Isn't everything connected? Aren't there laws of cause and effect? If we don't live in a causal world, why do we bother to teach and be taught, to influence and be influenced, persuade and be persuaded? While trying not to shock youngsters, we do our best to get them to understand that it is not a good idea to put paper clips into electrical outlets. If everything is isolated, unrelated behavior, then all community efforts to the contrary are futile.…

Every few days in the summer, I walk into our backyard, which currently opens up toward a couple dozen acres of soybeans--not the most inviting crop, I know, but I am not the farmer. I gather a few fallen branches, some dried out leaves from the past fall, and a scrap piece of paper or two from our recycling bin. Loosely piling them within a small collection of rocks that our daughter helped me gather in the overturned field last…

The summer of 2010 witnessed a significant event in the history of the worldwide Reformed family of churches: the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) and the Reformed Ecumenical Council (REC) organized a Uniting General Council (UGC) to join them together in the World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC). This new fellowship of Reformed, Presbyterian, Congregational, Waldensian, United, and Uniting churches was the outcome of a process that began for WARC in Accra, Ghana in 2004 and for REC in…

Question 52. What comfort is it to thee that "Christ shall come again to judge the quick and the dead"? Answer: That in all my sorrows and persecutions, with uplifted head, I look for the selfsame One, who has before offered Himself for me to the judgment of God and removed from me all curse, to come again as Judge from heaven; who shall cast all His and my enemies into everlasting condemnation, but shall take me, with all His…

If you should pick up Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind, I suggest that you begin at the end. This is not simply because Robinson writes wonderfully provocative closing lines, although she does. Every time I read the final sentence of her introduction to the Vintage edition of Calvin's selected works, I'm tempted to applaud: "Behind the aesthetics and the metaphysics of classical American literature, again and again we find the Calvinist soul, universal in its singularity, and full of Calvinist…

James K.A. Smith forays into the now-popular epistolary genre with the compact and accessible Letters to a Young Calvinist. It is timely, as Smith notes in the introduction, since as we celebrate the 500th anniversary of Calvin's birth, a "new Calvinism" has gained popularity among evangelicals. Smith identifies in some ways with these new Calvinists and their zeal, but he also seeks to put this new movement in conversation with the larger Calvinist historical-theological framework and worldview. Letters to a…

More than a year ago already, my uncle Rodney died of cancer. He never had a family of his own, living with his parents until he died--which is probably why he would call me like clockwork every two weeks. The phone would ring in my office. I would check the number, notice the area code and brace myself for the voice on the other end. "Hello?" I would say, knowing full well who was calling. "What the h*ll's going on?…