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A United Methodist bishop faces the big questions surrounding his own terminal cancer

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A United Methodist bishop faces the big questions surrounding his own terminal cancer

There was nothing unusual, in the early 1970s, about a student hearing one of his professors preach during chapel.

But one sermon – "How Would You Like to Die?" -- impressed the seminarian who would later become United Methodist Bishop Timothy Whitaker of Florida. Theologian Claude H. Thompson had terminal cancer and, a few months later, his funeral was held in the same chapel at the Candler School of Theology in Atlanta.

"What hit me was that he calmly preached on that subject -- even while facing his own death," said Whitaker, reached by telephone. "It hit me that that, if death is one of the great mysteries of life, then that needs to be something that the church openly discusses. …

"Yes, we live in a culture that is reluctant to talk about death. But I decided that it's important for us to hear from our elders who are facing this issue, head on."

Thus, soon after doctors informed him that his own cancer is terminal, Whitaker wrote a lengthy online meditation, "Learning to Die." The 74-year-old bishop is retired and receiving hospice care, while living in Keller, a small town near the Virginia coast.

"Being a pastor, I considered it a privilege and also an education to linger beside many deathbeds. I have tried to never forget that, unless I die abruptly in an accident or with a heart attack or stroke, sooner or later the subject of death will feel very personal to me," he wrote. Now, "in the time that remains for me I have one more thing to learn in life, which is to die. … I had always hoped that I would be aware of the imminence of my death so that I could face it consciously, and I am grateful that I have the knowledge that I am going to die soon."

Certainly, Whitaker noted, the Orthodox theologian Father Thomas Hopko was correct when he quipped, while facing a terminal disease: "This dying is very interesting."

Dying is also complicated -- raising myriad theological questions about eternity, salvation and the mysteries of the life to come, he noted. The Bible, from cover to cover, is packed with relevant stories, passages and images. The same is true of the writings of early church leaders who preached eternal hope, even when suffering persecution and martyrdom.


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A question that skeptics have raised for centuries: Why did the Bible accept slavery?

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A question that skeptics have raised for centuries: Why did the Bible accept slavery?

QUESTION:

Why did the Bible accept slavery?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

There’s been intense discussion of this never-ending issue in 2023, as we’ll see.

In essence, defenders of the Bible explain that slave-holding was a fundamental aspect of society as far back as the earliest written annals we have, well before biblical times. Due to the existence of that powerful reality, the Bible did not and could not attempt to overthrow the sinful system but worked against its evils. Fact is, slavery was so ingrained that it was not outlawed till recent times, nearly 3,000 years after the Old Testament laws were written and 2,000 years after the New Testament dealt with the problem.

However, skeptics question the moral stature of the Jewish and Christian heritage because the Bible is outwardly neutral toward the practice of owning fellow human beings as property. After all, today slavery is considered a contemptible blight, as in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the United Nations: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”

Recent events show how contentious the interpretation of slave history can be. Witness the July furor when a sentence in new Florida public school history guidelines said American slaves “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Catholics’ debate over their history has been revived this year. Some background: The pioneering 4th Century Bishop Gregory of Nyssa (in present-day Turkey) preached against slavery in the Roman Empire, but his was a lonely voice. The influential 13th Century theologian Thomas Aquinas taught that “nothing is so repugnant to human nature as slavery,” which amounts to “civil death.” And yet some people have “eminence of reason” that makes them “by nature masters” over those who have “deficiency.”


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Podcast: Another sexy version of the old New Age arrives, with the 'Secular Sabbath'

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Podcast: Another sexy version of the old New Age arrives, with the 'Secular Sabbath'

This podcast post really needs a soundtrack. So, please click on this Secular Sabbath video and leave it running. Then open the GetReligion post in a second browser window and start reading. This will help with the content — I promise.

This week’s “Crossroads” discussion (CLICK HERE to tune that in) focused on a timely, solid feature at The Free Press with this catchy headline: “Can You Find God in a Bikini?” The story was timely because, in many ways, this is a news story that has been with us for decades (if not for centuries, viewed from a theological, pre-electronic-trance-music point of view).

To understand my thinking here, it helps to follow a timeline linking a few books on this topic.

