Thursday's News & Ideas - 7/8/2021

Could newly elected SBC president be forced to resign over sermon plagiarism?
Baptist News Global: Amid charges of sermon plagiarism, newly elected Southern Baptist Convention President Ed Litton is facing calls for his resignation.
The New York Times: ‘Sermongate’ prompts a quandary: Should pastors borrow words from one another?*

The proportion of white Christians in the U.S. has stopped shrinking, new study finds
NPR: Two dramatic trends that for years have defined the shifting landscape of religion in America -- a shrinking white Christian majority, alongside the rise of religiously unaffiliated Americans -- have stabilized, according to a new, massive survey of American religious practice.

Federal judge largely faults Air Force for 2017 Texas church shooting
CNN: A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the negligence of the United States government was mostly responsible for the 2017 mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, one of the deadliest mass shootings in recent history.

Reading the Old Testament while pregnant*
The New Yorker: “It is the mothers -- Eve, Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Hannah, Rachel, Tamar, Bathsheba, Ruth -- whose stories are so moving to me now.”

The vortex of white evangelicalism*
The Atlantic: “There are people who look at me suspiciously because I’m too proximate to evangelicalism, or they look at me suspiciously because I’m too proximate to Black spaces and I speak too plainly about racial injustice,” says Esau McCaulley.

The Spark

It’s not just bad behavior -- why social media design makes it hard to have constructive disagreements online
There’s no shortage of research about the psychology of arguing online, says The Conversation. But there’s another factor that’s often overlooked: the design of social media itself.

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