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Essays

Home, Heroes and Saints in Christ

I have been told that I have a tendency to ruin cultural outings with my penchant for theological critique. I try really hard to rein it in, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. It might have happened last month, when I took my 4-year-old son to see “The Wizard of Oz.” It was an Andrew Lloyd Webber production, with many of the classic songs from the 1939 movie and a few new songs written for this play. One of…
Kristen Deede Johnson
October 30, 2014
Poetry

Psalm 727

For the Director, to the tune of “The Cup of Mourning.” Dawn, in her tattered veils, wafts one last breath over the pond like a bridal train; the ivory mesh snags, opening on a rain-pearled leaf, a peeling scroll of birch inked with cryptic lines— alas, no message there for a widow. French press steeps as layers of gauze keep parting, God’s hand there, stirring a glimpse within morning’s swirl of cream marbled through coffee, easing this ache we call…
Laurie Klein
October 30, 2014
Essays

Lying, Truthfulness and the Grace of God

It is an old question, and it happens every fall. Every fall, I teach a required course on biblical theology as seen through the Old Testament and the Gospels. Every fall, we get stuck on the story of Rahab in the book of Joshua, and we get particularly stuck on the question of whether Rahab was justified in lying to Jericho about the whereabouts of Israel’s spies. Every fall, almost all of my students — whether they are products of…
Keith Starkenburg
October 30, 2014
Essays

How to Practice the Virtue of Hope: The ‘Shawshank’ Connection

The apostle Paul ends 1 Corinthians 13 with the words “And so these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” In the Christian tradition from Augustine to Aquinas and beyond, “these three” become the three theological virtues. For love, we get a list of how-to’s in the same chapter: love is not rude; it rejoices with the truth. In Hebrews 11, we get a list of heroes of faith. But what to say about…
Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
October 30, 2014
Poetry

Earthworks 301

Such dubious tutors: the upwardly mobile drone whose instinct sinks his career with a single sting; the flim-flam deer tick, upended, six legs waving, with two new ones, nose hair thin and due to emerge before she self-destructs from Siphon Arrest; and, out-slumming all comers, the fly wannabe, that inveterate pond bum and bottom crawler, the caddis worm, sheathed with twiglets and crumbs of stone, bits of rotted sedge, an earring back, a long-gone snail’s bivalve casket. As it was…
Laurie Klein
October 30, 2014
Essays

A Letter from Despondent University

Below is a letter from an old friend, Karis, who now serves as dean of the chapel at Despondent University in up-state Washington, in WantMore County. We share a faithful correspondence through letters. Occasionally she writes something that I like to share. Despondent University, est. 1849 May 6, 2014   Dear Trygve, It’s graduation day at Despondent University. It’s typical Northwest atmosphere. The clouds hang low, and a slow drizzle threatens the moment. Yet, despite the concrete sky, an atmosphere…
Trygve Johnson
October 30, 2014
As We See It

Thick Lives, Thick Theology

The question of this guest-edited issue of Perspectives can be asked in two ways. First, we are asking a broad question: How does Christian theology illuminate the weight and depth of our day-to-day lives, such that our lives can be experienced and shaped in accord with that weight and depth? As David Bentley Hart has recently claimed in “The Experience of God” (Yale, 2013), “We have, in fact, no direct access to nature as such; we can approach nature only…
Trygve Johnson and Keith Starkenburg
October 30, 2014
Inside Out

To Not Look Away

All day long I have held out my hands to an obstinate people, who walk in ways not good, pursuing their own imaginations – a people who continually provoke me to my very face, offering sacrifices in gardens and burning incense on altars of brick. – Isaiah 65:2-3 The poet Marie Howe instructs her students to make six observations about the real world they encounter each morning before coming to class. She’s in the business of retraining their attention. It…
Julie VanderVeen VanTil
October 30, 2014
Poetry

Romantics

He loosens his work-tie’s noose-knot, ascending a staircase climbing above our grey earth, fallen leaves clotting gutters in the car-park where a divorced neighbor, half-lifed, drags on a cigarette, smoldering time until her bed-mate’s pickup returns, a faded T-shirt her smock, her hair a mess like a nest. Exhausted, Ulysses stumbles into his haven, a two-room apartment, having passed by the taupe vestibule’s Charybdis, its mailbox, filled with bills starving for their pounds of flesh, to behold as he does…
Nathaniel A. Schmidt
October 30, 2014