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Don Luidens

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Legacies of the Mission to Arabia

Donald A. Luidens As a teenager growing up in Beirut, Lebanon, I was privy to an adage among local expatriates: Western scholars come to the Middle East, stay a week and write a book, stay a month and write an article, stay a year and begin to ask questions. Armed with this cautionary note, I approached a recent foray into that part of the world with a trunkload of questions, spent more than a month, and now presume to write…
Don Luidens
March 1, 2013
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The Mournful Sounds of Implosion

Those are the gentle, mournful sounds of a denomination imploding. Sad to say, they are not the first, nor will they be the last. But this time it's the Reformed Church in America which is slip-slidin' away. Crushing in on herself. Catch her quickly; she'll settle below the horizon soon. Get a last snapshot and hold it in your mind for posterity. It was here; it flourished; it ministered; it floundered; and then it was gone. Postmortems will abound as…
Don Luidens
November 1, 2009
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Bethlehem BeckoningPlus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose!

Every twenty years, Bethlehem has beckoned me. In 1964, seventeen years after the outbreak of what Palestinian Arabs call "The Disaster" (an-Nakbah) and Israelis call "The War of Independence," I visited Bethlehem with my family. Then in the Kingdom of Jordan, Bethlehem was a wonderfully dusty little town of crowded houses and twisting alleys masquerading as streets, replete with the sounds and smells of donkeys and Mercedes taxis. Trinket hawkers were persistent and ubiquitous on Manger Square in front of…
Don Luidens
March 16, 2005
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Beirut Challenge

"Call Lewis Scudder," the late-April memo read.  He "says he has a really neat idea" to share with you.  My dear friend lives in Limassol, Cyprus, seven time zones ahead of Holland, Michigan, and by the time I received the memo, Lew was long-since asleep.  My curiosity was whetted, however, so I contacted him.  Come to Beirut, he challenged me, and present a paper at a conference there.  In six weeks.  With that unexpected bidding, I was launched into a…
Don Luidens
March 16, 2004