Vouchers, Cooperative Program, removed churches

Improve politics

The editorial about school vouchers makes good points, which also apply to charter schools, now being championed nationally.

I suggest these ways to seek improvement in politics:

• Vote, and let it be known you will vote.  Too many stayed home or wasted their vote.

• Read, and share important news with others.

• Write; respond to faulty views, create correspondence threads.

• Attend political gatherings and hearings.

• Bring people together and resolve tensions.

• Display citizenship; emphasize good things about our society.

• Insist on logic; proposals must make sense fiscally.

• Talk; don’t be afraid to discuss politics, even with those of different views. There should be common ground, even on the thorniest issues like education, immigration, environment, health care, gun control and constitutional interpretation. Everyone should agree discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation is un-American.

• Keep the pressure on regarding issues like the Russia connection, fossil fuels and climate change, public schools, the new attorney general squelching investigations and prosecutions. Keep their feet to the fire. 

• Don’t give up. We all reach a point when we feel things are hopeless and we are tired of politics. Take a break for a few days, but get back on it.

We owe it to our grandchildren to keep the American experiment and the American dream afloat.

Remember the story of Benjamin Franklin being asked what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Don Nolte

Exeter, N.H.

 

Truett, the Grahams & Jeffress

Jack Graham has ordered the withholding of funds to the Cooperative Program because he says Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission President Russell Moore was “disrespectful” to Trump voters during the election. Since Jack Graham and Franklin Graham are both disciples of President Trump, I was wondering if they are kin to each other.

Has it occurred to anyone that maybe Jack Graham has received a message from God about withholding funds from the Southern Baptist Convention? Seriously. If these funds were intended to be used to spread a message of hate, fear, bigotry and lying all over the world instead of Jesus’ message of “love God and love your neighbor as yourself,” I could see where God might intervene.

I was thinking about George W. Truett, World War I veteran, minister to cowboys and longtime pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas. Truett preached a message on the steps of the U.S. Capitol during the 1920s about separation of church and state. If Truett were alive today, what would he think of people like the Grahams and Robert Jeffress? I think he would weep like Jesus did 2,000 years ago.

Carl Hess

Ozark, Ala.

 

BGCT & removed churches

I would like to thank Ken Camp for his kindly structured article, “BGCT board votes to remove three churches.” He presented the dilemma in an inclusive way, representing both sides of the event.

How to treat LGBT persons is a struggle all Christian denominations are going to struggle with, including my own Roman Catholic Church.

Is it not interesting that even in the Baptist convention, the pushback comes from the hierarchy of the convention? The congregations and their pastors who are working with the real people have come to a different conclusion on how to be like Jesus by welcoming disenfranchised and marginalized persons.

Don Siegal

Three Rivers, Calif.

We may look like dancing baptists at First Baptist Church in Austin, but we’re really just shaking the dust off our feet.

Marshall Smith

Austin

I recall Jesus saying, “Let him who has not sinned cast the first stone.” Do look at those who did cast stones.

Camille D. Miller

Austin