Fifty years ago, Baylor’s campus was transformed as the Board of Trustees voted to integrate the student body. That same year, the first black student enrolled.

In discussions prior to the November 1963 vote, students expressed feelings about integrating. In a letter to the Lariat in 1957 one student wrote, “It is the place of Baylor as a Christian institution to take a lead in integration.” Another student said, “I think a Negro should stay with his people, and we should stay with ours.”

The growing secularization of the Christmas season has left some Christians wondering how they should celebrate.

According to a 2010 Gallup poll, 95 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas, but only half of them describe the holiday as “strongly religious.” In the end, the poll concluded that although the holiday has religious roots, it is celebrated by nearly all Americans, including 80 percent of non-Christians.

South Africa’s first black president spent nearly a third of his life as a prisoner of apartheid, yet he sought to win over its defeated guardians in a relatively peaceful transition of power that inspired the world.

As head of state, the former boxer, lawyer and inmate lunched with the prosecutor who argued successfully for his incarceration.

Hesitant to be pegged as a theologian, Dr. Jimmy Dorrell, a part-time lecturer at George W. Truett Theological Seminary, said his ideology stems from an urgency to maintain a practical Christian faith and not from a desire to engage in theological discussion.

“I’ve always hated intelligent, fluffy theology,” he said. “If it’s true, I have to learn how to live out of it.”