Let’s start here, with “Understanding the New Age,” which was researched in the late 1980s by the great religion-beat pro Russell Chandler. The key to this vague New Age thing, he said, is the movement’s “view of the nature of reality, which admits to no absolutes” and, thus, all “standards of morality” are “relative.”

In the mid-1990s, linked to another burst of New Age media buzz, I interviewed Chandler and the resulting “On Religion” column included this thesis:

A few years ago, most generic bookstores had a "New Age" section. Today, this is rare. But this doesn't mean that the wave of religious trends that crested in the 1980s simply vanished. Truth is, it soaked in.

"You don't see New Age shelves anymore because you can find New Age books in almost every part of the store," said Russell Chandler, an award-winning religion writer best known for his 18 years at the Los Angeles Times. "They're in the psychology section and over on the women's shelf. You'll find them under self-help, stress, holistic health and the environmental, too."

The day of New Age cover stories in news magazines may have passed, but that's beside the point. New Age faith, said Chandler, has "become so visible that it's now all but invisible."

Reading Chandler led me to New Age preachers such as Marianne Williamson (yes, she is seeking — again — the White House as a Democrat) and her bestselling book “A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles.”


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What's the news impact of the intense racism investigation at Wheaton College?

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What's the news impact of the intense racism investigation at Wheaton College?

History matters with everything touching upon morality and religion. And so it is with the dramatic racial reckoning in a candid and thorough self-examination released Sept. 14 by Wheaton College in Illinois.

The implications command news media attention because the 163-year-old school is among the most highly influential and respected institutions in U.S. evangelical Protestantism. This is, after all, the alma mater of the Rev. Billy Graham.

By coincidence, the power of history was underscored the very next day at an emotional worship service to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the racist terror bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four girls ages 11 to 14 as they donned Sunday choir robes. Perhaps more than any other episode of the civil rights era, this eroded white southern churchgoers’ remaining tolerance toward Jim Crow segregation.

History is “our best teacher,” said the service’s keynote speaker, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court (video here starting at 1:30), who quoted I Corinthians 15:10 and Hebrews 11:1 and said “with God’s grace” ongoing racial justice efforts will succeed. Though “parts of this country’s story can be hard to think about” and “difficult to remember and re-live,” she said, “it is dangerous to forget them.”

Precisely for that reason, Wheaton’s Historical Review Task Force, recommended by President Philip Ryken and approved by its Board of Trustees, began investigating past campus race relations in October, 2021. The result is the 122-page accounting that the trustees endorsed and issued last week (click here for text).

The report is important because, as the student newspaper reported, “Wheaton is one of the first Christian colleges to conduct such a review” of the sort seen at some non-religious campuses. One notable predecessor was the 2018 report (document here) on the racial history of Louisville’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a school that’s one year older than Wheaton.

The task force, made up of trustee, faculty, administration, student and alumni representatives, declared, “We repent of all forms of racism and favoritism in our institutional history, whether conscious or unconscious” and pledged follow-up actions.

The first big example is the trustees’ decision to immediately remove from the library the name that honored J. Oliver Buswell Jr., in response to long-running student protests.


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News hooks? Gender, sexual orientation and religion among American college students

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News hooks? Gender, sexual orientation and religion among American college students

I know people will be surprised to hear this, but it’s rare for me to get my hands on some new data. I basically use two or three surveys for everything you see on this Substack and my social media.

But last week was a very good one because I got data that is a bit different, but very interesting, and quite newsworthy.

It comes from FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), which is an organization that fights for the ability of individuals (students and faculty) to be able to freely exercise their First Amendment right to free speech. If someone on a college campus is punished for nothing more than their speech, FIRE often steps in and sues the university. You can read several examples of this on their Wikipedia page.

One of the major research projects that FIRE undertakes is an annual survey of college students to gauge how they think about the issue of free speech and if they feel like they have to stifle their speech because of hostility on campus. Often, this includes speech connected to religious beliefs.

This is a real treasure trove of data about how the next generation thinks about all kinds of topics. Their full report of their results (which runs to 85 pages) is here. The survey that they collected contains a total sample size of 55,102 respondents who had to be currently enrolled at an institution of higher learning in the United States. A thorough description of the methodology used is here and here.

