He is the last pulpit prince. At 96 years old, Gardner C. Taylor has outlived almost all his contemporaries. The closest equivalent is Billy Graham, who (though better known than Taylor) self-identified as an itinerant evangelist. In Taylor’s heyday as senior pastor of Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, N.Y. (1948-1990), his name was synonymous with preaching excellence. In fact, in 1996, Baylor University named him one of the 12 “most effective preachers in the English-speaking world.”1 The age... Read more

Warren Throckmorton shares a bit more from historian Thomas Kidd on “George Whitfield and Slavery.” Kidd helpfully confronts the seriousness and enormity of this grim reality: The most challenging issue for a biographer of George Whitefield (as with Patrick Henry) is his identity as a slave owner. I admire Whitefield and Henry, as well as similar figures of their time such as Jonathan Edwards or George Washington, but their owning people as slaves remains an unavoidable moral problem. How does one admire... Read more

The U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing for-profit businesses to opt out of the contraceptive mandate in the new health care law has raised questions about what the ruling might mean for businesses, for future challenges to the contraception mandate, and even for the future of church-state law. We posed these questions to Robert Tuttle, one of the nation’s experts on church-state issues. He is the Berz Research Professor of Law and Religion at the George Washington University, and is a... Read more

I grew up in a deeply Christian family in Oklahoma, the heartland of America. We went to church three times a week and felt our faith required us to be good citizens and good neighbors. I was taught to believe, from the time I could speak, that every human being on the face of this earth is a child of God and deserving of my respect and care. I also learned about the good things Christians had done in our... Read more

This week, in the Hobby Lobby case, the Supreme Court ruled that a religious employer could not be required to provide employees with certain types of contraception. That decision is beginning to reverberate: A group of faith leaders is urging the Obama administration to include a religious exemption in a forthcoming LGBT anti-discrimination action. Their call, in a letter sent to the White House Tuesday, attempts to capitalize on the Supreme Court case by arguing that it shows the administration... Read more

On the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, Americans are engaged in new debates over what it was about. Southern revisionists have long tried to claim it wasn’t about slavery, but rather “Northern aggression” – which is a tough sell since they seceded from the Union despite Lincoln’s attempts at compromise on slavery, and then attacked the federal Fort Sumter in South Carolina. That would be Southern aggression, by any standard. But there’s still room for smart... Read more

It’s disheartening to persons of faith that something as beautiful as religion, which brings so much peace to its adherents, can equally be used to fuel hatred and conflict. But such is the case. One need only think of Sunnis and Shias in Iraq, of Buddhists and Muslims in Myanmar, and of the rise of anti-Muslim parties in Europe, even in such supposed bastions of liberalism as Denmark. In this time of Ramadan, when 1.6 billion Muslims enter a special... Read more

A recent Gallup poll on Americans’ views of the Bible got fairly broad media attention, though it wasn’t entirely clear what made the poll newsworthy. Was it that “Most Americans see the Bible as the Word of God“? Hard to see the news there—that’s been true for as long as Gallup has been asking the question, and it remains true of 75 percent of the country. But New York Times columnist Charles Blow still said he was “shocked and fascinated”... Read more

Bill Cosby served as the narrator for this 1968 documentary on African Americans and the media Read more

A Saturday ago at the annual conference of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal accused President Obama and other Democrats of waging a war against religious liberty and all but openly threatened a violent revolution, AP reported: “I can sense right now a rebellion brewing amongst these United States,” Jindal said, “where people are ready for a hostile takeover of Washington, D.C., to preserve the American Dream for our children and grandchildren.” Of course, Jindal’s speech didn’t... Read more