I don’t have a career. Most of my jobs have included me having to run the checkout, and sweeping and mopping the floor at the end of the night. My husband doesn’t have a college education or a career. He’s what is referred to as a cement dweller. He goes to a factory and spends his days standing on a cement floor bending and twisting metal all day. We don’t own a large house—up until a year earlier, we were living in a basement.
My father served in the US Army during the Second World War and spent a good portion of his time in the desert area of North Africa. As a boy, growing up during the early 1950s, I learned about war and soldiering much the same way every other American boy did: by watching John Wayne and Audie Murphy movies in the theaters and on television. My father rarely, if ever, talked about his experiences as a soldier. He had a…
Movies have long occupied contested terrain in religious circles. A Christian writer in the 1930s described Hollywood as the “place where Satan has his throne.” In their desire to spread the gospel, evangelicals became leaders in the development of all the major media–except motion pictures. Matthew Crouch, producer of the evangelical sci-fi film, The Omega Code, said, “My dad was sincerely told by his mother, ‘If you go into the theater and see Roy Rogers and Dale Evans ride their…
What is competition? We talk about healthy competition, ensuring competition, and being a competitive person, all of which have positive connotations. Americans, in general, see it as a good thing, or, if not good, at least natural . . . like a self-regulating free-market or an undisturbed ecosystem in balance. For this reason it’s not surprising that in defining the word competition, the Webster dictionary uses both business and organic competition as its secondary examples. The primary definition however is…
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…
During the great missionary era of the nineteenth century, many servants of God from different denominations went over land and seas to far off places carrying with them the greatest gift they could ever offer to people whom they had never known or seen before, namely, the redeeming and liberating Good News of Jesus Christ. His gospel of the grace and the love of God is found to be so revolutionary and subversive that recently it was reported in the…
Clover Hill Reformed Church (Hillsborough, NJ) The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. John 1:5 It stands as it always has, constant even in the wake of December’s celebrations. Along the Old Amwell Road, a white clapboard sentinel whose vigil spans three centuries. Circa 1834. Built in a wave of revival that swept the East then rose up in a hundred wooden steeples, its church spire rises still, visible by day on all approaches…
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…
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…