I am making one adjustment to this data — I restricted my sample to just those who are between the ages of 18 and 25 years old. While I do think the views of 40-year-old graduate students are important, I wanted to just focus on college aged folks for this bit of data analysis. That means my sample is a bit smaller — 39,178. That’s still more than enough to analyze, though.

I am going to write a series of posts with this data, especially topics related to free speech and allowing speakers on campus that generate controversy, but I gleaned so much from just the demographic variables that I had to write about them specifically.

The theme here is simply three variables: sexual orientation, gender identity and religion among college-aged folks.

What really kicked this off was a report from Brown University that indicated that 38% of their student body identifies as homosexual, bisexual, queer, asexual, pansexual, questioning or other. When that same poll was conducted ten years earlier, that share was just 14%. Is Brown an outlier here? Or are huge percentages of college students not straight and/or not cisgender? Are these issues linked to religious beliefs, or the lack thereof?


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Pope Francis vs. Bishop Strickland feud highlights the good and bad of journalism today

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Pope Francis vs. Bishop Strickland feud highlights the good and bad of journalism today

Another week and yet another headline about Pope Francis feuding with a doctrinally conservative American prelate.

It’s become an all-too-common story and one that the legacy media often can’t resist.

It was late last month that the pope lamented what he called a “reactionary” Catholic church in the United States, where he said political ideology had replaced faith. Pope Francis had made the comments on August 5 in a private meeting in Lisbon — published three weeks later by the Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica — with members of the Jesuit order, of which he is a member, during his trip for World Youth Day.

The pope’s comments, and the expected fallout, were widely covered by both the secular and Catholic press in the United States and abroad.

The latest salvo in this transatlantic war-of-words took place last week, on Sept. 11, when The Pillar reported that the pope had “discussed with Vatican officials the prospect of requesting the resignation of Bishop Joseph Strickland of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas.”

This is what The Pillar reported:

The pope met Sept. 9 with Archbishop Robert Prevost, OSA, head of the Dicastery for Bishops, and Archbishop Christophe Pierre, apostolic nuncio to the United States — both cardinals-elect.

Several sources close to the dicastery told The Pillar ahead of the meeting that the prelates would present the pope with the results of an apostolic visitation of Stickland’s diocese, conducted earlier this year, as well as subsequent public actions by the bishop, who has emerged as an outspoken critic of the Holy Father.

“The situation of Bishop Strickland is the agenda,” one senior official close to the dicastery told The Pillar, “and the expectation is that the Holy Father will be requesting his resignation — that will certainly be the recommendation put to him.”

While noting that the papal audience did not exclusively concern the Bishop of Tyler, who has previously accused the pope of having a “program [for] undermining the Deposit of Faith,” the official said that Strickland’s case was set to be the “primary point of discussion.”


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Here we go again: Did Coco Gauff have a prayer after her U.S. Open triumph?

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Here we go again: Did Coco Gauff have a prayer after her U.S. Open triumph?

Enquiring tennis fans (may) want to know: Is the young U.S. Open champion Coco Gauff a “good” religious believer or some kind of “bad” conservative Christian whose beliefs should be avoided in the mainstream press?

I am getting to this story late, because I have been on the road for more than a week for pressing family reasons. However, it’s clear that Gauff is going to be one of the more inspiring sports figures of 2023, and in this case “inspiring” can have several valid meanings.

So let’s start with the obvious hot-button image from social media, as in that ESPN SportsCenter post on X containing a video clip that showed the new champion kneeling, with her head bowed and her hands against her forehead in a rather obvious symbolic position.

The ESPN tweet said (all together now): “@CocoGauff took a moment to soak it all in after winning her first Grand Slam title (heart emoji)”

Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Tony Dungy — one of the most outspoken Black Christians in mainstream media — wasn’t amused by this faith-free language and responded on X. This, in turn, was picked up by “conservative” media, since religious faith is often viewed as a “conservative” thing. Here’s a major chunk of the New York Post coverage:

“I hate to break this to you SportsCenter but Coco Gauff was not ‘soaking it all in’ at this moment. She was praying. She has been very open about her Christian faith in the past. It seems pretty obvious what she is doing here,” Dungy wrote.

