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As We See ItSexuality

Response to Matthew Tuininga on Sexuality and Scripture

Let me begin by warmly thanking Matthew Tuininga, who has become my good friend, for the generous spirit of his response to the talk I gave on same-sex marriage at Neland Avenue Christian Reformed Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan, on October 13 last year. Would that all discussions of this intensely controversial topic breathed such a spirit of respect and friendship! It will help the reader understand my response to Tuininga if I briefly summarize what I said in my talk:…
February 28, 2017
Essays

Sexuality and the Gospel: My Response to Wolterstorff

A couple of months ago, philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff made big news when he delivered a speech at Neland Avenue Christian Reformed Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan, in favor of same-sex marriage. The speech has evoked mixed reviews: Those who desire to see the church affirm monogamous same-sex sexual relationships are ecstatic to have a scholar of Wolterstorff’s stature on their side (however cautiously he may have presented his case), while those committed to the biblical conception of marriage as being between…
February 28, 2017
Essays

You Just Don’t Get It

“You just can’t understand.” It frustrated me when my daughter would tell me, “You just don’t get it. You can’t get it.” I remember the day that she was born. My daughter was 23 hours old when she was placed in my arms by her birth mother. A literal waterfall, a sheet of tears, obscured my view. And when I could see again, I marveled at my miracle, this God-granted miracle girl. This act of love. Her birth mother had…
Debra L. Freeberg
January 4, 2017
Poetry

The Dove

Here in a parking lot in February Where snow, piled through the winter, melting in thaw, Had sent a freshly pulsing tributary Across the asphalt like a silver claw, A dove landed, dipped, and drank, wary. Almost as swift in flight as peregrine With wings that whisper rhythm as it flies, Cautiously wild, yet still in cities seen, This is the mourning dove, whose presence vies For space against construction and machine. Songbird yet gamebird, prey to hunters’ pride, Preyed…
January 4, 2017
Reviews

John Updike as Evangelist

Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike, by John McTavish MYTH AND GOSPEL IN THE FICTION OF JOHN UPDIKE JOHN MCTAVISH CASCADE BOOKS, 2016 $25 183 PAGES Readers looking for the latest cutting-edge scholarship on John Updike (1932-2009) might be disappointed in John McTavish’s Myth and Gospel in the Fiction of John Updike. McTavish, an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada, offers us instead a kind of bricolage: revisions and expansions of essays and reviews McTavish…
January 4, 2017
Essays

Loving God, Each Other and the Truth

Editor’s note: The following is adapted from a chapel talk at Northwestern College, Orange City, Iowa. A salesman driving through rural Iowa has car trouble. He has no cell service, so he walks to a nearby farmhouse. He enters the yard and, looking to his left, sees a pig in a pen. The pig has a wooden leg. The salesman stares for a moment then walks onto the porch and knocks on the door. After the farmer lets him use…
January 4, 2017
Essays

Reincorporating Christus Victor in the Reformed Theology of Atonement

In Christianity’s first centuries, we find vivid depictions of the cross as a fishhook or mousetrap that catches Satan in the act of destroying human life. The mousetrap image seems to come from the Latin version of Augustine’s triumphant statement in his Sermon 134 that the devil, the ruler of this world who will be driven out (John 12:31), caused his own destruction by entrapping Christ in death, bringing about the resurrection. As the Gospels indicted Sadducees, scribes and Jerusalem…
January 4, 2017
Reviews

Learning to Be, Not Do, in Youth Ministry

Poetic Youth Ministry, by Jason Lief POETIC YOUTH MINISTRY: LEARNING TO LOVE YOUNG PEOPLE BY LETTING THEM GO JASON LIEF CASCADE BOOKS, 2015 $21 160 PAGES Poetic Youth Ministry, by Jason Lief, is a disruptive book on youth ministry. Opening with the Disney film WALL•E as an analogy for the challenging identity-formation journey young people face, Lief examines why the “faith scripts” taught in many of our churches often end in tragedy, with our young people choosing a different faith…
Darwin K. Glassford
January 4, 2017
Poetry

Autumn Leaves

It seems the leaves know that they’re done with green of photosynthesis: loosing their stems from tendril grasp, they drop, but glide so far from tree you wouldn’t think that leaves so far had come from distant oak or birch but for the form they clearly bear. Their gliding draws my admiration: Energized from loosing free, though similar in species’ name, leaves that seemed alike on tree, now individual in flight, differ in distance and descent, distinctive in each solo…
January 4, 2017