Furman 20 years after Break with SC SBC

[Stephen Fox]

He may be a member of St. Paul Baptist in Richmond, I'm not sure.

Deb Loftis is a native of Richmond, well known in Baptist circles and a 1974 grad of Furman with Judy Clarke, a year behind former Furman President David Shi. Deb is not on the Search committee but may have conversations with Cullen.

I hope so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cullen_(attorney)

[Stephen Fox]

http://www.npr.org/2013/10/23/240248593 ... of-the-gop

with the conversation above today on NPR, and recent Chatter on Furman's public facebook wall re Jesse Jackson's upcoming appearance October 30

[Stephen Fox]

http://blogs.furman.edu/freshmenblogger ... al-furman/

[Stephen Fox]

Echol Nix, who was Eric Motley's debating opponent growing up in Montgomery had his picture taken with Jesse yesterday when Jackson spoke in some classrooms at Furman after his main event Weds evening. Motley was one of Tom Corts most cherished undergrads at Samford, and from Samford went to the Bush White House. Nix teaches in Furman Religion Department!

http://foxofbama.blogspot.com/2013/10/w ... or_25.html

[Stephen Fox]

Cooley is the product of a "Christian" School in Ft. Lauderdale, Fl. https://www.facebook.com/walions

She brought Anne Coulter to campus and is most likely the woman who get a tape copy of Jesse's address to the National Review.

On her school's facebook wall I left them some reading material to consider

[Stephen Fox]

Tully succeeded DJ Kennedy at Coral Gables, the sponsoring church of the Westminster Academy of which Lauren is a product.

Marshall Frady and the World of billy Graham at Furman; still a lot of Drama

https://www.facebook.com/walions

[Stephen Fox]

Code: Select all

Tomorrow is Billy Graham's 95th Birthday. A Recent symposium at Wheaton on the World of Billy Graham featured a presentation by Steven Miller on Marshall Frady's 79 bio of Graham. It is ironic, maybe coincidental that it all coincides with Frady's alma mater, especially now the connection to his Grandson Tully Tchvidjian's ministry at Coral Gables Baptist Church in Ft. Lauderdale. And it worthy to note Roger Ailes of the Nixon administration; now with Fox News will feature an interview of Franklin Graham with Sean Hannity tomorrow night at ten pm. I am convinced Frady, were he still with us, would find all this most fascinating and worthy of pursuit, especially the tentacles that now entangle Furman University and the Conservative Students Organization. Thanks for this wall to point all this out to the latest group of students and staff here on the eve of Frady's 63 Class Reunion. Stephen M. Fox, FU 75 

[Stephen Fox]

Sam is a friend who is editor of the collection For the Love of Alabama. He is former book page editor of the Charlotte Observer, on the advisory board of the Furman alumni magazine, now with the UMC Reporter.


http://www.umc.org/site/apps/nlnet/cont ... t=13414457

[Stephen Fox]

Talked to her this morning, a staffer for the US Tea Party Catholic Rep whose district includes my hometown of Gaffney. The Conversation centered around immigration reform.

[Stephen Fox]

Lauren Cooley affiliated with Billy Graham's Grandson Tchvidjian at Coral GAbles Prez in South Florida, DJ Kennedy Successor engaged one of my comments at the Christian Century.

Here is my reply

Lauren Cooley Thanks for reply, Lauren. Had a good chat about you and other Furman matters with a current Furman student while visiting the Upstate over the Holidays. I trust you have read the links about Marshall Frady and his relationship with Jesse Jackson I shared on Furman facebook wall last fall. I doubt I will ever reach your and the Blonde Ann Coulter's high standards, or great ethics. As for shoddy friends, there is a new bio of Roger Ailes out, maybe you will want to take a look at it.....And be aware of Molly Worthen--UNC proff and Yale PHD--book on the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention my Dartmouth friend Randall Balmer said Pastor Tick's grandfather Billy Graham acted quite cagey in. Pardon the syntax, You and Saint Anne have fun clearing it up. Don't be shy, join the conversations at www.baptistlife.com/forums history. I have a thread there on Furman. Your name is mentioned often. Hope you keep reading and Praying. Get Dr. Guth to set you up for a chat with his daughter Karen next time she's in town. You two should have plenty to talk about. BTW, how did you celebrate MLK day yesterday. And What did Saint Anne do. Does she admit now Jesse Helms was wrong to call him a communist. Does Anne Graham Lotz still have her suspicions?

