For the last decade, I, like many, have tried to make sense of what’s going on across the border and have been dumbfounded by Christians gleefully signing on to MAGA. We need fresh theological insights. Happily, Lee Camp’s book Scandalous Witness, first published in 2020 during Trump One, is newly re-released and is more relevant…
How would you feel about my neighbour (true story!) who was so frustrated with mice in his cabin that he boasted about lavishly spreading poison all over his yard? How would you feel listening to this, knowing that all the local chipmunks disappeared? Jesus counseled us to love our neighbours as ourselves but never said…
“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner once said, then added, “it’s not even past.” In her debut historical novel Revolution Songs, Carissa Halton, an award-winning Alberta author, explores the Crowsnest Pass mining strike of 1932. Halton told Christian Courier that she was fascinated by the bitter labour dispute, not just because of its importance…
We are an increasingly visual culture, so it is good to learn from a long Christian tradition of showing the faith through images. Eve Tibbs, Orthodox Christian and professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, an evangelical bastion, addresses this challenge with her lovely book Seeing the Gospel: An Interpretive Guide to Orthodox Icons. Intriguingly, prestigious Calvinist…
The first church I pastored, in inner-city Chicago, just moved its worship services online because the Mexican congregants fear Sunday morning ICE raids. Signs of tough times are all around. Two recent books don’t just counsel against despair, but suggest ways to move forward while deeply rooting ourselves in our faith. Towards resistance Hannah Reichel…
Believing that all human life is sacred – all are made in God’s image and Christ died for all – I embrace “a consistent life ethic,” from womb-to-tomb. I question the death penalty, abortion, war and euthanasia while supporting adequate incomes, healthy food, good housing, accessible health care and protecting the vulnerable. The challenge is how to talk respectfully and listen with reverence to friends, loved ones and relatives, not to mention congregants, on all sides of these issues.
In the back row of my university classroom, I could not stop crying. I was in my second year, studying philosophical logic and there I was, shedding tears and more tears. A month earlier, my only sibling Margaret had died of leukemia. She was 17 and I 20. The grief felt unremitting. I did not…
When Tony Campolo died late in 2024, he was almost 90 and one of the most recognizable names in contemporary evangelicalism. He was the son of immigrant working class Italians in Philadelphia, his family having converted from Roman Catholicism to fundamentalist Baptist. Campolo was a lifelong American Baptist and a lifelong Democrat (eventually a spiritual…
At four years of age, I decided to learn how to write. I sprawled on the living room carpet, placed a blank page over a flattened Smarties box, and traced the letters. Then I ran to the kitchen, triumphantly presenting the sheet to my mother, exclaiming, “I can write!” She observed, “You copied a Smarties…
For me, reading about the Nazi Occupation of the Netherlands can bring about a visceral response. Recently, for example, I was seized with waves of terror while listening to an audiobook version of The Diary Keepers: World War II in the Netherlands, as Written by the People Who Lived Through It by Nina Siegal. In…
There were not many options on Sunday afternoons. We were not allowed to do homework. Even workaholic men like my father were not permitted to labor. There was, however, a lot of visiting. Sometimes an invitation was extended in the church parking lot. Other times my parents proposed a drive after lunch and we wandered…
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