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MARCH 2007: ESSAY by Margaret Bendroth One summer during high school, my younger sister and I had a contest to see who could read the most books by Grace Livingston Hill. Almost a century ago, the prolific Mrs. Hill (whom we imagined as large and lonely) churned out scores of Christian Endeavor romance novels that would subsequently be reissued as pastel-covered paperbacks in the 1970s. Those formulaic stories of "love and faith," filled with sleazy flappers and slick-haired roues, fresh…

MARCH 2007: POETRY by Trina Baker Panting, I breach the trees for the meadow. Feet leave behind the dirt, moist and fecund, packed beneath needles and oak leaves in the shadow of redwoods clustered around the burnt-out trunk of a sister. Feet step softly where owl clover springs along the side of a muddy path. Horses marked the trail with dung; their hooves stirred up mud where damselflies flit low green and blue, ahead of footsteps. The first dragonfly of…

MARCH 2007: REVIEW Dies Irae by Roy Anker The new note in films, both last year and this, seems to be dystopic. In a marked shift of mood, filmmakers from the United States and abroad are following the premise that things broadly taken are grim and are going south, fast. Even Rocky, that emblem of triumph against all odds, in his latest incarnation (Rocky Balboa) finds his life shambling, his money gone, his wife dead, his son far distant, and…

MARCH 2007: REVIEW by Peter Bratt Just a week before the 2006 midterm elections, the Reverend Ted Haggard, head of the National Association of Evangelicals, pastor of the enormous New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and reputed counselor to the president, fell into a media firestorm over revelations of his drug use and same-sex adultery made by a former male prostitute.Within a few days, one of the leading voices of evangelical Protestantism had to step down from his pulpit…

But I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people. --Psalm 22:6 Are you a worm? Not a gummy worm or a book worm, but a real worm--an elongated soft-bodied invertebrate that lives in the dirt? It's not exactly an act of self-empowerment to acknowledge that you're a worm. The word is a metaphor for insignificance; after all, there's nothing lower than a worm. Yet our psalmist freely admits, "I am a worm and…