To her comment in the original exchange:

There is an interesting conversation going on at Furman University now about the recent appearance of Marshall Frady's friend Jesse Jackson. Frady was an early biographer of Billy Graham. Graham's grandson Tully Tchvidjian is now pastor of the Coral Gables Church whose Christian School Westminster sent Lauren Cooley to Furman. At Furman she invited Anne Coulter to Campus and has been the biggest antagonist of Jackson's appearance there getting quoted in the National Review which took exception to Jackson's appearance. Take a look at my blog on the matter www.foxofbama.blogspot.com


Reply · Like

· Unfollow Post · November 4, 2013 at 7:46pm






Lauren Cooley · Digital Liaison at Upstate Business Journal

Hi Stephen, I know this is a little late, but I just wanted to clarify a few things. First, Tchvidjian is the pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian, not Coral Gables Church. Secondly, he was only there my senior year... I went to WA for 13 years. Third, WA did not "send" me to Furman. I worked very hard to get into such a great university and chose the school on my own, just like every other college student chooses their university and is not "sent" by their high school. And fourth, although I'm sure AC doesn't care what you call her, it's ANN no E. Anyway, hopefully you can do your research next time and get the facts right. Your shoddy journalism sucks.

[Stephen Fox]

To admit the context of her uninformed outraged against Jesse Jackson's appearance at Furman. She is now interning with the Upstate Business Journal, which recently spotlighted the Atlantic's James Fallows stories on Greenville's vitality. Fallows was chief speechwriter for President Carter.

From Garry Wills analysis in recent nybooks.com of Joe Scarborough's fog:

ver and over, a closer look shows how skewed is this reading of political history. The moderate is supposed to be pragmatic, to adopt what works; but over and over we see that Republican moderates would fail without their extremists. George H.W. Bush needed Lee Atwater’s dirty tactics to get him into office, and he lost when he reverted to moderation by raising taxes (which Reagan also did). Bush defeated at first the forces raised against him by Pat Buchanan’s “pitchforkers” in 1992—but in what worked over time, Buchanan was the pragmatic victor:

[Buchanan] revolutionized the modern Republican Party by providing the blueprint to a GOP congressional majority. Buchanan’s conservative populism was especially persuasive in districts like my own where Republicans rarely won congressional races. It was persuasive because so many of his policy positions were outside a Washington Republican mainstream that all too often capitulated to big business and big government even when it was not the conservative thing to do.

That sounds like the Tea Party our author has come to rein in. And no wonder. Scarborough admits that he won his congressional seat as an enthusiastic member of the Gingrich Revolution in 1994. He was in favor of the first government shutdown before he was against the second one:

The coming Republican Revolution of 1994 mixed Buchanan populism with mainstream GOP orthodoxy. Newt Gingrich put together a winning political strategy that kept Republicans in the speaker’s chair in the US House of Representatives for sixteen of the past twenty years.

But Scarborough became a moderate in time for his brief period in office, and thus could be a shining Camelot figure of the Ike-Ron sort. He deserted “Gingrich, the long-term visionary,” for a more pragmatic colleague in the House, Steve Largent of Oklahoma. That kind of conversion does not disqualify Scarborough as a model, since even his favorite conservative philosopher, Bill Buckley, was against Scarborough’s first great ideal, Eisenhower, before he was for his second one, Reagan (and even Reagan had been a New Deal Democrat).

Scarborough’s pretense that he believes in an evenhanded oscillation of fringe and center in both parties continually breaks down. We are given two great icons of moderation on the Republican side, but not a single one on the Democratic side. When Lyndon Johnson wins, it is not because of his own moderation but because the Republicans went extreme with Goldwater. Bill Clinton won because the first President Bush wobbled between his own heartfelt goals and those of Atwater, and Clinton was reelected because Dick Morris helped him play against Gingrich’s grandiosity.

There cannot be a Democratic equivalent of the Republican “icons” Ike and Ron in Scarborough’s scheme. Some might want to put Franklin Roosevelt in that position, but Scarborough knows that he was just the man who set Democrats on a radical course at Yalta, and gave Republicans an enduring anti-extremism position:

For conservatives [not extremists, you notice, but Scarborough’s own true conservatives], Yalta now brought together two irresistible forces: contempt for Roosevelt and the growing fear of Communism’s spread. Both were potent in and of themselves. Mixed together in the story of the sellout at Yalta they fed on one another.

After five years of standing shoulder to shoulder with a Democratic president leading the fight against Adolf Hitler, Republicans suddenly had a case to make against FDR on foreign policy that was equal in weight to the domestic case….

