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by Kristin Du Mez It won't be long until another Mother's Day is upon us, and I have to admit that I'm a bit ambivalent when it comes to this holiday. It's not that I don't cherish the construction-paper cards and hand-crafted presents my kids lovingly bestow upon me each year—I really do. It's when we get to church Sunday morning that I can't help but find the whole idea of Mother's Day more than a little troubling. Mother's Day, of…

by Ronald A. Wells I began writing this story on All Saints Day, but I didn't finish it then. Now, looking forward to Easter and to our communion with those for whom death has been conquered, it still seems appropriate. It is about the best storyteller the Dutch community has produced in the past fifty years. Stan Wiersma was a professor of English at Calvin College for many years, a career that ended with his untimely death twenty-seven years ago. His…

by Joshua Bode The Reformed Church in America's 2012 General Synod passed a resolution that included the statement, "homosexual behavior is a sin according to the Holy Scriptures, therefore any person, congregation, or assembly which advocates homosexual behavior or provides leadership for a service of same-sex marriage or a similar celebration has committed a disciplinable offense." While the question of what the Bible says about homosexuality is of basic importance in the church's debates around homosexuality, the synod's declaration also raises…

Donald A. Luidens As a teenager growing up in Beirut, Lebanon, I was privy to an adage among local expatriates: Western scholars come to the Middle East, stay a week and write a book, stay a month and write an article, stay a year and begin to ask questions. Armed with this cautionary note, I approached a recent foray into that part of the world with a trunkload of questions, spent more than a month, and now presume to write…

Allan Janssen The action by the Reformed Church in America's General Synod last spring that restated the synod's "official position that homosexual behavior is a sin" and declared that advocacy of homosexual behavior is a "disciplinable offense" raised anew the issue of the authority and reach of General Synod statements. It is a question that has been raised before. In the late nineteenth century, the Reformed church struggled with the issue of Freemasonry. At the heart of the issue was…

Grace Claus I've been thinking a lot about membership lately. This is mostly thanks to Wendell Berry, whose novel Jayber Crow I finished earlier this month. It's the story of Port William, a small farming town in Kentucky, the people who live there, and the way a place lays claim to us. Early in the novel, Jayber, a twenty-something man who was orphaned as a child and has moved increasingly farther away from his hometown, decides to return home. His…

MARCH/APRIL 2013: POETRY by Otto Selles Blame the blanketed lake and the pale sky for offering no sense of direction— no definition of where snow should fall. But maybe snow of this cottonball kind is itself at fault and suffers from an unsure sense of the snow's true vocation to pile up by falling down. This snow prefers putting on a show somersaulting on a flying trapeze mocking any need for a net below. Otto Selles lives with his wife…

MARCH/APRIL 2013: POETRY by Susanna Childress Tell me snow is falling on the willows now, fat, full, unhurried, for my strawberry-haired nephew sleeps, his body beneath a blanket knit brilliantly blue, his body wilted with neuroblastoma, and here on the couch, I hold his head and wonder at what's sent from above, what we'd believe drifts down during these months of ice, so far north we need Easter to end winter for us—not Eostre, Teutonic myth, vernal equinox, not eggs,…

Lisa DeBoer In the foreword to Steve Guthrie's Creator Spirit, Jeremy Begbie observes, "In our culture, there seems to be an intuitive sense that ‘the spiritual' and the world of the arts are somehow intimately related." As a professor teaching in an art department in a Christian liberal arts college, I can attest to the truth of this observation. Whether the underlying assumption itself, however—that the arts truly are somehow uniquely, intimately spiritual—is correct, remains to be argued. Were one…