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As We See It

This Is about Race

I sat in a room recently with moms and dads who learned about how they can prepare their families in the event of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid. I learned about the importance of having a plan – collecting documents and birth certificates, authorizing someone to pick children up from school, ensuring children born in the United States  are registered in the country of their parents’ birth so they aren’t rendered stateless should the family have to relocate. I…
April 30, 2018
Essays

Siding with an Oppressor

If we must refer to Advent, then let us hear the Palestinian cry for deliverance from bondage. Both ideologically and municipally, Israel considers Jerusalem to encompass greater Jerusalem, which includes West Jerusalem, East Jerusalem (the Palestinian side, illegally annexed by Israel from 1967 to 1980) and many of the Israeli settlements (also illegal according to the Fourth Geneva Convention) to the north, south and east of Jerusalem. Since 1967, Israel has allowed and/or encouraged the illegal settlement of Israelis in…
April 30, 2018
Essays

Of Aliens and Embassies

American visitors to the Holy Land often “run where Jesus walked,” a Palestinian friend from Bethlehem likes to say. One need only watch the crush of tourists pouring out of buses at the Church of the Nativity to observe the pattern: place one tentative foot into the West Bank, check the landmark off the list after superficial engagement and zip back to the sunny places on the other side of the checkpoint with nary a glance at Bethlehem as it…
April 30, 2018
Essays

Distance

1,284.5 miles: The distance from my front door to Charlottesville, Virginia. In the second weekend of August, I woke to the sound of a crop-duster plane zooming over our family’s tent in the middle of a Minnesota state park about a half-hour from my home. We were on our annual family end-of-summer camping trip. I lay there for a minute on the air mattress and reached over to my shoe, where I’d stuck my phone for the night. I drowsily…
April 30, 2018
Essays

Reformers and Race: Reconciling Dialect and Deed

“Sawubona.” This Zulu word for hello is much more than a simple greeting. Translated, its intention means “I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being.” Understood this way, this word has the potential to reshape the way we see ourselves and others, particularly influencing our social constructions of race and nationalism. Seeing one another appropriately requires the affirmation that all humanity is created in the image of God and thus possesses inherent dignity, value and worth…
April 30, 2018
Essays

Canada Geese and Gerasene Swine

I saw them across the water in the early morning, on our lake in Ontario, just beyond Paquin’s Point: a band of geese, maybe half a dozen. What I actually saw, just barely in the low-angled light, was a passing vision of long thin necks and heads upon the water, gliding behind the point and out of sight. I ran up to the cottage to get the binoculars, but I had to wait an hour to get a better view…
Daniel Meeter
February 28, 2018
Essays

Theology in Bronze

T.S. Elliot wrote that at the end of all our journeying we will arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. For me, it took moving to Calvin College, in the heart of Dutch Calvinist West Michigan, to see the richness of the Lutheran landscape where I spent the formative years of my academic career. For 15 years, I trudged uphill to the bluff-top campus of Gustavus Adolphus College, my sights fixed on the soaring 187-foot…
February 28, 2018
As We See It

Shakespeare’s Language Lessons

“He was not of an age, but for all time!” – Ben Jonson Shakespeare indeed was a man of his age. Ask anyone sitting down to read his plays for the first time – with their 16th- and 17th-century language, idioms and references. Nevertheless, Ben Jonson’s message about his friend is obviously true: Shakespeare’s works have spoken to countless eras and cultures in the 400 years since his death, and they continue to do so as we return to his…
February 28, 2018
Essays

Olivier Messiaen: Music as Prayer

VISIONS OF AMEN: THE EARLY LIFE AND MUSIC OF OLIVIER MESSIAEN STEPHEN SCHLOESSER EERDMANS, 2014 $50 570 PAGES CONCURRENTLY RELEASED AUDIO RECORDING: MESSIAEN, VISIONS OF AMEN HYESOOK KIM AND STEPHANE LEMELIN, PIANO WWW.EERDMANS.COM/SCHLOESSER_AUDIO Few composers of the 20th century were as deeply shaped by a theological tradition as was Olivier Messiaen by French Catholicism in the period following the First World War. Born to a literary family – his mother a poet, his father an English teacher and translator of Shakespeare…
David A. Hoekema
February 28, 2018
Essays

Capital versus the World: the Protestant Principle in the 21st Century

In April 2014, Thomas Piketty’s tome on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, was released in English translation, featuring 577 pages (minus the footnotes) and some 115 or so graphs and illustrations. In May Capital reached the no. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list, a fact surprising even to the publisher Harvard, which struggled to meet the furious demand for the book. The central assertion of this behemoth of a text is that capitalism, particularly since the…
February 28, 2018