I get the text message in Brussels, while lying on the floor of the airport, my backpack serving as my pillow. I’m on my way to West Africa; soon I’ll board the last leg of my journey into Freetown, Sierra Leone. Aiden, my oldest son, has messaged me. It’s two in the morning back home…
We live in confused times. The Government of Canada hosts two websites standing in tension with each other. The first is titled, “Preventing suicide: Warning signs and how to help.” It lists the phone numbers of crisis centres and offers advice for helping those at risk. It then lists the websites of other agencies and…
This beautifully designed volume presents a collection of 22 sermons, delivered by Christian Reformed Church Pastor Herm Van Niejenhuis during his 37-year-career serving congregations in Lethbridge (Alberta), Kingston (Ontario), Saskatoon (Saskatchewan), Willowdale (Ontario), and Sioux Centre (Iowa). Who would dare to publish and expect to sell a collection of sermons in 2022, you might ask? The…
Deconstruction is a couple of generations old now. It was originally formulated by Jacques Derrida in the late 1960’s to express the complexity of our relationship to our cultural traditions. It meant accepting that our confident knowing had to be reassessed. Today, deconstruction is having another moment in the spotlight. Specifically, among those who inhabit…
There is a grandfather clock in my office at the college – a careful piece of craftsmanship that likely dates from the 18th century and which seems to have crossed the Atlantic from Scotland. Its face features hand-painted thistles and its case has a thin and now delicate mahogany veneer. Alas its mechanisms are seized…
No one has ever accused me of being a mystic. For one thing, I don’t dress the part. No flowing robes or beard down to the belly. Corduroy trousers and tweed jackets are my style. But even apart from sartorial evidence, my writings show few signs of flirting with mysticism. I love the carefully constructed…
The miraculous healing of a 12-year-old girl brought the French army to a standstill in 1656. The girl was Marguerite Périer. She was Blaise Pascal’s niece and a boarding student at an abbey just outside of Paris called Port-Royal-des-Champs. Marguerite was suffering from an incurable physical ailment: an eye abscess. Several doctors had examined the…
Jack and I were newlyweds when the “Charismatic Movement” swept through the church. Yes, even in small town Ontario, even in Reformed circles. I had only become a Christian a few years earlier. Eager to learn about God, I was genuinely interested in spiritual gifts. We had several friends who spoke in tongues, talked about…
The show The Good Place is one of the most remarkable things to ever appear on television. It is a show about the afterlife – and behind the all-star cast was an all-star team of PhDs who loaded the scripts with quotes and ideas from moral philosophy. In one scene, an angel named Michael muses…
This column will conclude my brief foray into an examination of the Five Points of Calvinism as articulated in the Canons of Dordt, one of the Three Forms of Unity of Reformed churches, including the Christian Reformed Church of North America (CRCNA). The fourth point of the Calvinist TULIP is Irresistible Grace. The irresistibleness of…
The word “indifference” has a bad reputation. It’s difficult, in fact, to think of any context where the word is used positively, or of any situation where someone would be happy to be described as indifferent. An exception might be in those situations where we must choose between things of little consequence. If it’s a…
As an undergraduate student in the mid 1970s I came into contact with the writings of several Christian leaders who were advocates of social justice, a concept that was new to me at the time. Accordingly, I began reading Sojourners, The Other Side, and, of course, Vanguard, which was published out of 229 College Street,…
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