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Get Thee Behind Me, Fat

NOVEMBER 2007: AS WE SEE IT "Thou shalt place outside thy door a vat of fat. And this shalt be a sign unto the angel of heart disease to pass over thy house. Purge thy dwelling of trans and saturated fats (polyunsaturated is OK in smallish amounts) and purify thy house and all that is therein. Set outside thy dwelling, then, the vat of fat to signify thy purity, so that thou mayest be holy and live long in the…
November 15, 2007
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On Those Always With Us

NOVEMBER 2007: ESSAY On Those Always With Us by Thomas Allbaugh In 1972, I landed my first job, at a diner near the YMCA in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. The diner was called the Butterwagon, from its origins in the 1950s as a wagon sitting on a walk that ran along one side of the Civic Auditorium, where it looked out over the Grand River. The burgers in this operation were cooked in butter, and the little wagon in those…
Thomas Allbaugh
November 15, 2007
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Embodied, Human, Sexual: The Only Way to Be Christian

I recently had a conversation with a young man who was part of the Soulforce- sponsored Equality Ride that toured Christian colleges and universities in the United States earlier this year. The college where I was then teaching had prepared--and prayed--long and hard to be attentive to the Equality Riders' concerns and to be ready for the possibility of honest dialogue concerning homosexuality and Christian discipleship. At dinner following the group's presentation, this young man and I talked about the…
Cherith Fee Nordling
November 15, 2007
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Who Cares?

I have been raising money for more than twenty five years, first for a moderately liberal Protestant seminary and now for a recovery center for homeless alcoholics and addicts. Politically I am a moderately liberal Democrat. Religiously, I am a moderate liberal, though it would be more accurate to describe me as an evangelical liberal, a term widely used in the early twentieth century but nearly unknown today. My experience has taught me repeatedly that the most generous donors are…
John M. Mulder
November 15, 2007
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Eat This Book

NOVEMBER 2007: REVIEW What does it mean to engage in a spiritual reading of the Bible? How do we read the Bible not for information but in order to respond in prayer and obedience? How do we read the Bible as a living book speaking to us and shaping us in our everyday living? These questions animate Eugene Peterson's latest publication. In Eat This Book--the second volume in a projected five-volume series on spiritual theology--pastor, teacher, and Bible translator Peterson…
Steven Bouma-Prediger
November 15, 2007
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For All the Saints

NOVEMBER 2007: INSIDE OUT These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect. --Heb 11:39-40 Five years ago this month, I was in Paris. And my friend was dying in Michigan. I had left for Paris very much aware that I might never see him again. The cancer had hit fast and hard, and the…
Mary S. Hulst
November 15, 2007
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Two Poems by Jules Green

NOVEMBER 2007: POETRY Bird Tired, chest out, she will not leave this morning, a blue fall day among the rainy ones. Maybe she will make it beyond this window this evening to a pile of damp rust leaves or the paler ones that cling to the trees in conscientious blushes and defiant greens. Squatting, forehead to pane, the wind doesn't ruffle her cheeks. The smell of coffee, made by someone else, lingers at her knees, not the smell of raw…
Jules Green
November 1, 2007
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The Guns of August 2007

The new weapons "package" and containment strategy that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have been peddling around the Middle East lately have received a lot of coverage. In light of American policy in the region, the proposal is so predictable that discussing it seems trite; yet Americans' persistence in staying uninformed on the issue makes the deal tragically inane, demanding a critical response. Also predictably, the leading press has been clinical and acquiescent…
Bert deVries
October 16, 2007
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Strenuous Wholeness

"There's a future in strenuous wholeness" (Ps. 37:38, The Message) Our natural track is brokenness. Without a strenuous effort in the other direction, we will find ourselves selfish, unfulfilled, angry, hopeless, fractured, fragmented, broken (and without even a hint of a will to put things back together again). All of it happens slowly, almost unnoticeably, as if strand after strand of an invisible web is being spun around us, holding us just enough to make us forget we are falling…
Rebecca Warren
October 16, 2007