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Always

Last night we attended a little theatrical performance, sixteen shortshort plays tossed together like a good salad maybe, all of them having something, more or less, to do with faith and its practice. I'd say that faith was the dressing maybe, but it wasn't--faith didn't simply spice up the greens; faith was the greens. Punctuating the four acts of the performance were four testimonies, offered by the cast. Four times, individuals stepped to the front of the house, removed their…
Greg Scheer
March 16, 2008
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The RCA and the Kingdom of God

I wonder how long the doctrine of the Kingdom of God has been disappearing from the Reformed Church in America. Of course no one would deny the doctrine, but it's hardly robust in the denomination, and it hardly informs or inspires or directs us. Yet it is the single doctrine most characteristically "Reformed." The doctrine has had its variations in the RCA. Orthodox Calvinists stress the "Sovereignty of God" and matters of divine election. Liberals and progressives stress the "Kingdom…
Daniel Meeter
March 1, 2008
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To Save the Soul of America: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Renewal of America Today

To save the soul of America! I was astounded to learn this was the motto of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, civil rights movement. This motto was quite audacious given the minority status and the oppressed situation of African Americans at the time. African Americans were just thirteen percent of the U.S. population, and they had been racially oppressed for three hundred years. But they wanted to save the soul of America? It would have been much more reasonable if their…
Hak Joon Lee
March 1, 2008
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Can Human Rights Survive Secularization? Part I

Every society has a characteristic moral culture, by which I mean a characteristic set of concepts for thinking about moral issues and a characteristic way of applying those concepts. For almost a millennium now, a characteristic and distinctive feature of our moral culture in the West has been our employment of the idea of natural human rights. The most dramatic employment of this idea has been in the human rights movement of the past fifty years. Not far behind was…
Nicholas Wolterstorff
March 1, 2008
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Reforming Sex Education

When my first son Owen was an infant, I often got together with a group of moms to participate in a playgroup. Truthfully, the group was more for the social benefit of the moms and less for our infants, since they were too young to crawl and their playing involved nothing more than pulling each other's hair. Nonetheless, it was important for us moms. We talked about parenting philosophies and had lively debates over when to talk to our children…
Lavonne Zwart Schaafsma
March 1, 2008
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Economics for the Poor

How moral is the market? This question has long been the source of heated debates that all too often degenerate into shouting matches. One side decries poverty, exploitation, environmental destruction, child labor, races to the bottom, and the like; the other side fights back with claims about the foolishness of government interventions and the horrors of socialism. Among the more informed scholars in these debates are, on one side, philosophically and religiously trained social ethicists who tend to be critical…
Roland Hoksbergen
March 1, 2008
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Going It Alone

In late April 1992, Christopher Johnson McCandless forded a stream of early snowmelt into the wilderness. On September 6 of the same year, hunters found McCandless' emaciated, decomposing body in an abandoned bus in the middle of the wild, home to his great Alaskan adventure. What we know about McCandless' story comes from terse journal entries, testimony of his brave family, and acquaintances formed over two years of tramping around the American West prior to his calculated turn north. What…
Margaret Jenista
February 1, 2008
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Preaching Tips

"We are sorry for the loss of your friend, and his courageous battle against cancer; but it is not interesting." I heard these words from a Pulitzer Prize winning poet at the University of Iowa a few years ago. It did not sound pastoral at the time. I have changed my mind. I think he is right. Our losses are not interesting. Even the loss of Jesus, the Son of God, our Lord and Savior, is not interesting. It is…
Thom Fiet
February 1, 2008