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Essays

Though There Are No Grapes

In late April two years ago, I changed the tires on my van, installing the summer tires once again – not such a memorable event and one that I had done also exactly six months earlier. On October 31, 2015, my wife and I had just put on the winter tires and, in all aspects, it was a typical fall day. The two of us were at home with our younger son, getting our property ready for winter. She had…
December 30, 2017
As We See It

How Karl Barth Almost Ruined a Perfectly Good Sunrise

I am in the Black Hills of South Dakota, alone and in the dark, waiting for the sunrise. In the twilight before the bright ball of the sun peeks over the horizon, scattered cloud formations already announce its arrival, and I realize how clouds ought to get more credit for their part in this morning spectacle. Deep, warm colors gradually cool and brighten as the sun climbs and appears over a distant hill. But even as the sun arrives, the…
December 30, 2017
Essays

Choosing between Culture-Making and Soul-Saving

We stepped out of the car into the grassy, gravel courtyard of the evangelical Ethiopian church. We were very late for worship; today was the feast of St. Gabriel, and we had been stuck in traffic as hundreds of Ethiopian Orthodox churchgoers walked past our stranded car, streaming by in their traditional white robes. That was them, this was us: We were evangelicals, and we were going to an evangelical church, a distinction of great importance, we were told. We finally arrived…
December 30, 2017
Poetry

To Martin, on His Wife, the Original “Opt-Out”

Soren Kierkegaard once said Martin Luther might as well have married a “wooden plank” Katherine, Kette, hidden in herring barrels, driven into town to hunt a husband, of all the renegade nuns, so young, eyes roving from the cloister, she refused to be “placed,” so you wed her. Doctor Hammer-in-Hand, you were never a “sexless log,” six children and a hoard of orphans clustered in the Black Cloister homestead. Nowadays, Katie’d be a keeper – queen of sustainable living, herbal…
December 30, 2017
Poetry

I Come

Charlotte Elliot No one wants to come just as they are to the Lord. Only children, who go just as they are to anything – rumpled hair at the wedding, shoes on the wrong feet at Grandma’s. Too young to have learned better, to carry a disapproving sneer to their closets and mirrors. We come to the altar with bloodied knees and hands, we come to the Lord praying “Just as I am” And maybe, yes, it is possible to…
December 30, 2017
Essays

Faithful Betrayal

As a professor at Northwestern College, I don’t find it uncommon for my students to raise questions or share perspectives that motivate me to rethink my own views. The rethinking I have in mind right now was sparked by a conversation with a student shortly after her graduation. She had enrolled in seminary and just finished the required reading of Peter Rollins’ text The Fidelity of Betrayal. She loved the book and encourage me to read it, suggesting I would…
December 30, 2017
Reviews

Sport at the Deep End

Well Played: A Christian theology of sport and the ethics of doping WELL PLAYED: A CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY OF SPORT AND THE ETHICS OF DOPING MICHAEL SHAFER PICKWICK PUBLICATIONS, 2015 $25.60 (PAPERBACK) 244 PAGES Although authors have since biblical times alluded to sport while writing about Christian faith, scholarly treatises on this relationship have arisen mostly in the past 40 years. Theologians Jurgen Moltmann (Theology of Play, 1972) and Robert Johnston (The Christian at Play, 1983), for instance, wrote about the…
December 30, 2017
Essays

Your Worst Life Now: Learning How to Die

Humans have an aversion to death, and rightfully so. Death is not our friend; it is the enemy. Unfortunately, death is also a familiar enemy, visiting every person sooner than later. Physically and biologically, we begin to decay relatively early in life. While 21st-century drugs and technology prolong life, the fight against death is ultimately a losing battle. This is not to suggest that death is something to which we must passively resign ourselves. Life is to be treasured. Thus,…
October 31, 2017
Essays

Judgment Day/Justice Day

I suppose everyone has a guilty pleasure. Mine happens to be 80s action flicks. Recently, on one of those rare evenings that occur roughly quarterly, when the house was still and the laundry caught up, I screened Terminator: Genisys. Though not technically an 80s film, I reasoned, as an attempted reboot of the venerable franchise, it fit the bill. Spoiler alert: it’s not a good film. But it does present a pretty compelling theological trojan. The narrative crux of the…
October 31, 2017