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Heidi Rupke Soon after my family and I joined an Episcopal church, a bulletin announcement seeking volunteer bakers for communion bread caught my attention. The recipe is simple, with fewer steps and ingredients than some of the other breads that emerge from my oven. But as I do with any unfamiliar recipe on the first runthrough, I followed its steps methodically. Holy communion didn't seem like the right occasion for some jazzy improvisation. What priestly expression would sprightly raisins or…

Colin Hoogerwerf If you stare closely at soil for long enough, you will see that it is alive. It is filled with micro and macro invertebrates, fine roots, fungal hyphae, and decomposing material. It is structured with pores that flow with water and gas. It is rich with color and odor. This should be no surprise, for the life of the earth comes out of the soil. Soil, as we know it, makes its first appearance in Genesis 2. Before…

Debra Rienstra Obviously, even in my late forties, I still have some father issues to work out. I realized this afresh as I was reading through Daniel Pink's 2005 book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, because I kept thinking of my poor dad and how I wanted to show him the book and say, "Ha! See? I was right all along!" How immature of me, since these days it is more pointless than ever to…

James Vanden Bosch Lawrence Dorr has been writing fiction in English for more than forty years; this most recent gathering of his short stories follows three earlier collections: A Slow, Soft River (1973), The Immigrant (1976), and A Slight Momentary Affliction (1987). More than half of the fifteen stories that make up A Bearer of Divine Revelation come from the earlier collections, but their appearance here gives them new focus and new life. Taken together, these fifteen stories allow the…

Jon Pott It was another Eerdmans author, Corbin Scott Carnell, who introduced us, in our office some forty years ago, to his friend Janos Shoemyen (alias Lawrence Dorr). Corbin had published with us a luminous book on spiritual longing—Corbin related it to the German concept of Sehnsucht—in the work of C. S. Lewis, an interest that attuned him as well to the particular sensibilities and literary gifts of his friend. Corbin and Janos were colleagues at the University of Florida,…

Lawrence Dorr Jules Verne's Le Tour du Monde en 80 Jours with its solid-red cover stuck out from among the other books on the shelves of the children's library, like a sign warning of dangers ahead. The book was their French mother's choice. His sister Agnes, who was fourteen, said it was beneath her. Her Latin class was discussing Aesop's Rana Rupta et Bos. Another inappropriately placed book was Huxley's Brave New World in German translation. It belonged to Fraulein…

Thom Fiet A woman stared at her portrait, still shimmering new from the hand of the master, Pablo Picasso. Before her, imprisoned in the frame, a tangle of broken shapes—a triangle representing her head, rectangles for extremities, an oval for a torso. A shock of tormented tassel of hair. A single dot representing what she thought to be her ample bosom (or was the dot her eye?). Horrified, she shouted, "This doesn't look at all like me, not at all!"…

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2013: POETRY by Marci Rae Johnson —for Thom Caraway When you came up out of your office into the customary light you heard it. In the gap between the two buildings you heard it bounce one to the other. You on one side with your red ball cap the priest on the other wearing purple the veil of light cloud 57 degrees and high humidity. You heard it and the air lifted just a slender wing flap of skin…

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2013: POETRY by David Cho These are the days stretched long. The weeks when darkness sets, then the rain, the falling leaves, frost, the early morning light. These are the days when light breaks, holding the night, and turning leaves red. These are the long days, the ladybugs making their final turn, flurry of red wings, scissoring in procession upwards. Let not a young child bottle their journey; let their migration up trees, up wind be longer. Let not…