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by Paul Janssen This white guy observes Black History Month because there is no way that I would be living the life I live today without the mostly unwilling contributions of African Americans. I am who I am because they did what they did. That might sound odd coming from a fellow who grew up in Iowa, which during my youth was one of the whitest states in the nation. I didn't meet an African American until I was in…

by Fred L. Johnson III President Barack Obama's 2012 reelection victory presents him with the opportunity to continue the fight he's been waging for the middle class ever since his inauguration. On that day, now four years ago, Obama inherited a financial catastrophe that had been over thirty years in the making. During those years, the federal government had steadily retreated from its regulatory responsibilities while Wall Street financial institutions bloated into behemoths eventually deemed "too big to fail." Compounding those…

Thom Fiet The scriptures give us a great many views of God, and we, of course, are eager to add our own. Here on the banks of the Jordan River in Matthew 3, we get the feeling that we are seeing something of the core of who God is. Everyone at the Jordan is being baptized into the reality of heaven, but only Jesus arrives to be baptized into the reality of humanity. When Jesus is baptized, he is entering…

In December 2012, Scot Sherman, teaching pastor at City Church San Francisco and president of the Newbigin House of Studies, as well as a member of the Perspectives board of editors, spoke with Tim Vink, the Reformed Church in America's coordinator for church multiplication, about his response to a recent Perspectives article. Scot Sherman (SS): In an As We See It piece in the August/September 2012 issue of Perspectives, titled "The NAR and the RCA" (The New Apostolic Reformation and…

David G. Myers, Ralph Blair, Marilyn Paarlberg In his forthcoming book No Condemnation! (Wipf Stock), Lutheran scholar Gary E. Gilthvedt observes that "there is nothing about homosexuality in the earliest ethical codes of the Hebrews, the Ten Commandments; nothing in the Prophets; nothing in the sayings of Jesus in the four gospels of the New Testament; nothing in the great majority of New Testament Epistles. Integrity suggests appropriate regard for the fact that, simply put, 'Homosexuality is not a prominent…

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2013: POETRY by Tom C. Hunley When I die, Lord, I want to come back as a cloud an airplane passes through just before the crash, lit up by blazing sunset and just freed of a heavy, cleansing rain— a cloud gifted with speech enough to say Change your course, pilot. I want to change, cloudlike, into the sort of person who finds a wallet and an abandoned infant and knows which to keep, which to return, and does…

by Dennis N. Voskuil In 1997, during the sesquicentennial of the city of Holland, Michigan, a statue of Albertus C. Van Raalte, the settlement's founder, was erected in a corner of Centennial Park. It is telling that it took one hundred and fifty years for Van Raalte to be so recognized, and then under the auspices of Chicago-area benefactor Peter Huizenga. Van Raalte's contributions—as a forceful and visionary leader of the Dutch Calvinist migration to West Michigan in the nineteenth century—have…

Bob Vander Lugt Fifty years to the day after the release of his first album, seventy-one-year-old songwriting icon Bob Dylan offered up Tempest. His third release since 2001, Tempest is ten tracks of Dylanesque storytelling, dark scenes of sin and violence threaded through gritty blues and simple folk renderings. After thirty-five studio albums and a career cluttered with confounding artistic highs and lows, it's fair to ask if it's time for this folk legend to lay the mantle aside. Fortunately…

by Norman Kolenbrander St. Nicholas Orthodox Church is located above The Mystical Rose Catholic bookstore, across from Van Den Berg's Gift Shop on the busiest shopping street in my town, Pella, Iowa. It is the twenty-first century, after all, and we have our own little smattering of diversity to prove it. A friend and I decided to join their congregation for the St. Nicholas Day liturgy, the feast day of their namesake, on December 6. We met under the tower…