Kaitlin Curtice spoke at Baylor University chapel on February 12 and prayed to “Mother Mystic.” Baylor, the world’s largest Baptist university, is affiliated with the Texas Baptist Convention at the state level and the Southern Baptist Convention at the national level. Curtice is a practitioner of New Age contemplative mysticism. She defines “contemplation” as “listening to the Divine/Mystery/Higher Power/God, and letting the overflow of that love stretch into other realms of life” (Curtice, “A Shared Vision of Contemplative Activism,” Sojourners, Sep. 4, 2019). She is an environmental activist and nature worshipper. In her speech at Baylor she said that she dipped a tobacco leaf into the water of Lake Michigan and “Mother Earth spoke to her” (“BU speaker’s prayer sparks campus controversy,” KWTX television, Feb. 13, 2020). Baylor University has been welcoming heretics since the early 20th century. In 1921, Baylor professor Grover Dow was teaching the evolution of man from apes with the textbook Introduction to Sociology. “As to his body we have very little exact knowledge, for the skeletons left by him are fragmentary, seldom amounting to more than one or two bones. But from these, by the use of our imagination, we have come to the conclusion that he was a squat, ugly, somewhat stooped, powerful being, half human and half animal who sought refuge from the wild beasts first in the trees and later in caves, and that he was half way between the anthropoid ape and modern man.”
(Friday Church News Notes, February 21, 2020, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)