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James Bratt

James Bratt is professor of history emeritus at Calvin University, specializing in American religious history and especially the connections between religion and politics. He is the author of several books including Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat, widely considered the definitive Kuyper biography.

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Tribute to David Timmer

This month we complete a line change on the Perspectives hockey squad. In an accompanying column we offer homage to Fran Fike, our outgoing poetry editor. Here it is my pleasure, but also sad duty, to say farewell to David Timmer in his role as co-editor of this journal. A pleasure because David is exactly the sort of unassuming but skilled craftsman that goes under-noticed in our culture, until his absence begins to tell. Just the sort, therefore, that deserves…
January 16, 2006
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Holidays

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, and I've given a fair bit of thought as to why that is so. After all, authorities tell us that real Christians live in and out of Easter, while churches as they are have converged entirely with the culture in making Christmas #1. Worse still, by the measure of faith, Thanksgiving is the one religious holiday in the United States that gets its warrant from state instead of church. Doubtless, memories--especially childhood memories--have…
November 16, 2005
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Transition and Tradition

With this issue Roy Anker rotates off Perspectives' team of co-editors, and the bearer of the above by-line rotates on. Nothing personal: it's Board policy, and a good one. Leanne Van Dyk and David Timmer, the rest of the current troika, will follow in due time, to be replaced by players to be named later. Perspectives is a journalistic trade built entirely on draft choices, with seven-figure contracts filled in only to the right of the decimal point and with…
August 1, 2004
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The Sound of Silence

Now that The Passion of the Christ is playing in the theaters, we can reflect a moment on how it played in the culture prior to its Ash Wednesday release. Most obviously, it provoked another dust-up in the culture wars. From the Left came warnings of anti-Semitism, warnings apparently borne out when director Mel Gibson's father asserted that the Holocaust was "mostly fiction." The real fiction, retorted some critics, lay with the original four gospels, to which Gibson was naïvely…
March 16, 2004
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Edwards Unbound

The life of Jonathan Edwards, born 300 years ago this month, is a tale of a singular but complex vision crossed by paradoxical outcomes under sometimes extreme conditions. The boy was reared in a nearly all-female family under the close watch of a rigorous father. Absorbed from the start with the demands of a fearsome deity, he broke through in his late teens to a vision of that same God being, literally, sweetness and light. Plagued by a brittle personality…
October 16, 2003