by Guy Sayles | Apr 13, 2012 |
Following are remarks I made at the April 12, 2012 meeting of the Buncombe County Board of Education. While the statement is content-specific, it does reflect my basic approach to the issue of religion in the public schools. By the way, the School Board voted to adopt...
by Guy Sayles | Apr 6, 2012 |
Writer and Lutheran minister Walt Wangerin told about finding his son reading a big stack of comic books. “Where did those come from?” “I took them from the library.” “You mean you borrowed them?” “No. . .” So Wangerin marched his son to the library and made him...
by Guy Sayles | Apr 4, 2012 |
We were created for worship and fashioned for praise. Tortured genius and brilliant critic of the church, Frederick Nietzsche, believed that human beings are driven by a will to power. We are, he said, desperate to have a sense of mastery over the sinister, unseen but...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 29, 2012 |
Not long ago, I had to make a hurried trip to Atlanta and back. As I traveled, I noticed the restaurants and fast food joints, or signs for them, which line our interstate highways. Appleby’s, Arby’s, Burger King, Chick-fil-A, Chili’s, Church’s Chicken,...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 23, 2012 |
Would you please give it a rest? Try to settle-down. Loosen up. Lighten up a little. Ease off. Back off. Whoa, wait a minute, time out. Give me a break. Chill out. If you’re hearing these kinds of things more often lately, there’s a pretty good chance you’re missing a...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 15, 2012 |
When I was in elementary school, our report cards contained a section on “class citizenship.” We didn’t just get grades on spelling and arithmetic; our teachers also evaluated our character. There was a list of personal qualities; and, next to each one, a ranking: VS...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 9, 2012 |
This week, I had the privilege, along with about 60 other Baptist leaders, of spending several hours at a White House briefing and conversation about important domestic policy issues. The briefing took place in a fourth-floor conference room in the venerable and...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 4, 2012 |
We need community, but community isn’t easy. And it isn’t easy mostly because there are people in community, and people have a way of being predictably and messily human. Some of the people in community with us have strange ideas and unreasonable expectations. Some...
by Guy Sayles | Feb 23, 2012 |
We’ve all heard, “Denial is not just a river in Egypt.” As worn-out as that cliché’ surely is, it still serves to remind us of one of the most common dances we use to two-step around the truth about ourselves and the world—the denial dance. You can pretend not to know...
by Guy Sayles | Feb 20, 2012 |
In the late 1970s, when Anita and I were in seminary in Louisville, KY my maternal grandparents, who lived four hours away in Huntington, WV, were the relatives to whom we most closely lived. Whenever we could, usually a few times a year, we’d visit them in the modest...
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