The mysterious case of Marguerite Périer
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The mysterious case of Marguerite Périer

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…

A Spirit Thing
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A Spirit Thing

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…

Holding sadness in one hand, and joy in the other
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Holding sadness in one hand, and joy in the other

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…

Grasping the rope of grace
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Grasping the rope of grace

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…

Holy indifference
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Holy indifference

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…

Remembering ron Sider
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Remembering ron Sider

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,…

Snip the TULIP
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Snip the TULIP

Rather than “Tiptoeing through the TULIP(s),” I prefer to snip the TULIP. The acronym TULIP is an oversimplification and distortion of the nuanced teaching of the Canons of Dort. Despite the impression of a venerable Dutch heritage, the acronym TULIP makes no sense in the Dutch language, which spells the famous flower as tulp. TULIP…

Paying Attention
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Paying Attention

It is sunburn weather today. A bare-feet, more-popsicles, sit-beside-the-fan kind of day. On summer days like this, we move more slowly and drink more water, paying attention to the demands of the body. Take care, self-care and air conditioning. When Angela Reitsma Bick mentioned that the theme for this August issue was The Body, the…

EVIL, Backwards
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EVIL, Backwards

There are three kinds of people in the church today: deists, dualists and devoted. In 2005, sociologists Smith and Lundquist coined the phrase “Moral Therapeutic Deism” to describe a belief of American teenagers: religion is about being “good” (culturally defined) so that one can be happy; God is a minimally involved Creator. It’s an individualistic…

The choices of God
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The choices of God

The second and third of the Five Points of Calvinism (known by the acronym of TULIP) have to do with the time God decided or knew (past tense) about what would happen (future tense). As I said in my previous column, these doctrines violate the fact that God does not exist in time, which in…

A scalpel, a word, a schism
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A scalpel, a word, a schism

One night, in the midst of the CRC’s Synod, I awoke with a word in my head. Vivisection. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this early morning revelation. Some folks dream lucidly, others sweat through nightmares. Me? Apparently I receive ten-dollar words. It might be just the peculiarity of my own gray matter…

Dialogue within the ‘bond of peace’
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Dialogue within the ‘bond of peace’

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…