Roosevelt was now not only the embodiment of socialism at home. He was, because of Yalta, an abettor of Communism abroad. It may have been an oversimplification of actual events, but most powerful political arguments usually are. The linkage of an expansive government at home with a weak foreign policy abroad gave the right an internally coherent political philosophy that would grow steadily in the postwar years and eventually lead to landslide victories for both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Liberalism’s failures at Yalta, in China, and in the nuclear arms race’s infancy gave Buckley and his apostles the kick-start that “movement conservatism” needed. America’s political system would never be the same.

Scarborough revives the old canard that Roosevelt (and Churchill) “sold out” Eastern Europe to Stalin at the meeting of Allied leaders while World War II was still being fiercely waged. But as historian James MacGregor Burns demonstrated, “Roosevelt didn’t give Stalin Eastern Europe; Stalin had taken Eastern Europe.” At that point, we had nothing we could give away.

By resurrecting the Yalta myth, Scarborough concludes that there cannot be moderate Democrats, since radicalism is built into the party’s DNA. No matter what its candidates do, they are the party of New Deal socialism and Yalta. When he says that Democrats have suffered from extremism, going “hard left,” he means that they have been even more outrageous than their party’s normal extremism—whether in the “acid, amnesty, and abortion” purportedly championed by McGovern, or in becoming even more socialist than the New Deal with Hillarycare and Obamacare.

His simplistic radical–pragmatic tick-tock of power ignores a great variety of different factors—the World War II halo around Eisenhower, the impact of JFK’s assassination on the 1964 election, the effect of September 11 on Bush’s second-term victory, to name only a few. And longer-term structural factors are filtered out entirely. Consider just three—race, religion, and money.

Race. Scarborough was born in the South one year before the explosive summer of 1964, which saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act, after the longest filibuster in Senate history against it by three defenders of the segregated South (Senators Robert Byrd, Richard Russell, and Strom Thurmond); the murder of the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi; Barry Goldwater’s successful plea to Senator Thurmond to become an outspoken Republican; the Goldwater nominating convention, at which southern delegates renamed their convention hotel “Fort Sumter”; Goldwater’s loss of all states outside his home Arizona and five that had been part of the Democrats’ “Solid South.”

Helped by the analysis of Kevin Phillips, Nixon four years later built his Southern Strategy on those five states, after his own wooing of Strom Thurmond. It made him president, and left a template Ronald Reagan adhered to, launching his 1980 campaign at the fairgrounds outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, the murder site of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, criticizing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and opposing a memorial day for Dr. King. As president, he tried to protect tax exemption for segregated colleges and vetoed a civil rights bill.

According to Scarborough’s book, none of these things happened. He says the Southern Strategy is a “laughable” liberal myth. Nixon was elected not because he built on Goldwater’s southern success but because he was a noble moderate until his private demons led him into the Watergate cover-up. Up till then, Scarborough says, in the combined votes of the Nixon and Wallace tickets “conservatism in the classic sense carried the day in 1968.”

Really? The support for Nixon-Agnew and Wallace-Lemay was a triumph of moderation? Scarborough, born into a Thurmondized South, literally cannot see race in any part of his home region’s history. Certainly not in its current efforts to exclude black and Latino voters by registration laws, identity tests, and narrowed windows for voting. These are purportedly aimed at “voter fraud,” which does not exist to any significant extent. Every other explanation is admissible, but not race in the historically innocent Land of Thurmond.

Racism is not confined to the South, of course—and neither are Republican efforts to limit black and Latino voting. But the reflexive political use of race is usually found among Republicans—as in the newsletters of Ron Paul, where Holocaust deniers and Confederacy restorers found a welcome. When Rand Paul was not plagiarizing others, his books and speeches were being ghostwritten by a self-styled “Southern Avenger.” Republicans do not see racism in their ranks because it has for so long been denied as to become invisible to its practitioners.

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[Stephen Fox]

Here was my comment to the online Furman paper:

Davis almost for certain knows Chet Edwards the visiting Poage lecturer at Baylor and champion of authentic Baptist views on the separation of church and state. As she gets accustom to the Upstate she is certain to draw distinction between and herself and fellow Baylor alum in the Upstate Trey Gowdy. As her fellow parishioner at Calvary Baptist in Waco, Roger Olson has made clear in his recent online review of Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason, the world of George Truett and Chet Edwards has a large chasm between that of Francis Schaeffer and Trey Gowdy. That said, Davis, like her Baptist president colleagues Nathan Hatch at Wake Forest, and Underwood at Mercer will shine as President of all Furman Constituencies. I am delighted early indications are she is fullfilment of Jeff Rogers grand lecture on Furman and Baptists in 1993 in the LD Johnson What Really Matters series.

