2006 Archives
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Cybercolumn by Berry Simpson: Looking through lenses
Posted: 4/13/06
CYBER COLUMN:
Looking through lenses
By Berry Simpson
Nowadays, one of our favorite fall-back movies—that is, movies on DVD that Cyndi and I watch again and again while doing other things, like grading papers or writing journals or playing Soduko on the internet—is National Treasure. In the movie, the lead character, Ben Gates, uses Benjamin Franklin’s secret spectacles to read treasure clues written on the back of the Declaration of Independence. The specs have several movable lenses, each a different color, and it takes multiple combinations of all the lenses to read every clue. He can’t see all the clues he needs until he looks through every one of the lenses.
Berry D. Simpson People are like that. In order to know someone well, you have to see them in all their different ways. You have to spend time with them, talking and asking questions and listening to their stories. But even conversation goes only so far. We can all think of people we’ve worked with for years, people we’ve talked with for years, and yet we really don’t know so much about them. Often, we’re surprised to learn they love to paint, or they are trained musicians, or widely known and respected outside their workaday lives. In order to really know someone, you have to be with them in all the things they do. You have to see their lives through every available lens.
04/13/2006 - By John Rutledge
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Texas Baptist Forum
Posted: 3/31/06
Texas Baptist Forum
Laying on hands
Scripture places much more importance upon “laying on hands” than those esteemed men who were cited in “Laying on hands” (March 20). Hebrews 6:1-2 lists laying on hands as a foundational doctrine, giving it weight equal to repentance from dead works, faith toward God, baptisms, resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment.
• Jump to online-only letters below Letters are welcomed. Send them to marvknox@baptiststandard.com; 250 words maximum. 
“For faith to be authentic, it must be freely embraced. … In a post-9/11 world where individuals die for their faith while others kill in the name of their religion, America's founding principle of religious liberty takes on even greater prominence.”Robert A. Seiple
U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom (RNS)“Immigrants have values that can convert America and return America to the values of thrift and hard work.”
Manuel A. Vasquez
University of Florida religion professor (RNS)“My sense is that we will see the development of human/animal hybrids, mammals that have more and more bits of human in them. You can see a progression developing here that you might not be able to stop.”
Nigel Cameron
Professor of bioethics at the Illinois Institute of
Technology (RNS)“It’s arrogant to say that either religion or science can answer all our questions. I don’t see the need either to banish one or the other or to artificially unite them.”
Susan Fisher Miller
Editor and English professor in Atlanta, commenting on the “debate” between religion and evolution (New York Times)How could Charles Spurgeon reject the practice “as a form of ritualism that could easily lapse into popery”? He did not refuse to preach the doctrines of grace, although many perverted the teachings to become libertines.
04/05/2006 - By John Rutledge
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