By Timothy Cockes, NOBTS News VETRALLA, Italy (NOBTS News) - This summer, an excavation team with New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary’s Michael and Sara Moskau Institute of Archaeology traveled to Italy to search for the remains of fallen World War II soldiers. The project was a partnership among multiple institutions and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. The DPAA is a U.S. Department of Defense agency which aims, to the fullest extent possible, to recover and identify the remains of missing American personnel from past wars. The excavation featured archaeologists with LSU New Orleans (formerly University of New Orleans), Tulane and NOBTS as well as staff representing The National World II Museum. The trip further developed the archaeology institute’s relationships with these neighboring orgnizations, while building upon an excavation that NOBTS and others completed last summer in Duncan Plaza. NOBTS brought 16 participants (students, graduates and faculty) to the dig, June and July, which investigated a central Italy location believed to be associated with a crashed World War II aircraft and lost American pilot. Jim Parker, executive director of the Michael and Sara Moskau Institute and professor of … [Read more...]

By Laura Elarnson, Baptist Press Originally published on BaptistPress.com. BP Editor’s note: A collection of photos taken by BP photographers Jim Veneman and Morris Abernathy in the days after 9/11 follows this story. NASHVILLE (BP) – Career photographer and longtime Baptist Press photo editor Jim Veneman was on the communications team at Union University in the fall of 2001. When the planes hit the Twin Towers the morning of Sept. 11, Veneman remembers watching the coverage with students and colleagues. He remembers the Union community gathering to pray. Then he remembers a phone call from then-BP executive editor Will Hall that afternoon. “How soon can you leave?” Hall asked. Veneman asked his boss, then-Union President David Dockery, who approved him to go. The next afternoon, a team of three – two photographers and a writer – headed north in the last rental van to be found in Middle Tennessee. Photographer Morris Abernathy, also a longtime BP photo editor, drove. On the way up, they stopped in Roanoke, Va., to print their newly made and emailed press credentials at an office store. They noticed the lights on at a nearby high school football stadium. “We pulled off the road and drove in, and they had a … [Read more...]