[Stephen Fox]

http://furmannewspaper.com/2013/11/20/k ... at-furman/

[Stephen Fox]

http://abpnews.com/ministry/people/item ... v5bGp2YZok

[Stephen Fox]

Understand this moment in Furman History.

I called circulation of the Furman Library this morning. They don't have Molly's book to date, but when I told them I have on good word New President Davis will be reading, and I have recommended it to a former Chaplain as well as two former Deans and Eric Motley's friend in the religion department, I think's it should be in the stacks by next Wednesday.

http://esrh.blogspot.com/2013/10/molly- ... alism.html

[Stephen Fox]

Presidnet Bill Clinton will be the guest of Furman grad Dick Riley, former Gov of S.C. and Clinton's Sec Ed April 8 at Furman.
. That same day in Collinsville, Al, Stephen Fox, FU 75, will host his friend Sam Hodges, 77, at Collinsville HS. Sam will speak about his book For the Love of Alabama. Sam's Grandfather was a founder of the SBC Radio and Television Commission!

[Stephen Fox]

http://www.greenvillebusinessmag.com/Vi ... rward.aspx

[Stephen Fox]

Harris had an excellent oped in Ethicsdaily.com on hijacking traditions. Compared SBC history of the last 30 years to the the GOP's travail with the Tea Party.

Harris son teaches Math at Furman.

Colin was a friend of my Father.

Randall Balmer, who Harris spotlights in his piece, is a friend of mine.

I feel in my soul Furman great Marshall Frady would be proud.

[Stephen Fox]

And his wife at the Historically Baptist affiliated instituion is pastor of a UMC Church. Before Furman Crowe Tipton was pastor of FBC Auburn, Alabama.

http://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/n ... /14285563/

[Stephen Fox]

Gantt speaks Thursday Sept 18. I have made a comment on the Furman facebook wall about Helms role in the fundamentlaist takeover of the SBC which led to Furman's break with SC Baps. Gantt ran against Helms for U S Senate in NC in 84 and was the victim of the infamous "hands" racist commercial.

[Sandy]

Understand this moment in Furman History.

I called circulation of the Furman Library this morning. They don't have Molly's book to date, but when I told them I have on good word New President Davis will be reading, and I have recommended it to a former Chaplain as well as two former Deans and Eric Motley's friend in the religion department, I think's it should be in the stacks by next Wednesday.

http://esrh.blogspot.com/2013/10/molly- ... alism.html

What!? You mean, the librarian at Furman didn't rush right out, not sparing budget nor time, and grab Molly Worthen's work right out of the bookstore on the day it appeared? I'm surprised they've been able to educate their students this long without a copy of it in the library.

[Stephen Fox]

I am posting a link, a direction to your comment Sandy on Furman's public library facebook wall. I did have a conversation with the archives a few days ago and they have the online access to the Southern Literary Journal with Doug Cumming's Spring piece on Marshall Frady's Emory papers, a matter that may interest William Thornton.

I hope by now you have read Scott Sherman's The Unvanquished on Frady.

Working to have Worthen on Furman campus within the year to let the light shine on the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Hope your friends from FBC Sburg will show if it takes. As Cletus said in the Nutty Professor, it ain't nothing but a short walk; Sburg to the Furman campus, about 30 miles. or 25 minues. if you come in on 29 by FBC Taylors where I first or second saw Cliff Barrows in person.

[Stephen Fox]

http://foxofbama.blogspot.com/2014/10/b ... party.html

[Stephen Fox]

The Homecoming issue of the Furman Magazine has a sterling profile of new Furman President Elizabeth Davis. She is a woman of faith, a good progressive Baptist and the Furman magazine is not shy in making that clear in the first edition of the alumni magazine of her Presidency.

In some ways it bookends the loose ends of the magazine piece a few years ago that I used to spark this series of comments on this board.

Most fascinating are the few paragraphs that talk of her Baylor experience, the troubles of the first decade of this century at Baylor, culminating in Ken Starr's selection as President.

The article says both are people of deep Christian conviction, something that is important to a significant constituency at Baylor. Implied that their secular politics might have a different inflection, they were a good "elixir" to move Baylor past the troubles of the first decade of this century.

Davis walked through all that in fine form. Though Furman is a secular institution now, like Wake Forest chosing Nathan Hatch, Furman is on course to produce some exquisite scholars of grand character.

[Stephen Fox]

http://furman.edu/about/commemorating-d ... ading.aspx