• Southern Baptist pastor Wiley Drake has been cleared of tax law violations by the IRS. The pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, California, had endorsed Mike Huckabee for President from the pulpit and with an e-mail message in which he identified himself as the church’s pastor. But in a letter to Drake, the IRS concluded that “the endorsement was not authorized or approved by the Buena Park First Southern Baptist Church and no church resources were utilized in preparing or sending the e-mail.”
The IRS also determined that the Cleveland-based United Church of Christ denomination of which Sen. Barack Obama is a member did not violate tax laws by sponsoring one of his 2007 speeches.
• John Lilley has held on to the presidency at Baylor University, despite a May 6 “failure of shared governance” resolution passed by the school’s faculty senate. The senate, upset at Lilley’s denial of tenure to 12 of 30 professors up for consideration, voted 29–0 against Lilley, with two abstentions. Lilley responded by granting tenure to seven of the rejected professors, and university regents later affirmed his presidency after a closed-door meeting. Baylor’s previous president, Robert B. Sloan, resigned amid faculty unrest in January 2005.
• A federal judge ruled in April that the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Safe Space initiative must remove disparaging comments about certain religious groups from its materials. The tolerance-training initiative’s publications “clearly take the position that churches that condemn homosexuality do so on theologically flawed grounds,” U.S. District Judge J. Owen Forrester said. Such a theological judgment, coming from a publicly funded institution, violates the First Amendment prohibition against the establishment of religion, Forrester ruled.
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Related Elsewhere:
Associated Baptist Press reported on the IRS’s decision regarding Wiley Drake’s endorsement, as well as Drake’s vow to endorse candidates in the future. Earlier this year, Drake asked his followers to pray for the deaths of two leaders of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and said, “The righteous have dominion, but only through imprecatory prayer against the ungodly.”
Associated Press reported on the letter the IRS sent to UCC headquarters.
The Waco Tribune-Herald has more on the recent academic summit that seems to have repaired Lilley’s relationship with faculty at Baylor.
Inside Higher Ed asked about the implications of the Georgia Tech decision for professors and student groups.
