Religion

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Entry Category: Religion - Starting with B

Bahá’ís

The Bahá’í faith originated in Persia (present-day Iran) in the mid-1800s as a movement within a minority sect of Islam led by a man known as the Báb (whose name means “the gate”). After his execution by Iranian leaders, one of the Báb’s followers, a man known as Bahá’u’lláh, became the leader of the movement and claimed to be the Messianic figure written about by the Báb. Bahá’u’lláh established the Bahá’í faith as a new religion and, after many exiles, was finally sent to Akka, Palestine (in present-day Israel), where he spent the remainder of his days. Bahá’u’lláh appointed his son, `Abdu’l-Bahá, to assume leadership of the Bahá’í faith upon his death. Central tenets of the Bahá’í faith include the …

Baines, George Washington

George W. Baines was a prominent nineteenth-century Southern Baptist minister, teacher, Arkansas politician, and president of Baylor University. His great-grandson, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was the thirty-sixth president of the United States. George Washington Baines was born on December 29, 1809, in Chowan County, North Carolina. He was one of ten children born to Thomas Baines, who was a Baptist minister, and Mary McCoy Baines. When he was eight, his family briefly lived in Georgia before settling on a farm near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1818. His early education was obtained in the rural schools. He later attended the University of Alabama but withdrew in 1836 due to gastrointestinal health reasons. He was later awarded an AM degree by the university. In …

Bales, James David

aka: J. D. Bales
From 1944 to 1980, James David Bales was a professor of Bible and theology at Harding University (formerly Harding College) in Searcy (White County). Both in public and in print, Bales earned a national reputation as a fearsome debater of theological issues and political ideologies, becoming especially well known for his anti-communism stance. J. D. Bales was born on November 5, 1915, in Tacoma, Washington, the fifth of eight children. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Albany, Georgia. Bales was eleven when a train struck and killed his parents. Bales went to live with his paternal grandparents in Fitzgerald, Georgia, until 1930 when he enrolled in the Georgia Military Academy (now Woodward Academy) in College Park, Georgia, where …

Bandini, Pietro

Father Pietro Bandini, a Roman Catholic priest, is most widely remembered in Arkansas for the 1898 founding of Tontitown (Washington County), located in the northwestern corner of the state, which he named after Henry de Tonti, an Italian explorer who established, with René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the first European settlement in Arkansas in 1686. However, the founding of Tontitown is but a regional capstone on a life spent working for the betterment of Italian immigrant communities in the nation. Bandini was born on March 31, 1852, in Forli, which is in the Romagna region of Italy. Little is known about Bandini’s family, described as of the upper class and refined. He is known to have had two older …

Baptist Health

Baptist Health, Arkansas’s largest healthcare system, has hospital campuses in communities around Arkansas, including Little Rock (Pulaski County), North Little Rock (Pulaski County), Arkadelphia (Clark County), Stuttgart (Arkansas County), Conway (Faulkner County), Heber Springs (Cleburne County), Fort Smith (Sebastian County), and Van Buren (Crawford County). In addition to its medical centers, it also operates therapy centers, physician clinics, a retirement village, and a school of nursing and allied health. Baptist Health began in 1919 when the Arkansas Baptist State Convention voted to create a modern scientific hospital in Little Rock. The Baptist State Hospital opened with seventy-five beds in November 1920. In its first year of operation, the hospital treated 1,026 patients. Dr. J. S. Rogers was appointed superintendent of the …

Baptists

Baptists make up the largest Protestant Christian group in Arkansas, characterized by the practice of baptism, usually by immersion, on profession of faith in Jesus Christ. They exhibit great diversity in customs, but most Baptists have congregational polity combined with voluntary interconnection of congregations. They also emphasize autonomy (self-governance) of congregations, associations, and conventions. Leading Baptist groups in Arkansas are the Arkansas Baptist State Convention (Southern Baptist), National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., National Baptist Convention of America, and American Baptist Association. Baptist Denominations Southern Baptists are members of congregations affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which formed in 1845 in a split over slavery. (Anti-slavery Baptists, mostly from the North, objected to the practice of Baptist missionaries taking their …

