All Posts By

James Schaap

Blog

This Gizmo

It was my idea to bring in an expert. For a couple of years in the 90s, I was chair of a board that ran

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Blog

The Purple Church

It’s purple. Well these days, some twenty hot years of Dakota sun later, St. Charles Church looks a bit pink; but originally it was purple.

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Blog

The Pastor’s Guns

Religious visions were everywhere in the years preceding the Civil War. Boom towns out west here may have been hell holes for a time, but

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Blog

The Story of Academy

Out in the middle of nowhere, the old white frame building is all that remains of a heart-felt dream that, as an answer to prayer,

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Blog

It’s a jungle out there

It’s not a particularly good picture, but it’ll have to do. That’s our house up at the top, maybe fifty yards or so away from

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Blog

How to teach slavery

I don’t know how exactly–or who–told me I had to read Beloved. I do remember having a single copy of three Toni Morrison novels–one of them

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Blog

Treasures

Hattie says that just before her mother got married, she’d left the farm to start working in a grocery in Springfield, SD, where some young

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