In mid-November, James Dekker interviewed Ryan Struyk, Grand Rapids native and life-long member of the Christian Reformed Church. Calvin University named Struyk its 2021 Young Alumni Award winner. Struyk is Senior Producer for CNN’s Sunday “State of the Union.” Ryan and the show’s team won a 2023 Emmy Award for their coverage of the first…
Post-war immigrant Paul Boers built a hugely successful greenhouse construction company in the Niagara region, throughout Canada and overseas. As his son Arthur testifies to in this unsettling memoir, though, there is far more to this man’s story than business success; their father-son relationship suffered through years of painful failure. With every book Arthur Boers…
Years ago, Paul Simon sang, “These are the days of miracle and wonder.” But that song was filled with terrifying images: soldiers in the desert, a bomb in a baby carriage. That sounds more like mayhem and worry than miracle and wonder. Still, that wise secular theologian and prophet kept repeating “And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry.” Was he crazy? Was he right?
The Synod of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) will soon meet for a week in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Agenda for Synod 2023 weighs in at 629 pages, with 76 overtures plus various communications. Over 60 of them respond in some way to the decision of last year’s Synod to declare that…
How did Princeton Theological Seminary’s community and wider Reformed enclaves receive Abraham Kuyper as a person and theologian during his extended sojourn in the United States in 1898? What became of Kuyper’s hope to establish Calvinism as a spiritual guide for not only Dutch, but also other nations’ public life, without establishing an official state…
Since Synod 2016 the Christian Reformed Church has been studying, discussing and agonizing over same-sex relationships. That year, Synod created a committee which produced what is now called the Human Sexuality Report (HSR). Among other issues, the HSR recommended that homosexual activity breaks the seventh Commandment and is thus prohibited. Synod 2022 took the report…
Some years after becoming an oblate at the New Camadoli Hermitage in California’s remote Big Sur, Paula Huston embraced God’s call to research and write this compact yet far-reaching and exhaustively researched history of the hermitage. First, she discerned she could not do justice to New Camadoli unless she dug deeply into the history of…
For 70 years, Fruitland Christian Reformed Church (CRC) and its congregation in and around Fruitland, Ontario have given faithful witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ over four generations of mostly Dutch-born or -descended members. Before the church was built in 1952, the growing congregation worshiped in a local Legion Hall. Early on, the fledgling…
J. Todd Billings’ End of the Christian Life is the most profound, challenging and comforting book I’ve ever read about death and life. As well it pulled me back to my grandfather’s death decades ago. Soon after immigrating to Chicago in the early 20th century, Jacobus Cornelis Dekker changed his Dutch name to James Cornelius;…
Hamilton, Ontario poet John Terpstra is also a cabinet maker. Correspondingly, his writing hovers over themes of spirit and place. In Wild Hope Terpstra offers a sequel to In the Company of All: Prayers from Sunday Mornings at St. Cuthbert’s. There Terpstra concisely expressed that small congregation’s embodied spiritual desires, praises and hopes. With personal…
Rose and I never watched much television except for The National and Hockey Night in Canada. During Covid, Adrienne and Andrew dropped to second place; we can almost lip sync their nightly reports of Covid’s horror. Hockey Night vanished entirely. Who can watch hockey without roaring crowds? Amazon Prime Video’s Midsomer Murders supplanted all else,…
When South African documentary filmmaker Craig Foster fell into a personal Slough of Despond, he came close to drowning emotionally and mentally. Netflix’s 85-minute My Octopus Teacher records his year-long recovery with daily baptisms in the eight-degree Centigrade sea off Cape Town. There he discovered he was not alone. As baptism declares, he died to…
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