Debra Rienstra

Refugia are places where we are content to be small for a while. To wait, to be quiet, to practice simple virtues like hospitality and empathy. To build capacity on a small scale to prepare us for regrowth.

“Lumberjack songs? Seriously?” “Just listen. You’ll see.” “Fine.” We were road-tripping out to the lake, and my spouse wanted me to listen to an album of nineteenth-century Michigan folk songs about the lumber and shipping industries. I figured this is…

In the great, green world there were polar bears and Golden toads, and oceans with acid in heavy loads. There were coral reefs and bumblebees, dying creatures on land and rising seas.

Maybe that’s what this conference was: one sliver of the church of refugia.

“It’s disturbing to recognize that in the Noah story, God does the same sort of thing that the Babylonian gods do in their flood story.” That’s what she said, this bold and thoughtful student in world lit class. We had…

“Is this the end of the world?”“It usually is.” That zinger appears near the conclusion of the kooky and wonderful Post-Rapture Radio, Russell Rathbun’s 2008 novel, which inventively satirizes American Evangelicalism for its shallowness and materialism. Toward the end of…

For all you college students out there, it’s time to gird up your binders and get ready for a parade of professors thrusting their course syllabi at you. On the off chance that you will actually read these syllabi—my research…

I’ve been working this summer on a podcast based on the idea of “refugia.” I wrote about this idea here at The Reformed Journal blog last May. Thanks in part to the encouragement of my colleague Dave Koetje, Professor of…

I realize we’re planning way ahead here, but if you happen to be in charge of an Easter Vigil service next spring, you should definitely order a big beeswax candle for the occasion. Why? Because in the ancient liturgical prayer…

In honor of the official beginning of summer, I shall relate some maritime history of the Great Lakes. I knew almost nothing about maritime history until last summer, when my husband and I visited the Sleeping Bear Point Coast Guard…