Sorting by

×
Skip to main content

All Articles

Essays

Praying in the Dark: Lament, Providence and Protest

A cancer diagnosis occurs in a moment, but the losses it brings come in slowly yet steadily, like a tide pushing against the shoreline, again and again. In the days after my own diagnosis, I sometimes felt resignation rather than anger or protest. “I’m not the center of the universe, after all,” I told a friend. “The world will continue just fine without me.” But that was just for some moments. Particularly as I considered the implications of this incurable…
April 23, 2015
Essays

Nature’s Space into Ethnic Place

The train hugged the Hudson River before crossing the bridge over Spuyten Duyvil onto Manhattan Island as my friend asked in a tone I’d become accustomed to, bemused Big-City incredulity: “I hear you’re moving to Idaho?” Actually, I explained, we were headed for Iowa. “Oh. Well,” he waved his hand in dismissal, as if he’d been close and I was quibbling over minor details: “One of those vowel states.” I was trading my commute from Westchester County into Greenwich Village,…
April 6, 2015
As We See It

Saints Surround Us

When I was 18, I had about two hundred grandmothers, give or take fifty. By the time I was a senior in high school, I’d had a maintenance job at a nearby retirement community for more than two years, and, during that time, I’d gotten to know the residents pretty well. For three summers, I cleaned all their windows, a process made much more difficult by my constant struggle against all the knickknacks on the windowsills. Sometimes as I worked…
April 6, 2015
Used under Creative Commons licenseAs We See It

A Child of God Called Home Too Soon

Dale Brown died in the fall of 2014 after a bicycle crash. Most readers of Perspectives will know very little about Dale Brown, my friend and colleague whose life is the focus of a clutch of pieces in this issue of the magazine. Dale was my friend for 27 years; readers who didn’t know him may need some small bit of introduction in order to get a clearer sense of who this man was. What follows is my attempt to…
James Vanden Bosch
February 28, 2015
Essays

The Great Inviter

W. Dale Brown, put in front of an audience, was always disarming: smart, artless, arch – and Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing put him in front of many audiences. Given his druthers, though, Dale would station himself at the back of a crowd. From there, he could wink at the latecomers. He could chuckle, a little less than circumspect, at the speakers’ jokes and quirks. He could whisper along with the poets and commit the orators’ maxims to…
February 28, 2015
Essays

A Seeker of Gospel-Shaped Stories

I somehow managed to earn a bachelor of arts in literature without ever encountering Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote until a high school production of Dale Wasserman’s 1965 play Man of La Mancha. I went as a rookie minister in the 80s because a 16-year-old junior from my youth group was playing the role of Aldonza, the scorned scullery maid Quixote keeps calling Dulcinea because somehow when he looks at her, all he can see is a princess: “I see…
February 28, 2015
Essays

A Curious Professor

Part I: Holberg In all the years of our long friendship, there was never a week that went by when Dale Brown and I did not talk about teaching. We talked about our own classes, of course, and our students, but we also talked about all the pedagogical “nitty-gritty” – grading and assignments and course readings – trying to figure out how to get ever better at what we felt was the most meaningful part of our job as professors.…
February 4, 2015
As We See It

The Work of Lent: Learning with Emily Dickinson

I didn’t grow up celebrating Lent. I came to it later in life. My first Ash Wednesday came late winter, only months after burying our firstborn son. Ashes; all was ashes. Dust; all was dust. In the dimly lit sanctuary, I found dried palms, ashes and words about loss. I discovered words to voice what was seething in my heart: words of honesty in Lent, however unsavory they might have been. How does one sing the songs of Easter when…
January 10, 2015
Essays

Common Grace and Race

That Abraham Kuyper was a racist, following the conventions of his time, is something that no neo-Calvinist would deny. His views on race and his theological impact – to some degree – on the rise of apartheid in South Africa have been well documented. For Kuyper, this is no mere blind spot: the problem of race in his thinking is situated within some of his most important theological formulations, namely his doctrine of common grace. With Kuyper, common grace is…
January 10, 2015
Essays

The Cost of Faithful Witness in South Africa: Russel Botman, 1953–2014

Russel Botman, Reformed theologian and university president, died on June 28, 2014, in Stellenbosch, South Africa. A 60-year-old dying in his sleep is not typically a matter for international attention. But in later press investigation and commentary a more complex story emerged. The context of his life and the circumstances of his death should interest us because they illustrate a theme about the personal toll exacted on those who would follow in the gospel train of Mandela, Tutu and King…
January 10, 2015