Bill Tammeus
View Could Bridge Divide Between Christians and Jews
The normal weekday lunch-hour crowd has collected at Michael Forbes Restaurant in Brookside. Old friends laughing, business folks talking deals. Well, normal except at my table. I’m with religion scholar Mark D. Nanos. I’ve asked him here to explain himself. And Nanos, a Kansas Citian who’s been stirring up the world of biblical scholarship for…
Hospital Chaplains Deliver Spiritual Care
Right from birth, this baby was sick, in trouble. “Her mother immediately asked for prayer and was very optimistic,” Kathie Knehans, then a chaplain at Children’s Mercy Hospital told me. So Knehans prayed with the family. And even when no family members were present, Knehans, now retired, visited the child and prayed. When the still-hospitalized…
Purge In Turkey Worries KC Emigres
The brutal, imperious reaction of Turkey’s dictatorial government to a failed coup attempt last year has turned life into a nightmare for most, if not all, Kansas City-area residents of Turkish nationality. “I don’t know of anyone here from Turkey who is not affected,” says Selahattin Aydin, executive director of the Dialogue Institute of the…
Christianity Faces Another Tempest
As the world marks the 500th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation in October, lots of Kansas City’s Protestant churches know that today they’re in another major theological upheaval. This one isn’t as violent (yes, the Protestant Reformation turned viciously violent for decades) as the one in 1517, but it may be as…
For Openly Gay Clergy, the Goal Is To Keep the Momentum
The Rev. Donna Simon says being a female member of the clergy sometimes is tougher than being a gay member. And Rabbi Javier Cattapan says his professional difficulties have more to do with being an immigrant from Argentina with an accent than with being gay. Those are signs of the welcome reality that many religious…