Books

Reviews

What to Read to Keep Your Mind Open and Heart Engaged
ByJames Dekker May 11, 2020July 15, 2022

Rose and I spent some time in self-quarantine after returning from visiting Resonate missionaries in the Dominican Republic. For us privileged people this is an obligatory holiday in a comfy place – our home with a big back yard. I’m reading to our grandkids in Ottawa and Grand Rapids via Zoom. We’ve skipped through Stuart Macleans’ Stories from the Vinyl Cafe and one story from James Herriot’s The Lord God Made Them All; eight-year old Japheth zoned out of that Yorkshire tale.

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Arts & Culture | Reviews

Wolterstorff’s Wonderful Account of Living in Learning and Wonder
ByJames Dekker September 23, 2019July 15, 2022

In the first paragraph of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s preface to In This World of Wonders, he admits his long reluctance to write about himself as a legacy of his southwest Minnesota Dutch immigrant community’s ethos of self-deprecation, “…[N]ever toot your own horn,” he writes.

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Arts & Culture | Opinion

Lenses and Ladders
ByKatie Munnik April 22, 2019July 26, 2022

I spent one day last week tidying our bookshelves because they needed it. They were a jumbly, unstable mess of books and papers, everything balanced horizontally and pushed in the wrong spaces. The poetry shelf threatened to collapse. The travel books had found their far-flung ways everywhere, appropriately enough, and the novels were on the march.

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Bible | Opinion

Stories of Hope
ByBryan Clarke April 8, 2019July 26, 2022

Have you ever heard someone, after reaching an impasse in a conversation focused on politics, religion or entertainment, conclude by saying, “Well, that’s your interpretation”? With this statement, all argument is expected to end. But should it?

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Arts & Culture

Written into the Story
ByHeidi S. De Jonge February 11, 2019August 9, 2022

TOWARD THE END OF The Two Towers, by J.R.R. Tolkien, Frodo and Sam, on their way to destroy the Ring, take a rest “in a dark crevice between two great piers of rock” on the stairs of Cirith Ungol. As they rest, Sam gets to wondering: “‘I wonder what sort of tale we’ve fallen into?’”

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Creation | Reviews

A Strange and Worthy Wonder
ByJennie Stephenson February 11, 2019August 9, 2022

MOST ENCOUNTERS with insects involve the chemicals invented to repel them from our bodies and our homes. With termites, our instinctive repulsion prevents most of us from ever examining the nuances of their behaviour; instead, they squat in the subterranean pits of both reality and imagination as undistinguished globs, wholeheartedly deserving extermination.

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Opinion

To everything there is a season
ByKatie Munnik February 26, 2018August 17, 2022

Seasons circle, spiral maybe. Each year we return to the same months and the same weathers but, in returning, we notice changes.

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Arts & Culture | Theology

Literary spoils
ByBrian Bork July 10, 2017August 18, 2022

I’ve been joking with friends lately that books are the luxury benefit of being clergy.

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Reviews

Savouring Austen’s novel of (re)discovery
ByAdele Gallogly February 14, 2016February 27, 2025

Jane Austen’s Persuasion is a subtle, small-scale novel compared to her other classic works. The cast of characters is slimmer, and there are fewer humorous moments. The heroine, 27-year-old Anne Elliot, is primarily serious and introspective; she doesn’t even speak a word of dialogue until Chapter 5. Even so, Persuasion captivated me upon my first…

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