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Exploring our wounds is not merely a therapeutic exercise. It’s a theological exercise. If disconnection is the essence of trauma, then we’re invited to explore what our own lives look like - and the shared life of our churches and communities – when lived within the traumatic conditions of our exile from Eden.

I’ve been ruminating lately on the rejections, absurdities, and moments of grace that could make someone a poet. What forces send a person into this difficult art, where anonymity is assured and financial reward all but nonexistent? How does the stuff of life become this particular craft?

The takeaway is that the elder Paul Simon, the great music man of his time (move over, Bob), though now gray, half deaf, and of raspy voice, professes the mystery and allure of beauty amid the perplexing mystery of the human capacity to relish, exult, know, and express. Throughout Seven Psalms, in multiple forms ranging from chant to song story, Simon meditates on the strangeness of the reign (or rain) of the marvel of being alive in this resplendent cosmos.

Trump is an antichrist because he seeks to put himself in the place of Christ and because his words and actions are a grotesque and demonic travesty of the real Christ. But there is a further reason that he is an antichrist: There are people, including Reformed Christians, who embrace him as their supposed Messiah, even if they do not all seem to be fully aware that they are doing so. Without their support – their discipleship – Trump would…

How did we get to a point wherein significant educational inequities – injustices – seem intractable? And why aren’t Christians shouting from the rooftops about it? Why doesn’t educational injustice seem to make the list of our primary concerns? Or maybe even our secondary concerns?

There have been many metaphors for pastors. How might we enrich our understanding of the pastoral role by considering pastors as “stewards of the Mystery?”

Some time has passed since June’s Christian Reformed Church Synod 2024. The Reformed Journal reached out to several people from across the CRC asking them to respond to three questions.

Our democracy is the beloved wooden boat. It only persists through love and maintenance and attention to see and replace the rot it before it sinks the whole enterprise. And it takes work.

I know many people who have spent their lifetimes clustered for refuge in a church (Reformed, Christian Reformed, Evangelical-Whatever). Now they refuse to do so and would rather paddle off into whatever the future brings without it. They tell of feeling bereft, anxious, and guilty. They are grieving.