I remember the first time that I watched the synod of my (Christian Reformed) church in action. Synod met back then (late 1940s) in the reading room of the old Calvin College library and, since there was no separate gallery for visitors, some of us got to nestle close enough to the delegates to make us feel as if we were right there in the dugout with the real players. The delegates, as they looked to me, were, most of…
The May 1999 issue of Perspectives contained an essay by Lewis Smedes, “Like the Wideness of the Sea?” that was among the most significant articles ever to appear in Perspectives. Like most of Smedes’s work, it is richly pastoral, drawing heavily on his experience in the church. He recalled the impassioned debates about divorce and remarriage in the Christian Reformed Church of the 1950s and then wondered about possible parallels to discussions about covenanted, monogamous same-sex relationships. Smedes met with…
Compelling Analogy by Steve Bouma-Prediger Lew Smedes was one of my esteemed teachers when I was a student at Fuller Theological Seminary in the mid-1980s. I vividly recall his stimulating class titled “Calvin and the Christian Life.” I had read his popular book “Sex for Christians” (Eerdmans, 1976) for a religion class as a student at Hope College in 1978 and read everything he wrote in the old Reformed Journal in the 1970s and 1980s. Lew was a larger-than-life person,…
MAY/JUNE 2014: ESSAY by Matthew Kaemingk If we would know ourselves, [as] the ancient Temple at Delphi advises, the study of sports in all its connections to the rest of art and life would seem to be an ideal quest for understanding of self and the world. —Simon Kuper, athletic anthropologist I am a rabid fan of the Seattle Seahawks. I am also a Christian theologian. When I claim to be a rabid fan, I mean what I say. Consider…
MAY/JUNE 2014: AS WE SEE IT by Jason Lief “So who are you rooting for in the Super Bowl?” All week it was the same question. “I hope they both lose,” is the response I gave. “Oh, but Peyton Manning—” Blah, blah, blah. Yes, great football player, even better Saturday Night Live host—his United Way skit is comedy gold. Still, I wanted him to lose. “But the Seahawks, come on, they’ve never won a Super Bowl. Surely you’ll root for…
MAY/JUNE 2014: AS WE SEE IT by George Brown Jr. What caught my attention that afternoon was the word “Rogue”: someone dishonest, a nonconformist or playfully mischievous. The word shone out in bright chrome letters on the back of the SUV stopped in front of my car. While I waited for the traffic light to change, I thought “Rogue” was an apt name for the way the SUV had been driven the past few blocks. Perhaps in a hurry to…
The ongoing political debate on the separation of church and state has been all too ambiguous in the use of political arguments of St. Augustine of Hippo. Politicians who include George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi have appealed to the elements of Augustine’s legacy. Particularly the critics of Augustine’s allegory of the two cities have often relied on his writings to argue for a strict church-state separation. Yet in contemporary political uses of Augustine, it remains unclear what…
Gayle Boss This morning, stepping outside, I noticed my first tulips beside the front door. Or rather, their absence. Yesterday morning I thought that after one of the coldest Aprils on record and after last night’s warm rain, I would finally see blooming the tulips I had painstakingly planted last October. I would see their tight green fists relax, like a magician opening his clenched hand to show the colorful silk inside—red, orange and pink, yellow. Instead, green nubs at…
Gayle Boss This fading picture is of my mother and her three sons, from about 1966. It was in the boxes of my mom’s papers and pictures that got sorted several weeks ago, after her death. I’m the one standing closest to her, the boy smiling too hard. I remember a day around the time this picture was taken, a school day when I discovered I didn’t have a lunch. I was so angry. My little stomach rumbled and grumbled,…
Kory Plockmeyer For a pastor, the transition to a new church presents a fascinating challenge: the first sermon. What passage claims highest priority? What signals are sent with that first message? My wife and I recently moved to Sioux Center, Iowa, where we pastor Covenant Christian Reformed Church. I began my ministry there with the lectionary readings at the time, in 1 and 2 Timothy. Somehow it seemed fi tting. After all, as N. T. Wright says in Paul for…
