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If you’re a regular at The Twelve, you’ll have already read a number of essays by now helping you understand our needs this giving season.

The short version: we’re totally volunteer, and the site takes money to keep up.

More than that, big plans are afoot to continue to revitalize The Reformed Journal online. Exciting — and we’re so grateful for your partnership: readerly and financially.

When I first got involved with this endeavor, it was in the early 2000s with the print version of Perspectives. And what I appreciated about that is what I appreciate still: that we do indeed offer a lot of different perspectives.

Every day when I get our morning e-mailer, I wonder what topic my fellow Twelvers (and our guests) will take up that day. I love the range of voice — from folks who were my students to folks who are my colleagues and old friends to folks I have only met online, even though we have written together all these years. No two days are the same.

And that’s a lovely freedom and a true mark of Reformedness: there is nothing out of bounds for us to consider. We bring our full selves to our writing: Debra’s passion for the environment, Jim’s profound sense of history, Laura’s pastoral heart, Jeff’s commitment to Buechnerian wonder, Kate’s righteous insistence upon justice, and on and on.

It’s wonderful to have a place to gather and talk about anything and everything, to explore together how the inexhaustible plentitude of God’s world gives us ever more with which to be faithful. In a world that is divided and divisive, intellectually narrow and often joyless, I hope we’re a place for something a little different.

We can’t do it without you, so please know I thank you most kindly for any support you can give us today.

Support The Reformed Journal

Your monthly financial contribution allows us to continue to express the Reformed faith theologically; to engage issues that Reformed Christians meet in personal, ecclesiastical, and societal life.

Jennifer L. Holberg

I’ve taught English at Calvin College since 1998–where I get to read books and talk about them for a living. What could be better? Along with my wonderful colleague, Jane Zwart, I am the co-director of the Calvin Center for Faith and Writing, which is the home of the Festival of Faith and Writing as well as a number of other exciting endeavors. Given my interest in teaching, I’m the founding co-editor of the Duke University Press journal Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition and Culture (and yes, I realize that that is a very long subtitle). I also do various administrative things across campus. As an Army brat, I’ve never lived anywhere as long as I’ve now lived in Grand Rapids. I count myself rich in friends and family. I enjoy kayaking and hiking. I collect cookbooks (and also like to cook), listen to all kinds of music, and watch all manner of movies and tv shows. I love George Eliot, Jane Austen, Marilynne Robinson, Dante, E.M. Delafield, Tennyson, Hopkins, and Charlotte Bronte (among others). And I have a bumper sticker on my car that says: “I’d rather be reading Flannery O’Connor.” Which is true.

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