Pittsburgh pilgrimage
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Pittsburgh pilgrimage

In late February I travelled for work purposes for the first time since the pandemic began three years ago. My travels took me to the Pittsburgh area where I spoke at two Christian institutions of higher education. The first was Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, where a good friend of mine, Bill Witt,…

What it means to be Dutch
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What it means to be Dutch

I am an American who happens to have a Dutch last name. That’s one of the surprising things I’ve learned while living in The Hague this year. Frankly, I had expected something quite different. I thought I would feel a lot more Dutch. What would you have expected to feel if all your ancestors, going…

Church coffee with a side of disaster
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Church coffee with a side of disaster

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…

A war with 800-year-old roots
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A war with 800-year-old roots

So here we are, a year into the Russian war on Ukraine. That seems like a long time, as we continue to hear about missile attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and apartment complexes, possible war crimes, counter-offensives, and promised Leopard tanks. But understanding where this conflict came from requires more than a year’s vantagepoint. We need…

Can’t stop being a little bit Christian
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Can’t stop being a little bit Christian

It’s no mean feat, telling the truth about history. History is politicized, covering contested terrain. It’s often told solely by the victors. It’s often grim, and sifting through the bones and ashes isn’t always the happiest endeavor. And it’s often received with a kind of snooty modern superiority. All that said, it’s important to carry…

The words that started a flood
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The words that started a flood

It was only two pages at first. A single, double-sided sheet. Paul De Koekkoek, pastor of First Christian Reformed Church (CRC) in Edmonton, wrote the articles and paid for the issues to be mimeographed and mailed to churches and interested individuals across Canada. In April 1946, De Koekkoek proposed (in Dutch) that the CRC denomination…

New graphic novel tackles the horror and heroism of WWII
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New graphic novel tackles the horror and heroism of WWII

In this fictional, historically-based graphic novel for juvenile readers, author R. J. Palacio fleshes out the background of characters she first introduced in her previous works, Wonder and Auggie & Me, especially that of Julian and his ancestors.  Julian is assigned a project to write an essay about someone he knows for his humanities class. He facetimes with…

The Traveling Letter
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The Traveling Letter

At times I’ve wondered why I’ve kept all of my correspondence my entire life. I have saved letters that I received way back in the 1940’s. Every time I move, I take the shoebox with letters along. But now I know why. There are two benefits that made it worth saving these letters. One I’ve…

Saints in the Making
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Saints in the Making

On July 26, 1942, a young Nazi nurse administered a lethal injection to a patient in the Dachau hospital. The patient was a Dutch clergyman named Titus Brandsma; he passed out of this life within 10 minutes. That moment doubtless seemed of little consequence. The clergyman had been in poor health and unrepentant of his…

All in the Family
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All in the Family

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…

A glimpse beyond what we think we know
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A glimpse beyond what we think we know

“As far as Papa knew, we canned a dozen jars of asparagus. He carefully added to his ledger and carried the preserves to the cellar. What was the harm of setting aside the thirteenth jar in the back of my wardrobe, behind the bolts of fabric leftover from Mama? I didn’t know what compelled me…

Cyprus 1974 and Ukraine 2022
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Cyprus 1974 and Ukraine 2022

The current Russo-Ukrainian war brings back difficult memories of another conflict that occurred in my youth and displaced virtually all of my paternal relatives from their homes. It was July 1974. I had just completed my first year of university at Bethel College in Minnesota where I was majoring in music. During that summer, I…