Sorting by

×
Skip to main content
Category

Magazine

Essays

Nature’s Space into Ethnic Place

The train hugged the Hudson River before crossing the bridge over Spuyten Duyvil onto Manhattan Island as my friend asked in a tone I’d become accustomed to, bemused Big-City incredulity: “I hear you’re moving to Idaho?” Actually, I explained, we were headed for Iowa. “Oh. Well,” he waved his hand in dismissal, as if he’d been close and I was quibbling over minor details: “One of those vowel states.” I was trading my commute from Westchester County into Greenwich Village,…
April 6, 2015
As We See It

Saints Surround Us

When I was 18, I had about two hundred grandmothers, give or take fifty. By the time I was a senior in high school, I’d had a maintenance job at a nearby retirement community for more than two years, and, during that time, I’d gotten to know the residents pretty well. For three summers, I cleaned all their windows, a process made much more difficult by my constant struggle against all the knickknacks on the windowsills. Sometimes as I worked…
April 6, 2015
Poetry

It Was Happy Hour

in our Florida retirement village we were on the patio ice cubes clinking in our gin and tonics conversations rising sinking from a tree next door a shriek and a flurry and down on the ground a hawk with a dove in its talons red-shouldered hawk we decided the hawk stood still the dove soft beneath him wrestled and rested wrestled and rested but the hawk calmly waited “ooh, poor dove” someone said “soon be dead” someone else said still…
Dave Schelhaas
February 28, 2015
Used under Creative Commons license
As We See It

A Child of God Called Home Too Soon

Dale Brown died in the fall of 2014 after a bicycle crash. Most readers of Perspectives will know very little about Dale Brown, my friend and colleague whose life is the focus of a clutch of pieces in this issue of the magazine. Dale was my friend for 27 years; readers who didn’t know him may need some small bit of introduction in order to get a clearer sense of who this man was. What follows is my attempt to…
James VandenBosch
February 28, 2015
Essays

The Great Inviter

W. Dale Brown, put in front of an audience, was always disarming: smart, artless, arch – and Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing put him in front of many audiences. Given his druthers, though, Dale would station himself at the back of a crowd. From there, he could wink at the latecomers. He could chuckle, a little less than circumspect, at the speakers’ jokes and quirks. He could whisper along with the poets and commit the orators’ maxims to…
February 28, 2015
Essays

A Seeker of Gospel-Shaped Stories

I somehow managed to earn a bachelor of arts in literature without ever encountering Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote until a high school production of Dale Wasserman’s 1965 play Man of La Mancha. I went as a rookie minister in the 80s because a 16-year-old junior from my youth group was playing the role of Aldonza, the scorned scullery maid Quixote keeps calling Dulcinea because somehow when he looks at her, all he can see is a princess: “I see…
February 28, 2015
Reviews

North-South Relationships in the Global Church

Sister Churches, By Janel Kragt Bakker SISTER CHURCHES: AMERICAN CONGREGATIONS AND THEIR PARTNERS ABROAD JANEL KRAGT BAKKER OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2013 320 PP. $26.96 Christianity is rooted in the Middle East and flourished in North Africa for centuries. Yet since the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity under Constantine in the fourth century it has been perceived as a Western religion, and for 17 centuries Christianity has been closely tied to the cultures and peoples of the North Atlantic.…
February 28, 2015
Inside Out

Getting Away

At Standing Stone State Rustic Park near Hilham, Tennessee, they ought to have a sign: No Internet Access No Cable Television No Phones No Cell Tower No Microwave No Seafood Buffet. If You Came Here To Keep Up, Turn Around. The only sign they do have is one that says “No Pets,” a rule, as far as I can tell, that almost everyone ignores. But it is possible that I have mistaken the strays that populate the place for family…
Thomas B. Phulery
February 28, 2015
Essays

A Curious Professor

Part I: Holberg In all the years of our long friendship, there was never a week that went by when Dale Brown and I did not talk about teaching. We talked about our own classes, of course, and our students, but we also talked about all the pedagogical “nitty-gritty” – grading and assignments and course readings – trying to figure out how to get ever better at what we felt was the most meaningful part of our job as professors.…
February 4, 2015