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Inside Out

Saul Cannot Get a Break

The Lord said to Samuel, “How long will you grieve over Saul, seeing I have rejected him from being king over Israel?” (1 Samuel 16:1) Poor King Saul. He can’t get a break from God. He didn’t ask to be king – it was God’s idea, not his. He wasn’t cut out for it, not really, not even being head and shoulders above the rest. He didn’t have the knack for it, despite that first success that earned him the…
Daniel Meeter
September 1, 2014
Poetry

Hard Red Spring

The day I stood on the clipped grass of Olds College – after palming Norquay, Chinook, and Neepawa, until my fingers had unlocked their doors, and I could smell the loam and feel the wind, and see three months of rain and heat, in an amber seed of Hard Red Spring wheat – I saw kaleidoscopic rings around the sun. And at the sun-dog-ends of those high-noon rims, were more rings intersecting, and at each intersection, like Ezekiel’s wheels in…
Stephen T. Berg
September 1, 2014
Reviews

Common Ground and a Big Table for All Citizens

EVANGELICALS ON PUBLIC POLICY ISSUES: SUSTAINING A RESPECTFUL POLITICAL CONVERSATION HAROLD HEIE ABILENE CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014 176 pp. $17.99 At my Christian university, political science majors make up less than 10 percent of the student body. When I talk to other students about voting, politics and faith, they tell me that they lack interest partly because of the nasty arguments. The religious right, Red Letter Christians arguing with the religious right, fighting about gay rights, refusal to take climate…
Julia K. Stronks
September 1, 2014
Poetry

God Likes Hair Salons

I can’t believe God lives outside the house of earth, beyond the lawn of stars, and the fenced-yard universe, out in the timeless cold, his raw breath, his radon brow, ridged, veiling nebular eyes, and his fingers, freezing as he writes down names in a book, for later. Of course God prefers the clamour of pubs, the company of welders and waitresses, the warm feel of a beech wood pool cue, the chatter on wharves and in hair salons, the…
Stephen T. Berg
September 1, 2014
Essays

“Like the wideness of the sea?” 15 years later

Compelling Analogy by Steve Bouma-Prediger Lew Smedes was one of my esteemed teachers when I was a student at Fuller Theological Seminary in the mid-1980s. I vividly recall his stimulating class titled “Calvin and the Christian Life.” I had read his popular book “Sex for Christians” (Eerdmans, 1976) for a religion class as a student at Hope College in 1978 and read everything he wrote in the old Reformed Journal in the 1970s and 1980s. Lew was a larger-than-life person,…
David E. Timmer, Annie Reilly and Elizabeth Vander Haagen
September 1, 2014
Essays

God and the Seattle Seahawks

MAY/JUNE 2014: ESSAY by Matthew Kaemingk If we would know ourselves, the ancient Temple at Delphi advises, the study of sports in all its connections to the rest of art and life would seem to be an ideal quest for understanding of self and the world. —Simon Kuper, athletic anthropologist I am a rabid fan of the Seattle Seahawks. I am also a Christian theologian. When I claim to be a rabid fan, I mean what I say. Consider the…
Matthew Kaemingk
May 1, 2014
Poetry

Poetry by Rose Postma

MAY/JUNE 2014: POETRY by Rose Postma The Apostle Peter Contemplates Logical Fallacies Somewhere in Northwest Iowa, a Silver Laced Wyandotte grips the gray-cracked wood of a fence post with his claws. He puffs his feathers in the black-cold, shakes his matched set of comb and wattles once, draws in breath to expel through the syrinx, and crows. The sun rises. Post hoc ergo propter hoc: the sun is not controlled by the cock, but it could be—the way a question…
Rose Postma
May 1, 2014
As We See It

Feeling Minnesota: The Art of Not Winning

MAY/JUNE 2014: AS WE SEE IT by Jason Lief "So who are you rooting for in the Super Bowl?" All week it was the same question. "I hope they both lose," is the response I gave. "Oh, but Peyton Manning—" Blah, blah, blah. Yes, great football player, even better Saturday Night Live host—his United Way skit is comedy gold. Still, I wanted him to lose. "But the Seahawks, come on, they've never won a Super Bowl. Surely you'll root for…
May 1, 2014
As We See It

Coincidence or Correlation?

MAY/JUNE 2014: AS WE SEE IT by George Brown Jr. What caught my attention that afternoon was the word "Rogue": someone dishonest, a nonconformist or playfully mischievous. The word shone out in bright chrome letters on the back of the SUV stopped in front of my car. While I waited for the traffic light to change, I thought "Rogue" was an apt name for the way the SUV had been driven the past few blocks. Perhaps in a hurry to…
George Brown Jr.
May 1, 2014