Opinion

Slogging through the COVID-19 pandemic is a daily exercise in perseverance and improvisation. So it probably wouldn’t surprise you that a few days ago I found myself crying as I drove alone in my Camry. No, the tears were not about the latest coronavirus report -- it was Luciano Pavarotti.

As a child, I imagined the bandits who beat and robbed the man in Jesus’s parable about being a good neighbor wore masks. Now, I’m pretty sure the Samaritan who helped the man was the one really covering his face.

The World Health Organization has designated 2020 as “Year of the Nurse,” marking 200 years since the birth of Florence Nightingale, who “will forever be linked with modern nursing — and rightly so.”

Preachers periodically inform congregations that the Ten Commandments are not the Ten Suggestions. As part of its coronavirus reopening plan, the CDC came up with a few dozen suggestions for faith communities. The White House has rejected them as commandments that infringe on religious rights.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, adults and children alike have called on political leaders and health experts to address a concern: Is now a bad time to lose a tooth? I am delighted that our leaders have not mistaken childishness for triviality.

Like many pastors and church leaders around the world, I've been grieving the damage caused by COVID-19. Yet, God is at work. We are mindful of the promise in Paul's Letter to the Romans: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”

As states across the country shut down non-essential businesses in March and April, debates started about what should count as essential. But one unessential business apparently remained open as “essential” across the country: state lotteries.

For more than a decade, abuse survivor advocates have been asking the Southern Baptist Convention to establish a clergy predator database, and they've been confronted with a denomination determined to do nothing. A new Baptist sex abuser database has been launched at BaptistAccountability.org.

No matter how we plan, people in disaster situations are notably bad at assessing risk and predictably overconfident about the control they have over their environment. Nor can church leaders control the behavior of whoever might walk in the door.

Karl Barth is widely regarded as the greatest (Protestant) Christian theologian of the twentieth century. Among a myriad of other things, Barth (1886~1968) is often credited with saying that people should hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.