MARCH 2012: ESSAY by Chuck DeGroat and Rachael Butler How do you view the city? Terms of derision abound: Crime-ridden. Busy. Scary. Drug-infested. Liberal. Over-crowded. Hopeless. And the caricatures are as old as scripture. It was Cain, the first citybuilder,…
MARCH 2012: AS WE SEE IT by Bart Garrett Imagine this scene. You are sitting at a coffee shop enjoying your favorite fairtrade, shade-grown, single-origin-bean, vacuum-pressed cup of caffeine when you glance out the window only to see a man…
MARCH 2012: AS WE SEE IT by Jared Ayers In the summer of 2008, my wife Monica and I crammed the contents of our house on Eleventh Street in Holland, Michigan, our two-year-old son, and our dog into a Budget…
FEBRUARY 2012: INSIDE OUT by Thom Fiet "You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." Matthew 5:48 Trudy Brower prayed for us in English, and then she prayed again for us in German, the assumption being that…
FEBRUARY 2012: REVIEW by Terri Martinson Elton Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church Kenda Creasy Dean Oxford University Press, 2010 $24.95. 264 pages. Don't judge this book by its cover, at least not…
FEBRUARY 2012: POETRY by Kristina Erny Due to the formatting needs of this month's poem, it is available as a PDF. Familiar with being an outsider from her childhood in South Korea, Kristina Erny became interested in dialect, storytelling, language…
FEBRUARY 2012: ESSAY by David Zwart A pair of burning wooden shoes! It is probably the most famous— or infamous—cover of the Christian Reformed Church's magazine, The Banner. It appeared November 3, 1980, the work of a new editor, Andrew…
FEBRUARY 2012: ESSAY by Marla Lunderberg When I get near an airport, any airport, any friend's take-off or return, I celebrate the motion, the rhythms of humanity on the move, and I do a quick mental check of my calendar…
FEBRUARY 2012: ESSAY by Adam Brooks Webber People eat the darnedest things. Escargot. Haggis. Lutefisk. Cheez Whiz. Our eating shows great diversity—and so does our fasting. As a global and interfaith practice, fasting can take on a variety of forms.…
