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Jon Pott I'm pretty sure that I met Rich Mouw at a party, probably in the late 60s, not long after he had joined the Calvin College philosophy department and I had landed at Eerdmans Publishing. For me, and no doubt for others, he came out of nowhere. Who was this noisy, seemingly unpedigreed character who had had no earlier association with Calvin (or even with the Free University of Amsterdam)? Unprecedented in the philosophy department at the time. The…

George Marsden Rich Mouw is a fundamentalist with a sense of humor. When I say he is a fundamentalist, I mean it in the best sense of the term. He appreciates what is fundamental to fundamentalism. Nothing is more important to him than to love Jesus, and for him that love is simple and heart-felt. He has written of his liking of "the smell of sawdust" and of what believers who think themselves more sophisticated can learn from that heritage.…

Nicholas Wolterstorff When Rich Mouw became president of Fuller Seminary twenty years ago, I and others anticipated that his career as a writer was more or less over; almost all his time would henceforth be consumed by administration and fund-raising. We have been astounded. Rich's pace of publication has quickened during his presidency. By my count, five titles appeared before 1993 and eleven since, not counting those co-authored with others. A little voice says, "They must be potboilers." The little…

Richard J. Mouw Like most people raised in North American Protestantism, I was taught songs in my early childhood about the love of Jesus. I can't remember a time when I did not know the words to "Jesus Loves Me" and "Jesus Loves the Little Children." These songs celebrate a divine love that sounds inclusive: Red and yellow, black and white, They are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world. But there is another little…

Richard J. Mouw Lent always takes me by surprise. I'm never quite ready for it. This has always been my pattern, going back to my childhood days as a public school student when I would wander onto the playground on a warm spring morning to find that all the Catholic kids had ashes on their foreheads. I hadn't even known that Ash Wednesday was approaching. And when my high-church friends would ask me what I had decided to give up…

JULY/AUGUST 2013: POETRY by Tania Runyan AFTER REVELATION 9 All that grace wasn't working anymore, the Kincaid prints and purpose-driven songs, kids star-charting memorized verses. He needed something big, something like a horse with an exoskeleton and a supermodel's hair. Smoke, breastplates, crowns. The people clawed the walls of ambulances. They writhed in hospital hallways until released back to parking lots shrilling with yellow-gauze wings. I thought it a little much, scorpion tails shooting people in grocery aisles, knocking them…

JULY/AUGUST 2013: POETRY by Joseph Byrd MUSIC STUDENTS GET MARRIED We ate waffles the night that we met; sweet, grainy things. They told what would come: a life that's moved from state to state, that's held no treat but each other's company, often rife with practice-rooms and metronomes, with queens of mind games and teaching—women full in their need to control (but how our spleens tickled at the learning, the music's pull). And though we've steamed ourselves a bit, and…

James D. Bratt In 1985, Richard Mouw left his teaching post at Calvin College for Fuller Theological Seminary, where he has taught ever since and for the past twenty years has served as president. Though leaving the heartland of the Dutch Reformed, he still intended to hone "a neo-Calvinist perspective" that was both "indigenous ecumenically enriched" for contemporary American application. This collection of fourteen previously published essays testifies that Mouw has been faithful to that call and that taking this…