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“Candide” and the Car Wash
I suppose many attitudes surround people’s work. I can truly say that I enjoyed almost all the jobs I had. Even “humping” freight on the

Meeting Big Brother at the ICE Office
Not long ago, I was part of a group from our church that accompanied Javier to the local office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

A Father’s Library, a Professor’s Virtue, and Sanctification
I was raised with a freedom to ask questions about my faith. I didn’t have the sort of fundamentalist baggage that I now discover many

The Difference Between a Time and a Season
While I grieved for the broken relationship between church and pastor, I was also excited about this opportunity for myself. After the initial three weeks

This Wasn’t Supposed to Happen
I remember vividly the day my death-denying illusions were shattered—it happened when I was a senior in high school. A friend had driven home from

Wonder and World-Mending: The Relevance of Denise Levertov to Our Present Darkness
“O Taste and See” was written two decades before Levertov would explicitly identify as a Christian, yet she already intuited that focusing on this world

Learning How to Lament From Jesus
Still, when I compare Old and New Testament lamenting, I can’t shake the sense that the coming of Jesus changed the role of lament for

The Case for “Messed Up” Stories
There was a time in my career when the father of one of my students (in a different decade and a different state) requested a

Your Leap of Change
All of us spend much of our lives constructing the protection we think we need to survive and thrive. These layers of defense work well

Fact Checking the Reformed Journal
But Jeff wasn’t asking for a dissertation-level, academic deep dive on any of these claims. He was just curious about the general consensus out there

For Those Who Fret About It
For much of my pastoral life, I’ve conversed in living rooms, at park benches, and in bars and cafés with people wondering about Christian faith,

How Reading Calvin’s Institutes Made Sense of a Glioblastoma
Calvin probably wouldn’t agree with my assessment of the evil tumor. For Calvin, the providence of God both sent the tumor and provided the surgeon,