Bill Tammeus
Commentator
Bill Tammeus, a Presbyterian elder and former award-winning Faith columnist for The Kansas City Star, writes the daily "Faith Matters" blog for The Star's Web site and a column for The Presbyterian Outlook. His latest book is "Jesus, Pope Francis and a Protestant Walk into a Bar: Lessons for the Christian Church."
Stories by Bill Tammeus
World Cup ‘Statement Piece’ Evokes Best Version of Kansas City
Before I moved to Kansas City almost 56 years ago, I had been here only once — for a brief visit to the Kansas City Press Club when I was attending the University of Missouri School of Journalism. But because of that visit and the fact that I grew up in the Midwest (Woodstock, Illinois,…
Area Christians Join Unification Movement
Much blood — literal and figurative — has flowed since the Protestant Reformation snapped the Catholic Church in two in the early 1500s. It wasn’t the first major break in Catholicism. The “Great Schism” happened in 1054 when what’s now known as Orthodox Christianity split from Roman Catholicism. But the results of those divisions can…
KC Reparations Leaders Uncertain Work Will Lead to Action
Do you know the details of how Kansas City’s past public policies and actions created a community with a long history of segregation that led to the racial disparities of today? Mayor Quinton Lucas says a primary purpose of his Mayor’s Commission on Reparations will be to teach you that history and to help you…
Plans Afoot to Meet Religious Needs of Worldwide Soccer Fans
If you were to visit this Condé Nast travel site about the World Cup games coming here to the Heartland in June, you might conclude that athletes and their fans have zero interest in religion. The site, after all, never mentions all the planning that people of faith here are doing now to make sure…
History of Persecution Binds Black, Jewish Communities
Kansas City icon Alvin Brooks knows more about the Civil Rights Movement here than almost anyone alive. And Brooks, former Kansas City mayor pro tempore, insists that progress for Blacks here would have been much more difficult without the consistent and persistent help of Jewish residents and leaders. “Jews in this community and across the…
Tackling the Scourge of Christian Nationalism
In recent decades, Christian Nationalism’s warped ideas have begun to attract the attention of scholars and teachers at universities and seminaries here in the Heartland. They’re trying to understand both its appeal and its dangers and to give students the tools necessary to make their own judgments about whether it’s good old basic Americanism or,…
‘Bountiful’ Jackson County Community Exemplifies Religious Freedom
The practice of changing one’s religious affiliation goes back more than a century in the family of W. Kevin Romer. He’s now presiding bishop of the Remnant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a resident of what the church calls “Bountiful: A New Jerusalem Community” in eastern Jackson County. Romer’s father was one…
Downtown KC Renaissance Seeds Congregations
As civic, commercial and residential life has blossomed in Kansas City’s Downtown in recent years, religious life has grown there, too. But that doesn’t mean it’s been easy for newly planted Downtown faith communities to flourish. “It’s been tougher in one sense than we thought it would be,” says the Rev. Troy Campbell, pastor of…
Taking ‘Bold Political Stances’ To Fight Injustices
It didn’t take long for the new Greater Kansas City Pastors Association to spring into action. As The Kansas City Star reported in early September, just one “day after thousands of people descended on the Missouri Capitol to demonstrate their outrage over congressional maps aimed at minimizing Kansas City’s voting power,” the new pastors’ group…
9/11 Pain Continues as Justice System Plods Along
Every email I get from Danielle Reddan, director of the Victim Witness Assistance Program in the Office of the Chief Prosecutor of Military Commissions, starts the same way: “Dear Survivors & Families.” More than two decades after the murder of my nephew, a passenger on the first plane that Osama bin Laden’s misguided theological thugs…