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Reviews

Building a Home for Learning

In my work with preservice teachers and in conversations with colleagues at Hope College, I frequently engage in questions of what it means to integrate faith and learning. Is it a matter of teaching Christian perspectives and ideas in a particular discipline? Is it about the worldview presuppositions that frame disciplinary assumptions and issues? Might it be about the ethos or ethic of ourselves as teachers? Does it boil down to the moments when we share our faith with students…
April 26, 2019
Reviews

Art as Concrete Theology

For anyone familiar with the interdisciplinary conversation in theology and the arts, Jeremy Begbie’s name is well known. Begbie has been arguing for music – and arts more broadly – as sites for serious theological engagement for some time (his first major monograph, Theology, Music, and Time, is now a landmark) and has pioneered an approach to doing theology that goes far beyond superficial attempts to get “behind the art” with questions of authorial intent. Begbie’s approach is, as he…
April 24, 2019
Essays

A Drink of Water: Flint, Michigan, 2014–2018

I assure you that anyone who gives you a drink of water because you belong to me will certainly receive a reward.Mark 9:41 The facts of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, are well known. Most important, it was caused entirely by human error and prolonged by a subsequent refusal to admit responsibility and take timely action. In April 2014, a state-appointed emergency manager opened a new pipeline to carry water from the Flint River to the city’s inhabitants. The…
April 22, 2019
Essays

Less Likeable than Insightful: Schrader’s “First Reformed”

First Reformed presents looks at current social issues through the lens of religion and specifically the eyes of a pastor from a failing Reformed church. To its credit, it attempts to give a well-rounded view of these issues. Pastor Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), is recently divorced and has lost his son in the Iraq war. Coming from a long line of male graduates of Virginia Military Institute, Toller had been an armed-services chaplain; he had encouraged his son to enlist…
April 19, 2019
EssaysReviews

Love and Hate: Christians and Rock Music in the 1960s

As a child of the 80s born to evangelical parents with a tall stack of Christian music on vinyl, I grew up with an odd mix of music. Music from an earlier era of secular styles was called “oldies.” Oldies were music that was once the devil’s music that had grown into AM-airwave fodder. Then there was country music, an old-time tradition often accompanied by gospel style and lyrics that developed into a saccharine substitute, with sad songs about lost…
April 17, 2019
Essays

Are We Even Paying Attention?

In late October, a gunman opened fire on a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in United States history. Earlier the same week, a white supremacist killed two black customers at a grocery store in Louisville. All of this came on the heels of an attempted mass bombing in which pipe bombs were sent to high-ranking progressive politicians, including two former presidents. Are Christians even paying attention to these levels of hate, to the…
April 15, 2019
Poetry

Crevices & Crannies

for the Sons of Korah (Psalm 84) Swallows swoop across the courtyard well above the notice of those alonefacing stone robed in black They flit & fly & loop back disappearing into gaps in the wall well above the reach or concern of those pushing paper prayers into every crack Before Mohamed’s people built their domebefore his Jerusalem dream Rome had destroyed the temple not one stone left upon anotherBefore Herod built on the rubble Nebuchadnezzar had knocked the temple…
April 12, 2019
As We See It

Lenten Parables

“Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” Luke 9:54 In the passage above, Jesus has just sent his disciples ahead of him to the towns and communities he plans to visit on his way to Jerusalem. Among the places his representatives are sent is Samaria. Home of the despised northern cousins of the Jews, whose worship is not quite pure enough to be considered orthodox, whose lineage is not quite pure enough…
April 10, 2019
Essays

Saints and Sinners – Can You Tell Them Apart?

Benedict Joseph Labre was an unemployed transient who begged around Europe for 13 years, eating refuse that other people didn’t want and clothing himself in rags. He was infested with vermin; he smelled bad. Yet fewer than a hundred years after his death in 1783, the Roman Catholic Church canonized him a saint. How and why did this happen? More important, what does it tell us about homelessness today? “The poor you will always have with you,” Christ said in…
April 8, 2019