Last month, I drove under the distinctively tall evergreens of Mission, B.C., and arrived at Last Door Keystone Retreat. Nick Ringma was waiting in the driveway to introduce me to a dark-haired rescue llama with overbite and a zealous protective streak. “He thinks you’re a bear,” Ringma explained, a little apologetically. As the llama decided…
Dr. Darcy Visscher, associate professor of biology at The King’s University in Edmonton, has always loved animals; from farm creatures to large African mammals, Visscher is fascinated by animal behaviour and the role humans play in impacting it. Visscher analyzes the role of animal behaviour patterns in both rural and urban landscapes by building and…
This past Spring, I read Let Your Heartbreak be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation by Episcopal priest Adam Bucko. I considered my life and saw that my heart had been repeatedly broken. I revised the question to: What is my greatest heartbreak? It didn’t take long for the answer to emerge – my failings…
After the 1517 Reformation, the relationship between mainstream Protestant Reformers and Anabaptists was characterized by bitter hostility and systematic persecution. What began as theological disagreement escalated into violence that would define centuries of Christian division. At the conflict’s center lay a seemingly simple question: when should Christians be baptized? While reformers like Luther and Calvin…
I don’t know when I got the blank postcard or who gave it to me, but for years I’ve used it as a bookmark. The sculpture on the front is striking. Two figures, one seated, one standing, are joined at the feet and lean towards each other. Together, they hold an overflowing basin of water,…
Lukewarm, that is the charge. I have heard this as a charge that the Reformed tradition lacked passion. More recently, it has been used to advocate for clarity: take a position, don’t stay in the messy middle. Christ’s letter to the church in Laodicea includes the passage, “I know your deeds, that you are neither…
When a Christian Reformed Church (CRC) pastor prayed a prayer lifting up Indigenous ways of being, Shannon Perez recalls feeling for the first time as if “I could belong here as my full self.” At the time, Perez was a young volunteer member of the CRC’s Canadian Aboriginal Ministry Committee (now known as the Canadian…
I have dyslexia. Spelling and pronunciation are, for me, nonexistent abilities. While spell-check is a blessing, I recently gave a “mediation” rather than a “meditation” at church – spell-checking programs do not correct a wrong real word. And I must be careful when speaking not to confuse people with my pronunciation of more complicated words….
From May 22 to 24, 2024, Christians from around the world gathered at the seventh annual Christ at the Checkpoint (CATC) conference in Jesus’ hometown to learn about the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During his opening talk, Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Lutheran pastor, called for Christian unity and action. “Thank you for responding to…
In North America today there is a certain first-person narrative that frequently grabs the attention of the secular media. The typical storyline runs like this: “I was raised in a Christian home where I was taught not to question the beliefs of my church community. My parents believed in, say, a literal six-day creation, a…
“I could not, not see the image of a table set with tea in the midst of rubble. It had been in my mind for years,” explains Karen Tamminga-Paton, the Alberta artist whose art installation, Peacetalks, recently exhibited at Revelstoke Visual Arts Centre in British Columbia. Tamminga-Paton was beginning an artist’s residency in France with…
“We in the West basically boil memory down to factual recall or lack thereof,” says Dr. Megan Roberts, but that’s not what most biblical authors mean when they say “remember.” Roberts teaches the Old Testament at Prairie College in Three Hills, Alberta. When she first started her research into memory, she was struck by the…
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