Baptist Studies at Mercer, Duke and SMU/Baugh Center

   I noticed a Baptist News global press release last week about the New House of Baptist Studies at the Perkins Divinity School of SMU in Dallas underwritten by the Baugh Foundation. Jaime Soles is the director. There are Baptist emphasis at several schools now in addition to historically Baptist Schools like Wake Forest, Baylor and Gardner Webb.

    What is core to education about the authentic Baptist work in America at these schools. Do graduates know about Stewart Newman when they graduate, have they heard about Will Campbell and LD Johnson and Marney, is their history inflected by the witness of the Baptist Journalist Marshall Frady, do they read Can I Get a Witness about lesser known forward leaning labor and justice activists who ushered in the Civil Rights Movement.

    Or is it all Woke Politics so mostly women can hang with their left leaning feminist scholars in the Methodist and Episcopalian tradition who go to Yale and Harvard Div and other Ivy Leaguers.

     I think there is a rich heritage in authentic Baptist life that knows George W. Truett, explores his time and his navigation of race in Jim Crow era. If I was head of one of these schools I would bring in Robert Wuthnow to talk about his chapter From Judge Lynch to Jim Crow in his book Rough Country to talk about Truett as mainstream for his time looking at Race. And by All means every intro should have in the syllabus James Dunn mentor Stewart A Newman sweet little book on the Free Church Tradition.

    Randall Lolley memorial service will be livestreamed tomorrow May 14 at one pm. Strong case can be made there was no Baptist witness of conviction of Randall Lolley without Stewart A Newman who saw Jesse Helms dismissal of Lolley coming when Newman stood up to WA Criswell in Columbia SC in 1956 . Any dimplomaed Baptist scholar who does not know and understand the implications of that moment in my opinion has a bogus degree

     From what I know of the layman Mr. Baugh, he would want every student funded by the endowment of his wealth and family name to have conversational knowledge of the insights of Harold Bloom's The American Religion into Baptist thought as it played out in American Politics of of the late 20th Century.

    Of course the convictions of Baptist Greats ML King, Jimmy Carter, John Lewis and Molly Marshall should be explored.

     Just a few bullet points, foundational curricula for Baptist thought. And if any of these schools want to fly me in for a week to talk about the wider historical implications of the fracas between Bill Moyers and Pressler, bringing in the kitchen sink of the Birch Society and the Texas Regulars and Ballot Box 13 and Clinton and Carter and Big Oil and why the Right wanted to get in the heads of all those white people in the pews for a voting bloc, Well you can find me and lets talk.