All Posts By
At one point, Milt simply stops praying before meals. “The loss of Dad’s prayer voice,” Howard writes, “was an absence, like losing one of your
I had never heard of Susan Cowger until I was asked to review Hawk and Songbird, her recently published books of poems, and I am
It is not a miracle—I know that. But it is extraordinary, something worth exclaiming about. For twenty-one consecutive mornings, I have risen and walked out
When I was a senior in high school in 1960, the young people’s magazine of my denomination (Christian Reformed Church) asked me and several other
. . .what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with
For many years, in both high school and college classes, I taught e e cummings’ poem “i thank You God,” and it was always a
I have been re-reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead slowly, paying attention to individual sentences, noting the wisdom and beauty of so many of them, how seemingly
“How I have loved my physical life,” says old Pastor Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. It is the kind of observation only an elderly person
May sunshine, and the old professorsits on his deck eating a cold beef sandwich while just above the grassthe sparrows trampolinewind currents as if they’reguided
A few years ago one of my granddaughters was told by her Christian school teacher that Christians voted Republican. Walking out of the classroom, one
Twice in my reading life I have come upon descriptions of communal singing that have aroused in me a deep longing to join with the
in our Florida retirement village we were on the patio ice cubes clinking in our gin and tonics conversations rising sinking from a tree next
Smidt’s burning bush has tongues of flame that dance and leap in autumn’s winds. The oaks that shed their dull brown leaves seem to look
MAY 2012: AS WE SEE IT by David Schelhaas I spent February of this year in Florida, hanging around with old folks most of the
Here’s a statement I hear rather frequently where I live and work: “Well, of course, I’m no ‘tree hugger,’ but…” and then follows a mild
William Jennings Bryan, if he is known at all these days, is remembered as a buffoon, the fundamentalist opponent of Clarence Darrow in the famous
One of the joys of reading fiction–especially good fiction–is that in the midst of the narrative which keeps you turning pages, turning, turning to find
David Schelhaas The words father and mother come from similar roots, and the roots most likely come from the sounds an infant child makes before
Every Sunday morning of my youth, the words fell from the pulpit like the solemn tolling of a bell: “The Lord is in his holy
As I look out of my office window, I see sky and the tops of trees. That’s because a foot of snow sits on the
One of the best things about living in a Northern climate is rounding the curve that takes us from winter to spring, from cold to
Sometimes, when I’m strapped in my seat, a strange body close on either side of me, two hundred of us altogether packaged like eggs in
About twelve years ago, Glenn Tinder asked in a landmark Atlantic Monthly article the vitally important question, “Can We Be Good without God”? He said
As a 60 year-old teacher, I am different from most of my students in many ways. One way is that I am able to remember
