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James Schaap

James Schaap taught literature and writing at Dordt College for 37 years. He is a regular contributor to The Twelve and the author of several books.

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Life, and Death: a memoir

The house where we lived at that time is long gone, as is the tiny kitchen where I stood, phone in hand, listening. The call had come in the middle of the day, in the middle of a lunch, our two kids were sitting beside us. It's now thirty-plus years later, but I will never forget standing there because I was reeling, yet confident that my being chosen for a waiter's scholarship--whatever that was--to the granddaddy of all writers conferences,…
August 1, 2011
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A Dirge for My Mother’s Cousin

Oddly enough, it may be my earliest intense memory. We're at the village park for a family reunion, I think, and it's fun--that much I remember. Then, for no particular reason, my mother's first cousin and some other faceless relative pick up my mother, one by her arms, the other by her feet, and swing her around somehow. They're just north a bit of the shelter house--I know exactly where they're standing, exactly, and it's more than fifty years ago.…
June 1, 2010
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The Sorcerer’s Smile

Your great-grandma says I talk like an old preacher, which is to say, too much. Maybe she's right. She's right about a lot of things. Of course, she knows all the stories, too. We've been married for sixty-seven years. It wasn't the time to tell the one I could have on Christmas Eve. Wasn't the time because nobody around that tree wanted to hear an old man go on and on, not with all those presents calling out. The only…
December 1, 2009
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Zuni Christian Reformed Church Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico

  Over the next several issues, Perspectives will be presenting "church reviews." These reviews are intended to give a glimpse into what is happening in Reformed churches across North America. We have selected a wide variety of congregations within the broader Reformed tradition to be reviewed. Some are "tall-steeples," others obscure. Some may be avant-garde, while others archetypal. A review is meant to be more light-hearted than mean-spirited. No congregation is going to receive a hatchet-job or "three stars out…
August 1, 2009
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A Huge Step

In March, 1968, we drove all night long in order to get to Florida for Spring Break, Daytona Beach. When we got there--as I remember--it was late evening, and the beach was wild with college kids. We looked for some place to stay but didn't find a thing until we stumbled into what seems, in my memory, to have been a retread army barrack. We got in line. We were third. It was late, almost midnight, and we were desperate.…
January 1, 2009
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January Thaw

Here's how I imagine it. She knows he's there but she waits, time being of little consequence, after all. He died in the fall, when the leaves were drenched in reds and oranges, and to the north the sharp lines of shorn soybean rows looked like something cut into the land. She thinks he chose the right time of year because autumn is so beautiful, and there's relief--the corn finally out, although harvest is much easier now with those lumbering…
January 1, 2008
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Jubilee

Every time I've been in Charles Mix County, South Dakota, in the last few years, I've stopped at a ghost town called, simply, Academy, about an hour north and west of Platte, not all that far from the route of Lewis and Clark on the broad Missouri River. What's there in Academy doesn't really amount to much--a couple deteriorating houses (a few people still live there) and one sizeable old building that sits up on a rise. That old building…
May 16, 2005
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In Just Spring

It's a basic tenet of the Calvinist faith by which I was raised that those sinners who haven't plumbed the depths of their own darkness simply are not capable of comprehending the blinding luminosity of grace itself. I rather like that equation, but then I live on the Great Plains, where the Lord wrote the textbook on winter. Because out here we know winter, I'm willing to lay down hard cash that we know, therefore, more deeply the joy of…
May 16, 2003