Remembering Who I Am
When I was growing up, whenever I would go on a trip without the family my father would turn to me just before I left and say, “Remember who you are.” As my own children now get older, I realize that who you are is not just shaped by your parents but the physical domain […]
Confederate Monument: Betrayal, Trump Train, and Moving Forward
Cleveland Daily BannerFaith on View has been covering this story since the demonstrations started in June. Our long article archiving the story is now over 16,000 words and can be read here. Hope and Betrayal The presentations to the City Council and the stories in the news eventually led to a call for a task […]
To Those Who Knock
It was May of 2014. I was staying Memorial Day weekend at All Saints of America Orthodox Church in De Queen, AR. I woke up early Saturday morning to take a day trip. 30 miles in, I was traveling 60mph approaching Broken Bow, OK when my engine started to sputter and the tachometer bounced forebodingly […]
Johnny Fencerider, Demon Sperm, and the Real Threat to Freedom of Conscience in America
I had a pastor friend who at one time I considered to be a mentor. Sadly, he proved to be a disappointment both as a friend and as a mentor. I remember as a very young minister standing in the midst of a meeting of the Louisiana Baptist Convention where a crucial vote was to […]
A life etched into the mountains
“Can you tell me what kind it is?” A rock, thrust in my face by my keen-eyed daughter, looked like the kind of shale we’d been examining for the better part of an hour. The front side betrayed three trace fossils, while the obverse held something much clearer – a small but perfectly preserved trilobite. […]
The person my mother thinks I am
My mother is fond of telling me, “Scot you’re David!” The David she has in mind is the biblical one. And when she conflates me and King David, I’m positive she is thinking of the David who is described as being a “man after God’s own heart” and not David the murderer and womanizer. After […]
A Journey to Eastern Christianity
The following is a talk which my departed grandmother invited me to give for her Sunday School class at First United Methodist Shreveport and which, due to some confusion, was given in its entirety to the wrong class. Because of that, I have never shared it until now. The talk zones in on Fr. Seraphim […]
Never too Old to be too Young
I grew up in a small country Southern Baptist Church in rural California. When my family moved there our family of six doubled the size of the church. But, the church did grow over the years. As a Teenager When I was in high school, our youth group was “thriving”- there were probably 8-12 of […]
Remolding Idols of Clay
I grew up in a Southern Baptist world filled with sacred tunes of both the vintage and contemporary variety. Ironically, the tune that has framed my spiritual experience more than any other stemmed not from a nineteenth-century revivalist hymn writer but from a soft rock band born in the synthesized seventies. Styx released “Show Me […]
This is my Creed: Christ with me
On the Louisiana College campus, there’s a carillon at the top of one of the buildings that plays awful bell arrangements of popular traditional hymns at certain times during the day. When I was a student there, I would go back and forth between loving and hating it, but one day as it played “All […]