A Personal Peeve, Promise, Plea

When I first went to work for a denominational agency in Nashville, I encountered two wasteful patterns that forever set me in another direction. One was individual sloth. The other was organizational misdirection. I observed that some religious bureaucrats were among...

A Hammer, A Bell and A Song

I was in Phoenix on Friday, Jan. 6, attending the annual Society of Christian Ethics meeting, when Foy Valentine called. When he learned I would be in Dallas on Tuesday, he said, “Let’s get together.” We planned to. Often we met at a pancake house...

Foy Valentine, SBC Ethics Pioneer, Dies

Foy Valentine, leader of the Southern Baptist Convention’s moral-concerns agency for a tumultuous 27 years spanning from the civil-rights movement of the 1960s to the fundamentalist takeover of the denomination in the 1980s, died Saturday after an apparent heart...