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It wasn't a heart attack after all. And how could it be, I wondered, even as the pain grew in my chest like a succubus. I gasped for breath that I couldn't find. The air left the room and left me sprawled on the living room chair where I normally read the paper, and struggling to breathe. Thirty years of hard tennis and nearly vicious racquetball had rendered my knees bony stumps of gristle and shard, but left my heart…

One of my earliest sermon memories goes back to the Reformed Church in the Netherlands in 1942. The dominee held forth on the German occupation and how we ought to discern God's will in all that happened in our country and our families, how suffering works patience, and how, along with Job, we should be silent and repent. After all, God, in his providence, would work out all things for good. Three years later, during the "hunger winter" in Amsterdam…

In early Lent I posted the following as my Facebook status, "I am brimming full of joy!" My liturgically minded friends quickly weighed in: "Well, stop it! It's Lent," wrote one. "Here, here! Ashes. Death. Sin. Think on these things," wrote another. It was all in good fun, and my friends made me laugh, but it also points to an odd association with Lent: that this season is anti-joy. That we should indeed sit around in sackcloth and ashes and…

Even before I read Matthew Lundberg's essay "Tripping over Adverbs" in the February edition of Perspectives, I had planned to write this little reflection for the Lenten Season. What follows may be something of a counter-weight to Lundberg's reflections on how some of our Lord's Supper liturgies seem to require more of a pumped-up faith than we may feel able to accomplish. Making sure you are "truly sorry" for your sins and that you "sincerely believe" in Jesus before taking…

I have James Smith's Vascular Plant Families open to page 203, Oleaceae: Olive Family. At least ten words are unfamiliar (actinomorphic, androecium, gynoecium, placentation), and another ten mean nothing to me in terms of botany (bisexual, united, cosmopolitan: I envision throngs of jasmine and forsythia marching down the streets of Chicago, celebrating Gay Pride week). I'm flipping to the glossary for each word, but the definitions don't help much. I start with exstipulate: without stipules. I turn to stipule: an…

During the heat of the 2008 United States presidential election, journalist Bill Bishop offered a tome that helped explain why the lines of demarcation between Barack Obama supporters and those of John McCain seemed so extreme: The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Therein, Bishop (with statistical support from sociologist Robert Cushing) describes the differences between blue and red states and how these distinctions are becoming more and more entrenched as folks in the…