has made us strong?

Southern Baptist Convention vs. Catholic record-keeping about and punishment of clerical sexual predators

Unintentionally, Christa Brown points out how unfair it is of us to allude to Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) clerics as Batholics. Unfair to Catholicism.

As required by canon law, the Catholic Church keeps meticulous records on its clergy. In part because the Catholic Church has dealt with sexual predation by the clergy for hundreds of years, the records are inclusive of such matters.

Whereas the SBC neither keeps such records nor requires that any be kept, as she explains:

Usually, they not only allow the accused ministers to continue in ministry, but they don’t even keep any records about victims’ accusations. It is as though it never happened.

It is as though Baptist leaders believe “no records” means “no abuse.”

It certainly means no action, whereas the modern Catholic abuse and scandal appear to have arisen in part from a departure from early church practice, which required action against clerical predators. For in the early church, there was no tolerance for it, as Brendan Kiley explains:

The first official decree on the subject was written at the Council of Elvira, held around A.D. 305 near Granada, Spain. The precise history is complicated, but the council is traditionally believed to have set down 81 rules for behavior, the 71st of which is: "Those who sexually abuse boys may not commune even when death approaches." It was the harshest one-strike policy: If you're caught abusing a child, you are not only laicized, but permanently excommunicated—damned for all time."

The SBC simply accepts no responsibility for dealing with such transgressions by Southern Baptist clergy. It embraces and defends a hands-off policy which permits clerical predators to move from church to church, unimpeded by denominational record keeping, accumulating victims as they go.

Nostalgia: Our doughty “duck and cover” turtle (1950)

"Duck and Cover" survival of a nuclear attack was the improbable goal of this sweet cinema and many others. It was shown in public school classrooms in the sweeter, kinder, gentler, stress-free 1950s when atomic annihilation was offered as a constant companion:

Internecine religious conflict returns to post-Mumbai India

Mumbia terror created a temporary sense of common ground among the religiously divided citizenry of India.

It's over. Sumit Ganguly of Indiana University writes for Newsweek:

Religious violence and cultural parochialism are on the rise. Much of these forces seem to be fueled by the global economic downturn, which is bringing out the worst political tactics. In such a turbulent economic climate, scapegoating ethnic and religious minorities may well prove to be irresistible for those seeking to divert attention from serious questions of unemployment and growing economic disparities. Matters may become even worse as India's national election approaches in May of this year. In attempts to solidify their political bases, political parties, regardless of their ideological orientation, may well start kowtowing to religious and cultural zealots. Several recent developments underscore the dangers that they pose for the well-being of India's plural polity and society.

Ganguly holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations and is an Adjunct Senior Fellow of the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles.

Read the rest here.

Tweetly telling the Vatican what not to give up for Lent

London Times Religion Correspondent Ruth Gledhill tells us, "The Roman Catholic Church in Italy wants us to give up texting, Tweeting and other tecchie messaging services for Lent," and she says, er, no.

Exactly the wrong move.

Had the Vatican been online reading blogs, using Twitter and the like, there would have been no historic row over Bishop Williamson's past because "Italian blogs had been writing about it, The Catholic Herald in England had covered it and I had blogged and reported it extensively for The Times."

No, it, she says, " is not texting they should be giving up, but Luddism."

Amen?

American women lead men in spirituality across the board

March is Women's History Month: A new analysis of data from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey found American women to be more religious than men in a variety of ways. charted below: