The fact that 40 percent of Americans have switched their religious affiliation since childhood is a sign of health. As A Baptist who believes in soul liberty, absolute freedom of conscience, and the priesthood of every person of faith, I can only be encouraged that so many Americans, experiencing dissatisfaction with the religious tradition into which they were born, would feel the freedom and have the courage to change their personal religious allegiance to one they find more satisfying to their hearts and souls.

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Email is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because we have much faster access to information as communication than ever before. Email is a quantum leap forward in technology from the fax machine.

However, like all technologies, it’s a mixed blessing. Unless one uses email with considerable self-discipline, it can become a tyrant in one’s life. Email comes to you so fast and in such volume that you have no time for reflection and contemplation in considering your response to correspondence unless you deliberately slow the process down and with conscious action make time to THINK.

In other words, you must set the pace with which you read and respond to email. Otherwise, email becomes master and you the servant, instead of the other way around. Unless we cultivate time for reflection it will be eaten up by email.

One test of whatever you or email is master: Can you “unplug” for a morning, for an afternoon—dare we say—a whole working day?

As a Caucasian male, I am reticent to wade into this deep end of the pool. However, my personal impressions, and I do understand that the plural of anecdote is not data, is that racism is even more entrenched in the American experience than sexism, although both are still alive and well in our society. Globally, I would argue that sexism is more prevalent, but in the United States, we’ve done a better job of vitiating the impact of sexism than racism.

The role of religion is to speak moral truth to society, both individually and collectively. Christianity, my faith, believes that all human beings are of equal value and worth to God and thus, should be to each other. As the confessional statement of Southern Baptist’s, the Baptist Faith & Message states, “The sacredness of human personality is evident in that God created man in His own image, and in that Christ died for man; therefore, every person of every race possesses full dignity and is worth of respect and Christian love.”

Thus, followers of Christ have the responsibility to speak out against sexism and racism whenever and wherever they occur.