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Are charter schools "state actors"?
The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board has authorized an explicitly Roman Catholic virtual charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, to begin operation in the 2024-2025 school year. Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a pretend-conservative and Biden for President donor who won the GOP nomination with the help...
Christian denominations in 1923
While searching for info on the state of Christianity in America circa 1923, when J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism, I found the US Census Bureau's 1916 two-volume survey: Religious bodies : 1916 : United States. Bureau of the Census : Internet Archive This is Volume 1 of a...
The Trojan horse of critical race theory and intersectionality
This conversation is well worth an hour and a half of your time. The topic is critical race theory and intersectionality and how those ideas destroy any community that grants them entrance. It is essential listening for understanding the times, a comprehensive overview of these concepts and their impact, delivered...
Fundamentalists, Modernists, and media bias at the 1928 Presbyterian General Assembly in Tulsa
Searching through archives, I found this item that I drafted on 3/15/2007, but never finished. Since 2007, Time has placed its archives behind a paywall; the links are all still valid, but unless you pay for a pass, you'll only see an excerpt. But I was also able to find...
Christian parenting: Immunizing against baptized liberalism, training the mind and the sentiments, and the call to heroism
One of the biggest fears of any Christian parent is that his child will abandon the faith in which he was raised once he's away from home. Some charismatic peer or professor will attempt to convert him to a new religion, which could be anything from a different branch of...
Oklahoma SQ 790: The First Amendment, not Oklahoma's special version
Oklahoma State Question 790 is a legislative referendum which would remove a discriminatory and inconsistently applied provision in the Constitution of Oklahoma that deals with the relationship of religion and government. Its passage would allow the People of Oklahoma through our elected representatives to weigh and balance a variety of...
Enemies of free speech at the University of Tulsa
Last Tuesday night, Rosaria Butterfield, Ph.D., gave a talk on sexual identity to a standing-room-only crowd in the Great Room at the University of Tulsa's Allen Chapman Activities Center. Butterfield's visit was sponsored by several evangelical Christian groups on campus: Reformed University Fellowship, Baptist Collegiate Ministries, Chi Alpha, and the...
Kol Nidre online
In college I became a brother of Zeta Beta Tau, a historically Jewish fraternity that became non-sectarian in the '50s. About a third of the brothers in our chapter were Jewish. They came from all over the country, from different backgrounds and had widely different approaches to religious observance. From...
Banking basics and missions
Tulsa Teachers Credit Union, one of the area's largest thrift institutions, has been running radio ads lately about their humble origins -- a cigar box in the desk drawer of a Central High School teacher, as teachers pooled funds to help one another meet their financial goals. In the US,...
Pray Tell: Can City Council invocations be in Jesus' name?
An edited version of this column appeared in the December 26, 2007, issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The published version is no longer online. Posted on September 10, 2017. Pray Tell by Michael D. Bates Recently it was reported that area ministers are being excluded from offering a prayer at...
Founders Conference: David Wells to speak in Owasso
There's a great opportunity coming up later this month for Tulsa-area Christians with an interest in sound theology and a concern for the lack of interest in same which prevails in much of the evangelical realm. Dr. David Wells is professor of historical and systematic theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary....
Keep in your prayers...
...Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who is recovering from pulmonary embolism. His condition is improving, but still serious. ... and D. James Kennedy, pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church (PCA), who suffered a heart attack on December 28, had a pacemaker implanted on Wednesday, and is now...
Larking about
There are all sorts of websites devoted to humor, and all sorts devoted to Evangelical Christianity, but there are a number that combine the two, poking gentle fun, from an inside perspective, at the unintentionally funny things about Evangelical subculture. One of my favorite such sites is Lark News, a...
Faith and politics: when it matters, when it doesn't
Here are a couple of interesting items on the intersection between faith and politics. On RedState, Erick Erickson, a political consultant in Georgia, has an explanation for the defeat of Ralph Reed and an evangelical legislative candidate in Tuesday's Georgia Republican primaries, and it's not that voters are rejecting religious...
"I just wanted to sing. I didn't want to be sung to."
Julie R. Neidlinger writes of a Christmas Eve service at the Church of the Living Powerpoint: And therein lies another problem: we were not a congregation, but an audience. We were performed to by a bunch of talented musicians and a music pastor and a pastor who had planned the...
Hymn to God the Whatever
John Hinderaker of Power Line links to a blog about Lutheran liturgy and hymnody. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the largest and most liberal of the Lutheran denominations, has a proposed new hymnal and service book called Renewing Worship, and the authors of www.worshiphymn.org are documenting the "improvements"...
Who ought to speak for evangelicals?
Evangelical Christianity doesn't have a Pope or a Presiding Bishop to speak with authority on behalf of such a diverse movement, which includes entire denominations like the Presbyterian Church in America and the Southern Baptist Convention, megachurches like Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, parachurch ministries like the Billy Graham...
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