Fred Reinders (1930-2023)
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Fred Reinders (1930-2023)

Fred Reinders is a man whose work has blessed the lives of thousands of Christian Courier readers, and he did this by creating shelters for their study, work, worship and play. Philosopher Calvin Seerveld, who was born in the same year as Reinders, wrote that “God’s firm covenantal grip . . . has provided society…

New life for 120-year-old words
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New life for 120-year-old words

How did Princeton Theological Seminary’s community and wider Reformed enclaves receive Abraham Kuyper as a person and theologian during his extended sojourn in the United States in 1898? What became of Kuyper’s hope to establish Calvinism as a spiritual guide for not only Dutch, but also other nations’ public life, without establishing an official state…

Stone, paper & screens
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Stone, paper & screens

There is a labyrinth in the cathedral of Chartres in France. The centre of the labyrinth is reached by walking (or going on your knees) on a deceptively long path. Look up, and you will see a mirror copy in the great West Rose of stained glass above. The centre of the West Rose is…

Facing the brokenness
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Facing the brokenness

No one else spoke to me about my mother. Not my kindergarten teacher, not the kids in my class, not the neighbors, not people from our church. So begins this memoir, describing the confusion of Jane Griffioen as a four-year old, totally puzzled as to why her mother was taken away on a stretcher from…

Social media during Synod? Pray rather than post
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Social media during Synod? Pray rather than post

A recent article in The Atlantic was titled “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” In this article, author Jonathan Haidt uses the tower of Babel story as a metaphor for how social media has shaped the current context such that people are “disoriented, unable to speak the same language…

Redemption on the 58
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Redemption on the 58

It had been another frustrating day in the lab, and I just wanted to get home. To grab a beer, drop onto the couch and watch another few episodes of Vikings of Valhalla on Netflix. A perfect segue to the weekend. “How many times can an experiment fail, anyway,” I thought to myself as I…

Who was Herman Bavinck?
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Who was Herman Bavinck?

What follows is taken from an interview I had with James Eglinton, a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and author of a new biography about Herman Bavinck. Derek: Who was Bavinck and why the renewed interest in him? James: Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) was a Dutch Reformed theologian. In the century since his death,…

‘Look, here is water…’
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‘Look, here is water…’

“Baptism, whether by immersion or sprinkling, teaches. . . .”  I can still hear those words. They were read every time a baby was baptized in our church when I was a teen. I probably heard them over 100 times, maybe over 200 times. But never once did I see the pastor baptize those babies…

At last!
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At last!

Three months ago, I wrote of my decades-long effort to set the Psalms to verse so that they could be sung to their proper Genevan melodies. This began in the mid-1980s when I was around 30 years old. But I had already been inspired by Calvin Seerveld’s versification of Genevan Psalm 128 in the late…

Technology and the Church
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Technology and the Church

People appreciate contributions by Reformed thinkers on issues in contemporary culture, including technology. However, at a recent talk, I also heard a critique: the church does not figure very prominently in many of these Reformed writings. Digital technology is fraught with ethical, social and privacy issues, but what is the role of the church in…

Do Reformed folks know how to fight?
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Do Reformed folks know how to fight?

Maybe the answer seems immediately obvious – of course we do, we fight all the time! So much, in fact, that schism is one of our chief contributions to the broader history of the Christian church. But do we know how to fight well? I don’t mean tactically, or strategically. Instead, since I believe everything…

An Alberta journey
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An Alberta journey

Decades before the first woman was ordained in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), groups of women (and some men) with a vision for the full expression of women’s gifts were at work, opening a path toward leadership. For me and other Edmonton women, that journey began in 1983 with informal house meetings and grew into…