Uncategorized

Your great-grandma says I talk like an old preacher, which is to say, too much. Maybe she's right. She's right about a lot of things. Of course, she knows all the stories, too. We've been married for sixty-seven years. It wasn't the time to tell the one I could have on Christmas Eve. Wasn't the time because nobody around that tree wanted to hear an old man go on and on, not with all those presents calling out. The only…

The Reformed Church (RCA) of Highland Park, New Jersey, stands on a side street just off the main thoroughfare of this residential town of about 14,000 people across the Raritan River from the old city of New Brunswick. A small century-old Gothic building houses the sanctuary. The educational building is only slightly more recent and blends in well enough, but attached to one end of it, in a rather different style, is the congregation's brand new clapboarded subsidized housing project…

I am delighted that this book came to be written; I worry that it will not be read as widely as it should be. As the authors Debra and Ron Rienstra point out in their preface, much has changed about worship in the last thirty years or so, and much attention has been paid, as they put it, to "shifting musical styles and new ways to organize the time, emotional contours, and architectural spaces of worship." Unfortunately, they point out,…

Some years ago a psychologist named Jonathan Haidt published some very intriguing data on what he called "elevation," which is the opposite of disgust. We all know that there are any number of things that disgust us or cause us to feel revulsion. When we witness hypocrisy, cruelty, and betrayal, we recoil--there are even certain physical sensations we experience when feeling disgusted such as a tightening in our chest, a clenching of our jaws, perhaps even a flutter of indigestion…