Becoming Free Indeed

Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear is a 2023 memoir by Jinger Duggar Vuolo, one of the stars of 19 Kids and Counting and Counting On, reality television shows focused upon the daily lives of the Duggar family. She was assisted in writing by Corey Williams. Published by W Publishing Group, an imprint of Christian publishing company Thomas Nelson, the book constituted the first memoir by a Duggar family member following brother Josh Duggar’s arrest on charges of possessing child pornography, but it deals with this scandal only in passing. The book was followed in 2023 by the release of the Amazon Studios documentary series Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets and the publication of Counting …

Biltz, Joseph Henri

The Reverend Joseph H. Biltz, a Roman Catholic priest and human rights activist, was a staunch supporter of social and Church reform in Arkansas. His outspoken advocacy for reform brought him into direct confrontation with both religious and civil authorities. Joseph Henri Biltz was born on May 29, 1930, in Little Rock (Pulaski County) to Maurice Biltz and Hilda Rumbach Biltz. He studied philosophy at St. John’s Seminary in Little Rock, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1951. He then completed four years of additional study in theology and was ordained by the Catholic Church in 1955 at St. Andrew’s Cathedral. He went on to earn a master’s degree in theology (1957) and a doctorate in moral theology (1962) from the …

Blake, Charles E.

Charles Edward Blake Sr. is the presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). He is also pastor of West Angeles Church of God in Christ, which has a membership of more than 25,000. In addition, Blake founded Save Africa’s Children, which provides orphan care programs across the continent of Africa. He was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2009. Charles E. Blake was born on August 5, 1940, in North Little Rock (Pulaski County) to Junious Augustus Blake and Lula Champion Blake. His father was a native of Camden (Ouachita County) who pastored various churches throughout Arkansas before moving to California. Charles Blake was ordained a minister himself in 1962. He received a BA …

Block, Frances Isaiah Isaacs (Fanny)

Frances (Fanny) Block was the matriarch of the first documented Jewish family to immigrate to what became the state of Arkansas. After courtship and the start of a family in Virginia and New York, Block and her family moved to southwestern Arkansas in search of new economic opportunities. Her willingness to forgo the stability of a religious community on the East Coast and move her family west allowed the family to establish a regional mercantile empire that included businesses in places such as Washington (Hempstead County), Fulton (Hempstead County), and Paraclifta (Sevier County) in Arkansas, as well as in New Orleans, Louisiana, and at several stops along the railroad in Texas from Houston to Dallas. Fanny Block and her family …

Bogard, Benjamin Marcus

Benjamin Marcus Bogard, founder and head of the American Baptist Association, was Arkansas’s leading fundamentalist Christian in the 1920s. In 1928, his efforts resulted in a law banning the teaching of evolution in Arkansas public schools; it remained in place until 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned it. Bogard was born on March 9, 1868, in Hardin County, Kentucky. He was the only son of tobacco tenant farmers M. L. and Nancy Bogard; the couple also had five daughters. In 1873, the Bogards moved to Caseyville, Kentucky, where Bogard attended school, Woodland Baptist Church, and evangelical camp meetings. In February 1885, he was baptized in an ice-covered pond during a church service. In 1887 and 1888, he attended Georgetown …

Booker, Joseph Albert

Joseph Albert Booker—noted editor, educator, and community leader—was for four decades a prominent leader in Arkansas racial relations and a pioneer in African American education in the state. Joseph A. Booker was born into slavery on December 26, 1859, in Old Portland, east of modern Portland (Ashley County). He was the son of Albert and Mary (Punchardt) Booker, who were slaves on the large Bayou Bartholomew plantation of John P. Fisher. Booker’s mother died shortly after his birth. According to one source, when Booker was three, his father, a man with “some knowledge of books,” died when his slave master whipped him to death. His father’s crime was urging his fellow slaves to revolt by “teaching them to read.” At …

