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Gridiron Liturgy

I recently went to a professional football game in Kansas City. What struck me most about the whole affair was that for the tens of thousands there it so much seemed an act of worship. In fact, pieces of liturgy were scattered just about everywhere. The climax of the pro football seasons begins in Advent, just like the church year itself, and the playoffs come in Epiphany. Even the anticipatory waiting of Advent was there, stuck as we were in…
January 16, 2004
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Why Jedi Knights Rule:How Reading and Writing Still Matter

Weird and wonderful superheroes haven't had it so good since the days of Baal and Zeus. Turn on the television, and you can be touched by a heavenly angel, pull for a dark angel on a big bike, or recoil from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's sometime boyfriend Angel. And this season there's the off-beat Joan of Arcadia, in which in each episode a teen-age girl runs into God who every time shows up in a different guise, ranging from boy…
John D. Suk
January 16, 2004
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Deep Waters

This summer my son Nathan and I took a ten-day adventure to Isle Royale--that long green stone nestled in the northwestern waters of Lake Superior. For six days and five nights, we lived with the foxes, moose, red squirrels, and wolves that had arrived on the island long before humans. They were most neighborly hosts. A moose and her calf stepped aside to share the path at Lake Ritchie, a fox helped herself to plump grasshoppers springing about at our…
Norman Bendroth
January 16, 2004
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Like Jacob and Esau:The Historic Postures of the RCA and the CRC

Throughout their long history, the Reformed Church in America (RCA) and the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) have been much like those famous biblical brothers, Jacob and Esau. Born from the same Dutch Reformed mother, they have often fought as only brothers can. A look at their professions, practices, and feuds reveals two different mentalities that were present from the start and have yet to disappear. The CRC seceded from the RCA in 1857 to preserve pure doctrine…
Abram Van Engen
January 16, 2004
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POETRY by Hans Ostrom

TO WAR AGAIN To see them go to war again, Again, will clarify the choice, Which is that either nothing or A Mystery will save us from What comes when love and reason fail. And love and reason always fail. Perversity and cruelty, The will to power, greed, and hate Will overwhelm what better selves Would want to do and be, will grind The planet and devour us-- Unless a prescient Mystery Can manage us away from our Capacities, propensities--…
Hans Ostrom
January 16, 2004
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Making a Home for the Heart

For anyone who parents, works with families, wonders about the nature of the spiritual life and its connection to families, cares about learning, or teaches others in any of these areas, The Power of God at Home: Nurturing Our Children in Love and Grace comes as a welcome relief and pleasure, even inspiration. As J. Bradley Wigger makes clear from the outset, this is not another "how to" book that inadvertently instills in the reader feelings of guilt or inadequacy…
Carol Cook
January 16, 2004
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Rachel’s Children

The baby Jesus is no sooner breathing than he has to go on the lam, hounded by rankest evil, his parents stealthing the child out of Bethlehem under the cover of darkness. No sooner does the least flicker of light happen, which is all this obscure infant Jesus amounts to so far, than evil comes hunting, doing its darkest to swallow even that slight glimmer. And then, miffed at being played the fool by the three kings he thought were…
Roy M. Anker
January 1, 2004
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A Warranty for Life?

In the waiting room of my car dealership's service department, I was hoping to hear that the needed repairs would be covered by the warranty. I didn't want to hear that the transmission of my car had been damaged by something I had done or failed to do.  I didn't want to admit that I had allowed some ill-equipped fast-lube mechanic to tinker with my transmission, thus making it my responsibility to pay for the repairs.  I wanted the dealer…
Evelyn Diephouse
December 16, 2003
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Pushkin

The wind swirling trash on Kirov Street, the main thoroughfare of the district of Perchersk--an extension of Kiev--rose unhindered from the Dnieper, the river masking the smell of war, a mixture of the exhaust fumes of trucks, tanks, mobile artillery pieces, horses, wet uniforms, field kitchens, dead bodies rotting under collapsed masonry, and the smell that shook him with fear: the odor of singed hair and burned bodies. Earlier, when he reported in at the field hospital to receive his…
Lawrence Dorr
December 16, 2003