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Howard Schaap

Howard Schaap is a lifelong resident of southwest Minnesota where he lives with his wife Sy. He teaches writing at Dordt University.

CultureFeatured

Reformed and Always…Deconstructing?

But in reformed worldview conversations, that adjective “reformed” means we’re committed to something more. We’re committed to complexity, committed to deconstruction, and to reforming again beyond that deconstruction, committed to listening to opposing voices to not only hear what they have to say but to take to heart their critiques, to even call them prophetic when they are. It means we can admit when we’re wrong and that we’re not even afraid of ideas that seem to challenge scripture. It…
Howard Schaap
December 27, 2021
Featured

The Voice in My Head Is Populist. And White.

Today, almost unmistakably, people in my tradition—people who have an ancestral distrust of government—find themselves susceptible to populist lines of argument. “They want to take away your freedoms” is a lightning rod in my community. It’s also a go-to populist line: “The elites are coming and they are going to enforce their will upon you.”
Howard Schaap
March 7, 2021
As We See It

Theme and Variation: Prayer, Enstrom’s Grace, and Calvin

Howard Schaap When I was in my early teens, my dad announced rather formally that he would no longer be praying before our family meals. Considering that, breakfast aside, he had prayed at virtually every family meal of my life up to that point, this was a significant announcement. Prayer could become just a rote exercise, went his explanation, and he didn't want to fall into the trap of the Pharisee in the parable, praying empty words. This did not…
Howard Schaap
January 1, 2014
Uncategorized

Music and Politics: U2 and the Country of Adolescence

At the end of spring semester, I know it's coming. It's most often an honest question from both colleagues and non-teachers alike, though sometimes the latter's fascination with "summers off" borders on an obsession. Still, in whatever form, the question still comes: "What do you have planned for the summer?" Even though I answer this question more assuredly as a college teacher than I did as a high school teacher, this year I find myself fishing for an answer that…
Howard Schaap
June 1, 2011
Uncategorized

The Bakery Conversation

I got sandwiched in a conversation on my Saturday morning bakery run. In the back of the Edgerton Bakery, rolls and loaves of fresh bread were coming out of the oven and needed to be sliced. That left one high school girl to work the counter up front for a whole line of customers. Outside it was windy and raining lightly, a hard drizzle, and the temperature was in the mid-forties. Miserable. We were in the middle of a string…
Howard Schaap
April 1, 2011
Uncategorized

Reading Tiger Woods: The Legend, The Myth, The Man

Really. Tiger Woods has been sleeping around? Really, his relationship with his fembot wife from the Swedish Bikini Team was a sham? Really, the man whose father proclaimed him to be the messiah not just of golf but of the world is an egomaniac? Really? Really, the man who spends his time traveling the world and playing on the nearly ubiquitous but quintessential man-made landscapes that define "the geography of nowhere," who lives in what I can only imagine to…
Howard Schaap
February 1, 2010