Faith in the voter’s booth
I was struck by the simplicity of Richard Land’s (pictured at right) message when I visited with the Southern Baptist Convention leader during his visit to Oklahoma City this week.
I interviewed Land briefly at last year’s convention annual meeting in San Antonio and had been to previous news conferences where the president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission held sway. I had always enjoyed talking to him because he doesn’t mince words nor does he appear to hesitate to speak exactly what’s on his mind (every reporter’s dream come true!).
So when I asked him to explain his general message to Southern Baptist these days I shouldn’t have been surprised that it was so simple and direct:
Register to vote.
Find out where you need to go vote.
Become informed about the candidates and …
Vote.
Land said that is the essence of his message — and he implores his audience of evangelicals (Land said one in three Oklahomans is a baptized member of a Southern Baptist church) to vote according to their Judeo-Christian value system.
The message is getting through, he said.
Land said Americans see the necessity of the seperation of church and state — a point emphasized by the country’s founding fathers. Americans don’t want government-sponsored faith, but they do want people of all faiths to have an opportunity to make their point in the public square, Land added.
He predicted that this will be borne out come the presidential election in November.
Meanwhile, here’s a heads up about a new prayer initiative that Land’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission is leadin.
The Nashville, Tenn.-based commission is partnering with the SBC’s North American Mission Board for a prayer initiative calling all Southern Baptists to engage in a time of prayer for personal spiritual revival and national renewal this fall.
The initiative, called the “40/40 Prayer Vigil,” will feature 40 days of prayer beginning Sept. 23 and concluding with a dedicated 40 hours of prayer that will begin at 4 p.m. Oct. 31 and end at 8 a.m. Nov. 2.
For more information, go to ilivevalues.com.
Get the scoop on “Sexless in the City”
If you are reading this blog posting, you may already have read my column about author Anna Broadway and her new book, “Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity.”
As promised, I’d like to share information about Broadway’s blog, which actually preceded the book.
For some interesting commentary on the issue of chastity in today’s society and other related dialogue, you can find her blog at annabroadway.blogspot.com.
There is also a related Web site at sexlessinthecity.net that you might find interesting.
I think many readers will find these sites thought-provoking and insightful, whether or not you agree with Broadway’s particular views.
When a Christian blogs …
Blogging may be a fairly new phenomena in terms of today’s technology, but not so new that there aren’t any rules to govern those bloggers with ethical standards.
Those ethical standards should be especially important for Christians — or other people of faith. One would think that the teachings of faith would help guide bloggers as they traverse their way through the blogosphere.
Several Oklahoma Southern Baptist bloggers I interviewed this week mentioned the personal attacks that sometimes are posted by other fellow Southern Baptists.
Each of the people I talked to said they wanted people to focus solely on the issues at hand, but a personal attack ripping into someone’s character or casting aspersions on an individual can cause undue harm. One blogger, the Rev. Ronnie W. Rogers of Trinity Baptist Church in Norman, said “spiritual harm” can be caused when bloggers air negative comments about internal affairs at their local church.
The Rev. Wes Kenney, a Southern Baptist pastor in Valliant, Okla., and one of the founders of SBCToday.com said he had noticed that some Southern Baptist bloggers had begun attacking some of the denomination’s leaders such as Paige Patterson and the Richard Land. Those kinds of postings can be discouraging, Kenney said.
The Associated Baptist Press recently had an interesting story on the issue of blogging ethics. That story by Ken Camp makes some interesting points.
Then I found Rebecca Blood’s Weblog Handbook on Blog Ethics.
This handbook includes six ethics rules for bloggers to abide by. Methinks they are pretty good, though they are not necessarily religious in nature.
Here they are:
1. Publish as fact only that which you believe to be true.
2. If material exists online, link to it when you reference it.
3. Publicly correct any misinformation.
4. Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry.
5. Disclose any conflict of interest.
6. Note questionable and biased sources.
With all that said, I guess it’s always a good idea to remind bloggers that their words are out there for all to see.
Rogers, in Norman, said he wondered if some bloggers realized that, say 20 years from now, the things they post will still be out there on the blogosphere — where they could potentially come back and cause them or someone else some trouble …
