Kanuga

We are at our church's annual retreat at Kanuga. Much to my surprise (it turns out a new member of the church has much better connections to retreat leaders) we have an amazing leader, Glen Hinson. He taught for more than 30 years at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. How he avoided getting kicked out sooner is not clear to me.

When Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith [said] in 1980: "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew." A furor ensued, with then-Southern Seminary professor E. Glenn Hinson saying that statements like Smith's "are the stuff from which holocausts come." (source)

Hinson now teaches at a Baptist seminary in Kentucky associated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (breakaway moderate southern Baptists). He told some good stories and spoke in a way that got through to me about how we struggle to believe in our core (not just in our head) that God loves us. I asked him if he knew my former therapist, and he said K. was one of his first five Ph.D. students.

I enjoyed my afternoon bike ride despite a very strong wind, though it left me a bit windburned. The river was still flooded from Thursday's hard rain; in fact I came to one place where the road was closed because of high water. I was 20 miles into a 25 mile ride and didn't have a map of anything but the route I was following (so I didn't know a way around). The water had gone down and there were only a few inches over the road at the yellow line, so I snuck through the barrier and rode the flooded road.