She wrote to me exasperated, looking for some clarity.* It was two weeks ago or so, and her church staff was in a panic about Sunday worship. Their area had just gone into a shelter-in-place order, and she – as…

So, March was 749 days long. I’m not sure if I’m ready for the month billed by T.S. Eliot as “the cruelest.” The picture painted by the news suggests that the month is horrifyingly likely to more than live up…

Be still, and know that I am God.   Psalm 46:10 As an ADHD sufferer, I confess that this verse has always given me the heebie jeebies. In high school, I was the girl sitting in the back row of class.…

In the moments I’m not self-righteously clucking “tsk, tsk,” at the toilet-paper-hoarding masses, I’m doing mental math estimating how long our supply might last. We’re starting to run low, the stores are empty, and I am anxious. If something doesn’t…

John 1:1-18 Every May I teach a Hope College course called Ecological Theology and Ethics. It runs for three weeks, with the middle two weeks spent in the Adirondacks of upstate New York. After a day of whitewater rafting on…

I initially had grand plans of reading and writing about two excellent new books that are out this month on Christian nationalism, but then a pandemic happened. Alas, that post will have to wait till this is all over, when…

I write from a position of privilege. I'm at my desk, typing on a computer hooked up to the internet, the lifeline for many who now work at home. I'm able to do my job, teaching students through videos and…

As I write this, my two teenagers are “zooming” their classmates and friends and working away at the assignments their teachers have given them during this period of online learning. Life has changed for us drastically in the last week…

Before my last semester of full-time college teaching was derailed by a virus, I had been teaching – for about the fortieth time – my course on American Religious Thought to a lively class of undergraduate students at Central College.…

Some years back, before we even had The Twelve yet I think, I wrote an article in Perspectives on a strangely powerful benediction that Neal Plantinga and I had been using for some years.  Now seems a particularly apt moment…