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MAY 2012: INSIDE OUT by Jennifer L. Holberg I recently joined the blogging group "The Twelve: Reformed. Done Daily." It's a group that has been going for a while (and with great stuff—I encourage you to check it out at the12.squarespace.com). And now that one of the original twelve has dropped out, I guess that makes me the blog's Matthias. You'll remember the story of Matthias from Acts 1. After Jesus' ascension, the disciples returned to Jerusalem and discussed a…

MAY 2012: REVIEW by Todd V. Cioffi Re-imaging Election: Divine Election in Representing God to Others and Others to God Suzanne McDonald Eerdmans, 2010 $26.00. 240 pages. It is not often that a title does justice to the content of a book, but it does here. Professor McDonald seeks to reimagine the doctrine of election within the Reformed tradition by contending that a key category for election, and indeed an underdeveloped category, is "representation" or "election to representation." While many…

MAY 2012: REVIEW by Scott Hoezee God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins Mark Galli Tyndale House , 2011 $12.99. 203 pages (includes study guide). Generally speaking, one tends to be suspicious of "instant books." These days it doesn't take long to rush a book into print, but the real concern should not be how quickly a publisher managed to knock out a finished product, but how much time the author spent actually…

MAY 2012: POETRY by Brett Foster The tweeny daughter torments the younger brother, who stands impassively, elbows on the table. He fiddles with a just cut apple and tugs at his pants. Bored, madly involved. Fidgeting, in a word. "Are you going to the movies?" she says. "Then why are you picking your seat?" Pause. Kitchen laughter (we're all guilty) sears and embarrasses as it will at that age. Yet he readily replies: "Seeds, Avery, I'm picking seeds." And so…

MAY 2012: ESSAY by Steven McMullen Angst about our food system is prevalent. Amidst the fair trade, organic, locally produced, and hormone-free labels, one can easily produce a hierarchy of moral standing based solely on a person's diet. In this environment, and given the plethora of other important concerns facing us, it is understandable that many people simply purchase the products they desire, leaving the regulating of agriculture to the Food and Drug Administration and United States Department of Agriculture.…

MAY 2012: ESSAY by Hak Joon Lee Several years ago in one of the opening sessions of my ethics class, I gave the usual long lecture on globalization using various complex academic jargon such as time-space compression, glocality, deterritorialization, and transnationality. After the class, a witty student sent me an email that politely chided my pedagogical ineffectiveness in explaining globalization. "Professor, the following example is a far simpler account of globalization." Question: "What is the truest definition of globalization?" Answer:…

MAY 2012: AS WE SEE IT by David Schelhaas I spent February of this year in Florida, hanging around with old folks most of the time—after all, I am an official member of AARP. One of the things I was told by an elderly acquaintance in Florida was that the whole idea of global warming had come from an eighth grader's term paper. And he believed it. I asked him if he ever watched NASA launch spacecraft to go to…

MAY 2012: AS WE SEE IT by James C. Schaap Our lindens are just about the tallest trees in town, I swear. And there he was, high up top, singing his heart out, that searing melody so perfectly "cardinal" that it couldn't be mistaken for anyone else's. Even with a horse of a lens, my camera couldn't have caught him way up there because cardinals seem almost always nervous and flighty, jumping from skinny branch to skinny branch as if…

MAY 2012: AS WE SEE IT by James Bratt Charles Colson's death last month prompted a chorus of praise from his evangelical supporters. Praise for his enduring conversion to Christianity. Praise for the change of character it wrought in him. Praise for the compassion that galvanized him to build his Prison Fellowship into the largest prison ministry in the world. Praise, sometimes followed by sad sighs that the mainstream media had too much remembered the Watergate felon and not the…