Bosmyer, Peggy Sue

When the Reverend Dr. Peggy Bosmyer was ordained in January 1977 at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Little Rock (Pulaski County) by the Right Reverend Christoph Keller Jr., bishop of the Diocese of Arkansas, she was the first woman in the South to be regularly ordained under a new canon as a priest in the Episcopal Church in the United States of America (ECUSA). Peggy Sue Bosmyer was born on July 26, 1948, in Helena (Phillips County), the daughter of Thomas Bosmyer, who was an insurance adjustor, and Margaret Markland Bosmyer, an elementary school teacher. Her older sister, Judy, had been born in 1944. Bosmyer graduated from Central High School in Helena in 1966. In 1970, she received a BA in …

Brockwell Gospel Music School

The Brockwell Gospel Music School offers instruction in choral and instrumental musical techniques for those who desire the improvement of church music. It operates every summer on a small campus in Brockwell (Izard County) at the intersection of State Highways 9 and 56. It was founded in 1947 as the Brockwell Music School, assumed its present name in 1962, and operates at its original site. The singing-school tradition goes back to the time of the Second Great Awakening on the American frontier in the first years of the nineteenth century. This tradition contributed significantly to the growth and power of the great revivals that especially captivated gospel-hungry settlers in the frontier South in the first third of the century. Itinerant …

Brown, Fountain

Fountain Brown was a Methodist preacher who was the first person to be charged and found guilty of violating the Emancipation Proclamation. Charged with having sold several of his slaves back into slavery after they had in fact been freed by President Abraham Lincoln’s order, Brown found himself at the center of a case that reflected the changes that came with the war. For a brief time, it was a celebrated legal matter leading to an active postwar effort to secure a pardon for the physically ailing Brown. Little is known about Fountain Brown’s early years. He is thought to have been born in 1806 or 1807, but the location is unknown. A one-time resident of Tennessee, he had been …

Brown, Robert Raymond

The Right Reverend Robert Raymond Brown was the ninth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas. He became nationally known in 1957 for his role in the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Brown drafted a pastoral letter that stated the Episcopal Church’s unequivocal position in favor of desegregation and support for racial equality. His efforts with a number of clergy, Christian and Jewish, resulted in a city-wide Day of Prayer on October 12, 1957. Brown was also the author of five books, including Bigger Than Little Rock, which recounted his role in the desegregation conflict. Robert Raymond Brown was born on June 16, 1910, in Garden City, Kansas. He was one of two sons of …

Brown, William Montgomery

The colorful William Montgomery Brown was consecrated as the assistant bishop of the Diocese of Arkansas on June 24, 1898, and soon became bishop after the death of Henry Niles Pierce. In 1925, after openly embracing materialism and communism, Brown became the only bishop in the Episcopal Church ever removed from office because of heresy. These heretical views were presented in his book Communism and Christianism: Banish Gods from Skies and Capitalists from Earth. William Montgomery Brown was born on September 4, 1855, on a farm west of Orrville, Ohio, the son of a maid, Lucina Elzina Cary, and a day laborer, Joseph Morrison Brown. He had a sister and a brother. He became an orphan during the Civil War …

Buddhists

Buddhists in Arkansas are represented by ethnic immigrants who bring to the state the religious practices of their homelands as well as native Arkansans who have turned to Buddhism for their spiritual needs. Though less than one percent of the population of Arkansas, Buddhists in the state have established temples testifying to their presence, in addition to meeting in a variety of formal and informal groups. Buddhism can be described as a religion, a philosophy, a psychology, a practice, or a way of life. Buddhism’s essentially non-theistic framework, along with its emphasis on personal experience as the only true validation of its teachings, sets it apart from most other religious systems. Despite the varied schools of Buddhist thought and practice, …

Byrne, Andrew

Andrew Byrne was the first Roman Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Little Rock, which then and now encompasses the boundaries of the entire state of Arkansas. A prelate on the southern frontier, he had few Catholics in his ecclesiastical domain; nevertheless, he planted the Church so deeply that even his death, the Civil War, and the five-year absence of any bishop could not eradicate the faith. Andrew Byrne was born in Navan, a town about forty miles northwest of Dublin, Ireland, the son of Robert and Margery Moore Byrne. There is no exact date of his birth on parish records, though they record that he was baptized on December 3, 1802; with his name being Andrew, he may have …