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As We See ItMagazine

We Need to Talk

Pardon the length of this piece, but we really need to talk. It’s become inevitable that I’ll get a call or email once or twice a month asking to consult with a church on a lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-questioning dialogue. Most often, I’m grateful that churches seek to be more informed, engaged and conversant. But this essay is not about the LGBTQ conversation necessarily. It’s about the first question I ask when I’m invited in: “How does your church talk about sexuality in…
June 30, 2018
As We See It

This Is about Race

I sat in a room recently with moms and dads who learned about how they can prepare their families in the event of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid. I learned about the importance of having a plan – collecting documents and birth certificates, authorizing someone to pick children up from school, ensuring children born in the United States  are registered in the country of their parents’ birth so they aren’t rendered stateless should the family have to relocate. I…
April 30, 2018
Poetry

Gardensong

Hosea 2:7 “What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?” – Jacque Lacan “ut operaretur eum” – Voltaire’s Candide Desire is taking a picture of the moon. The trip to faraway that made you miss your bed, an apple gone soft. The way summer fades the new drapes pooling by the window-pane. How pain feels so much like suspense. And I, thumbing my past like an old brochure, a native who…
April 30, 2018
Essays

Siding with an Oppressor

If we must refer to Advent, then let us hear the Palestinian cry for deliverance from bondage. Both ideologically and municipally, Israel considers Jerusalem to encompass greater Jerusalem, which includes West Jerusalem, East Jerusalem (the Palestinian side, illegally annexed by Israel from 1967 to 1980) and many of the Israeli settlements (also illegal according to the Fourth Geneva Convention) to the north, south and east of Jerusalem. Since 1967, Israel has allowed and/or encouraged the illegal settlement of Israelis in…
April 30, 2018
Essays

Of Aliens and Embassies

American visitors to the Holy Land often “run where Jesus walked,” a Palestinian friend from Bethlehem likes to say. One need only watch the crush of tourists pouring out of buses at the Church of the Nativity to observe the pattern: place one tentative foot into the West Bank, check the landmark off the list after superficial engagement and zip back to the sunny places on the other side of the checkpoint with nary a glance at Bethlehem as it…
April 30, 2018
Essays

Distance

1,284.5 miles: The distance from my front door to Charlottesville, Virginia. In the second weekend of August, I woke to the sound of a crop-duster plane zooming over our family’s tent in the middle of a Minnesota state park about a half-hour from my home. We were on our annual family end-of-summer camping trip. I lay there for a minute on the air mattress and reached over to my shoe, where I’d stuck my phone for the night. I drowsily…
April 30, 2018
Essays

Reformers and Race: Reconciling Dialect and Deed

“Sawubona.” This Zulu word for hello is much more than a simple greeting. Translated, its intention means “I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being.” Understood this way, this word has the potential to reshape the way we see ourselves and others, particularly influencing our social constructions of race and nationalism. Seeing one another appropriately requires the affirmation that all humanity is created in the image of God and thus possesses inherent dignity, value and worth…
April 30, 2018
Reviews

Exploring Calvinism’s Appeal

Saving Calvinism: Expanding the Reformed Tradition SAVING CALVINISM: EXPANDING THE REFORMED TRADITION OLIVER D. CRISP IVP ACADEMIC, 2016 $18 (PAPERBACK) 165 PAGES My initial response to the title of this book was, “Does Calvinism need saving?” Oliver Crisp, professor of systematic theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, thinks it does. His solution is to provide alternatives to what he considers unduly narrow or dogmatic positions taken in traditional Calvinism – for example, double predestination, total depravity and the bondage of the…
April 30, 2018
Inside Out

A Long-Lasting Pain: Reflections after Charlottesville

A holy privilege of the pastorate is that people trust us with their pain. For them, we are safe. Sometimes we are the only safe people with whom hurting people can bear to reveal the depth of the sadness and trauma they silently bear. When person shares his or her pain with me, I am the shepherd offering comfort and help as I am able, quietly bearing witness to that pain before God in prayer. When a community expresses their…
April 30, 2018