Though the story seems apocryphal, it carries its own veracity when you have heard it out. It comes out of the soul and psyche of the Southern church in its heyday of racial unrest some half a century back. Like many of its ilk, a certain genteel congregation in a large Mississippi Delta city was struggling with the issue of admitting “people of color” into their morning worship services. In spite of the signs in front proclaiming “Everybody Welcomed” and hymns intoning, “We are not divided all one body we”, this predicament straddled denominational lines […]
The Christian Thing
In Anthony Trollope’s novel written in the early 1860’s, entitled Framley Parsonage, there is an intriguing passage which describes the way in which one of the characters of the book forgives another: “Of course, Mrs. Grantly forgave Mrs. Proudie all her offenses, and wished her well, and was at peace with her, in the Christian sense of the word, as with all other women. But under this forbearance and meekness, and perhaps, we may say, wholly unconnected with it, there was certainly a current of antagonistic feeling which, in the ordinary unconsidered language of everyday, men and women […]
The Beaten Path
I hold my late father-in-law in high esteem not only for his beautiful first-born daughter, but because he was an avid hiker. After his retirement from a college teaching career, Sam hiked the Appalachian Trail, that ancient foot-beaten corridor that led Native Americans and the early vagabond settlers along the spine of this country’s eastern mountain ranges. People are forever walking where some angels feared to tread and others have forged their way through the wilderness. Robert Frost tempts us to consider the road less travelled, but there just might be some conventional wisdom in staying on the beaten path. […]
The Seat of the Pants
Those of us who are caught up in the struggle to live as Christians find ourselves somewhere in the middle of two styles of operations. There are some who claim that real Christians are those who live “by the Book.” They take the Bible literally as the Christian’s owner’s manual that must be thoroughly studied, stringently obeyed and ardently defended in order to guarantee worry-free miles of living. Others like to fly by the seat of their pants, looking occasionally at the Book but enjoying the scenery and trying to figure out instinctively how to play the situations by ear. […]