Gauff spoke about her faith after winning the first Grand Slam title of her career after she was asked what it meant to her to win the title on home soil.

“Oh my goodness. It means so much to me. I feel like I’m a little bit in shock in this moment,” Gauff said. “That French Open loss was a heartbreak for me. I realized God puts you through tribulations and trials. This makes this moment even more sweeter than I could imagine.

“I don’t pray for results. I just ask that I get the strength to give it my all. Whatever happens, happens. I’m so blessed in this life. I’m just thankful for this moment. I don’t have any words for it, to be honest.”

Let’s stress the obvious journalism point, once again.


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What do seminaries do, in an age in which many believers are afraid of 'theology'?

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What do seminaries do, in an age in which many believers are afraid of 'theology'?

During the 1970s and '80s, the flocks gathered in conservative Protestant pews kept growing and growing -- until a third of the U.S. population could be defined as "evangelical."

Times were already getting tough for leaders of progressive Mainline churches, with sharp declines in budgets and worship attendance. But the waters were smooth for evangelicals.

"One might be considered a very capable kayaker if the river currents are moving along at only a few miles per hour," said theologian David Dockery, during the recent convocation rites at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas, after he was inaugurated as its 10th president.

But the currents changed, while many contented evangelical leaders didn't spot the dangerous waves around them. "I fear that the waters of our cultural context have become much choppier and are moving evermore rapidly with each passing year," said Dockery, who noted that he was beginning his 40th year working in Christian higher education.

Consider a sobering new study -- "The Great Dechurching. Who's Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back" -- by researchers Jim Davis, Michel Graham and Ryan Burge. Their numbers indicate that evangelicalism has backslid to where it was 50 years ago.

The big question is, "Why?" Dockery said he accepts the study's thesis that many boom-era evangelicals lacked "deep roots in their understanding of the Christian faith." Many evangelicals failed to teach practical discipleship in daily life and seemed reluctant to defend the truths "delivered to the saints" through the ages. This fear of theology has proven to be a disaster as America "has become more secularized, polarized and confused," he said.

Thus, the "Dechurching" trend leads straight to hard questions about seminaries, noted Burge, in his "Graphs about Religion" newsletter. He teaches political science at Eastern Illinois University and is one of my GetReligion.org colleagues.

Seminaries help define religious denominations and are "an incredibly important part of the religious economy. In many ways they are the canary in the coal mine for the health of American religion," he wrote.


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Bible debates, ancient and modern: Why did early church choose only four Gospels?

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Bible debates, ancient and modern: Why did early church choose only four Gospels?

QUESTION:

Why did early Christians choose only four Gospels?

RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

During the formative first centuries of Christian history there were some 40 texts in circulation that could be considered “gospels,” according to one scholar, while another counted as many as 70. Marvin Meyer of Chapman University decided a dozen such non-biblical gospels merited inclusion in an 2005 anthology, while others have proposed different listings.

Early Christians dismissed what they judged to be “apocryphal” texts, meaning of doubtful authenticity, and recognized only the familiar quartet of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as authoritative and eventually included in what became the New Testament. The four did not name the authors, but the substance was deemed to come directly or indirectly from Jesus’ original apostles.

An obvious aspect of such judgments was the dating.

Chronology expert Jack Finegan calculated that Jesus’ crucifixion probably occurred in early April of either A.D. 30 or 33. “The Oxford Bible Commentary” typifies experts’ consensus in listing these dates for the final composition of the Four: Matthew between A.D. 75 and 100. Mark “probably not long after” Jerusalem fell in 70. Luke most likely around 80 to 85. John about 90 to 100.

That means there would have been living eyewitnesses to Jesus to provide or confirm oral or written material incorporated into the Four, rather like historians in 2023 gathering memories about the Dwight Eisenhower presidency through the Ronald Reagan years.

But over the past generation, liberal scholarship has emphasized those “apocryphal” contenders, effectively reducing the exclusive stature of the biblical four. Many decided there wasn’t much of importance to distinguish the traditional four from the others. Elaine Pagels of Princeton University popularized the revisionist mood in “The Gnostic Gospels” (1979). By 2003, the big-selling and rather ridiculous novel “The Da Vinci Code” fictionalized the supposedly arbitrary choice of New Testament books as a power grab.


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