One day after the removal of a prominent seminary president following a series of contentious remarks about women, Southern Baptists have begun a public reckoning.

The forced retirement of Paige Patterson, the president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, has broken a dam of anger, resentment and recrimination both for his comments about abused women as well as apparent efforts by the seminary’s trustees to protect his reputation even as they eased him out.

While not discussing Patterson by name, Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., sounded an alarm.

“I have to see it as the judgment of God upon a denomination and the larger evangelical movement for decades of failure in dealing rightly with questions of sexual abuse and misbehavior,” Mohler said in an interview with RNS.

Mohler warned that the impact of the #MeToo movement on the denomination was just beginning and that “we’re going to discover this problem is far more widespread.”

He was referring to comments by Patterson in a 2000 interview and a 2014 sermon in which he boasted that he once advised a woman to stay with her abusive husband and objectified the body of a 16-year-old girl as “built.” Both resurfaced in the past few weeks in the media. On Tuesday (May 22), The Washington Post reported that in 2003 Patterson asked a…

Two prominent Democratic U.S. senators, both possible presidential hopefuls, addressed a gathering of pastors this week, pairing religion with politics in an unusually direct appeal to left-leaning Christians.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker spoke Tuesday (May 22) at the Festival of Homiletics, a conference, founded in 1992, that gathers clergy from primarily white, mainline Protestant traditions to discuss and engage in the art of preaching, also called homiletics.

It was the first time that two politicians of Warren’s and Booker’s stature had appeared at the event. Celebrity speakers at the festival normally come in the form of popular ministers, such as the Rev. Rob Lee, a North Carolina pastor and descendant of Confederate Civil War Gen. Robert E. Lee whose denunciation of racist violence made a splash at last year’s MTV Video Music Awards.

But the theme of this year’s festival is “Preaching and Politics,” and those who assembled at Washington’s Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church were treated to a rare hybrid of a campaign rally and a preaching competition.

The packed pews suggested mainline preachers are in search of pointers for how to tackle political morality and justice in the Trump era from the pulpit.

“Oftentimes we’re told in many of our denominations, ‘Don’t touch politics in…

China is planning to reverse a policy that restricts the number of children people can have.

According to The Independent, the change would end a long-standing policy.

The policy went into effect in 1979 and restricts people to one child. In 2016, the government changed the policy to two children.

The Chinese government claims the policies have prevented some 400 million births.

Critics, however, say that claim is inaccurate.

Bloomberg said the policy could come as soon as this year, or by 2019.

There has been no official confirmation or comment from China’s National Health Commission on the new policy, but Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang reviewed a feasibility in April that showed there would be some “limited” economic gains from lifting child limits.

The limits were initially imposed to help with the government’s economy and shortages, but according to the state-run newspaper Xinhua the food shortages of the 1970s and 1980s are “history.”

But Professor Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, says economics may still be a factor for families, even with the policy change.

“People are not having children in China because they cannot afford them,” he said. “That’s not going to change whether you have a one-child policy, a two-child policy or a 200-child policy.”

Most…

The National Football League will no longer allow players to kneel for the National Anthem in the 2018 football season.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announced the new policy on Wednesday, stating, “This season, all league and team personnel shall stand and show respect for the flag and the anthem. Personnel who choose not to stand for the anthem may stay in the locker room until after the anthem has been performed.”

The National Review reports that players who still refuse to stand for the Anthem may face a 15-yard penalty.

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said that the NFL is not seeking to violate anyone’s rights, but that the fans are their priority.

“It’s not that easy. We’ve got a lot of things that we’re trying to balance,” said Jones. “We have the interest in every constituency that’s involved here, and the issues that are involved, and we recognize that with our visibility and the interest itself, it’s taken a life of its own.

I’m not trying to diminish issues of our rights here,” he continued. “But the number one thing here is our fans. And I know our fans want us to zero in on the game, zero in on football. They want to come to the game and get away from a lot of the other issues that are out there.”

Photo courtesy: Getty Images

Publication date: May 24, 2018

 

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