Tidings

> With more than 12 million members, the Southern Baptist Convention is the nation's largest Protestant denomination, but hardly its most egalitarian.

Last week in Dallas, the 18,150 delegates to the Southern Baptists' annual meeting overwhelmingly rejected increased power for women in the denomination's leadership. The key decision of the delegates was a defeat of a motion that would have required the denomination to include at least 20% women in its organizational makeup. Opponents of the measure cited the pitfalls of quotas, but this hardly seemed the issue when the delegates went even further, and voted to table a resolution that called for an end to discrimination against women in secular employment.

> In the '30s and '40s, theological superstars like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich hammered out modern definitions of God and the Christian life in Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary. But Union has fallen on troubled days lately, caught up in inflation, problems of faculty and student recruitment and divergent opinions on the direction the school should be taking [TIME, Oct. 9, 1972]. One more sign of that uncertainty appeared this month, when Episcopal Bishop J. Brooke Mosley, 58, after 3 1/2 years as Union's president, announced his decision to resign.

In recent years, there has been an exodus of well-known names from Union, climaxed last winter by the retirement of Theologian Paul Lehmann. Replacements in theology are hard to come by because of Union's new stress on hiring blacks and women: there are simply not enough of either qualified for the posts. Moreover, the faculty has been sharply cut along with the student body.

One vital problem that Union will have to solve is whether and how to restore the discipline of traditional studies. Students in the '60s were more interested in activist applications of theology, but now, Paul Lehmann observes, "they are beginning to insist on serious attention to tradition as a creative source for understanding contemporary experience." The issue concerns not only Union, but, increasingly, all the liberal Protestant seminaries and the varied denominations they serve.

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