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
Many ‘Moving Parts’ Complicate Work of KC Reparations Panel
Kansas City’s history of racial division and injustice is painful and often appalling. But the city now has an opportunity through the Mayor’s Commission on Reparations to show other cities — and maybe the nation itself — how to begin repairing the vast damage inflicted on Black citizens by discriminatory, foolish, destructive, and indefensible past…
Gay Bishop Reflects Evolution of Evangelical Lutheran Church
Almost 20 years ago, I devoted a long column in The Kansas City Star to an interview with two local pastors, both in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a Mainline Protestant denomination. The ELCA was then debating whether to change its rules to allow the ordination of LGBTQIA+ people as clergy. The Rev. Donna…
Kansas City’s ‘Stunning’ Array of Sacred Music
Rockhurst University music professor Timothy L. McDonald grew up near New York City where, he says, “we have a lot of sacred music, but it’s my perception that New York has not nearly as many professional and semi-professional sacred music groups as in Kansas City. “It’s stunning to me how many such groups we have…
Retreat Centers Serve as Oases from Stressful Times
Stress — including that caused by our nation’s current political turmoil — is such a common experience that people have devised many ways to describe it, including the simple exclamation “I’m stressed out.” There’s also the phrase you’re likely to hear only in parts of New England: “I’m right out straight.” Sometimes people under age…
Ministering to Children With Disabilities
When Michael Palacio was born 18 years ago this month, he was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, tuberous sclerosis, which causes epilepsy and autism. And Michael now has both. As his parents began to respond to Michael’s needs — and continue to parent Michael’s two older siblings — one issue that arose quickly was…
Feeding Tubes and Defibrillators
Let’s begin with two stories about the growing and important field of bioethics. The first is from Ryan Pferdehirt, the newly named Flanigan Chair in Bioethics at the Kansas City-based Center for Practical Bioethics. A hospital once asked him to consult on a bioethics case in which a son thought his desperately ill, hospitalized mother…
Sharpening Teeth of Acclaimed KC-Based Catholic Watchdog
A national (and international) Kansas City company has a new leader who grew up here but doesn’t live here now and may never call Kansas City home again. James Grimaldi began a few months ago as the new executive editor of The National Catholic Reporter, an award-winning, progressive newspaper voice for Catholicism. Given Grimaldi’s long…
Aging KCK Congregation Bequeaths Building to Serve Youth
Across much of the nation in recent decades, shrinking churches have confronted the painful question of whether they can afford to maintain a building for worship and other activities. Time and again the answer has been no. Sometimes that means finding other places in which to continue offering worship. But often it means either abandoning…
Truth, Religion and the Demise of Local Newspapers
When I started reporting at The Kansas City Star in late 1970, it was a regional newspaper that served not just the metro area but also east to mid-Missouri, west to central Kansas, and beyond. I was part of a staff of hundreds, and the paper’s circulation — all print then, of course — was…
Clergy Sex Abuse Survivor Reflects on His Reform Work
A 2002 series of Boston Globe articles turned a scandal about Catholic priests who sexually abuse children (and bishops who protect those priests) into a national story. The Globe, however, wasn’t the first newspaper to expose this reprehensible crime. Credit for that goes to the independent, Kansas City-based National Catholic Reporter. NCR was writing about…