Caitlin’s Osceola doesn’t look particularly Native: his nose is too long and thin, as is his face. Sitting Bull, in most portraits, looks like a

By today’s standards, there was good reason to believe it wasn’t starry-eyed love that brought them together or kept them blessedly close. There is no

One chief wanted to go home to where his ancestors were buried and was willing to die to make it happen. The other didn’t want

That mean streak, as Manfred himself knew, is never quite as proud as when it can hang on some doctrinal principle that legitimizes its existence.

Editor’s Note: Jim Schaap, long a fixture here on the Reformed Journal blog, has been absent recently. First, a cataclysmic flood last June, followed by

Listen to a Christmas story podcast, written and read by James C. Schaap. The youngest shepherd must stay with the sheep as the others go

Listen to a Christmas story podcast, written and read by James C. Schaap. A recently widowed grandmother visits her daughter’s family for the holidays.

Listen to a Christmas story podcast, written and read by James C. Schaap. An arrogant artist agrees to narrate the church’s Christmas program.

A Christmas story podcast, written and read by James C. Schaap.

One of our flood pictures features a little section of our backyard garden where a whole mess of detritus floated around until some stiff current

All this tabloid talk brings us up to our necks in sleaze, but I don’t think Mr. Pecker should get the last word..  Once upon

William Jennings Bryan knew how to deliver a speech, a talent he picked it up as a kid and ran with, the youngest man ever

You’ve heard, of course, the oddities, like the dictionary and the Bible, but what made the news this week was that Pen America, who tallies

Just about ten years ago, St. Louis University, a private Jesuit institution, moved a statue featuring one of its own founders, Father Pierre-Jean De Smet,

Just so happened to sit on a folding chair set up directly beneath the basket on the north end of the court last week at

In a sunny sky especially, the huge sandstone cutbanks along the Missouri can be perfectly stunning. To stumble on them after endless hours of treeless

Seems to me you have to cut LBJ some slack here. The man didn’t ask to be President. Didn’t run for it. Came into it

For years I’ve been told by friends I trust that I needed to read An Interrupted Life, by Etty Hillesum, who was Dutch and Jewish, a grown-up

Exactly 136 years ago today, a monster arose on the northern plains just as country school kids were about to be dismissed. The Initial brute

The State of Minnesota wants a half-section of land in Murray County to become once again what it was 200 years ago, when only Dakota

There was a lull. No one would have said the sudden silence was anywhere near the peace-on-earth promise of Christmas, and while it would have

The church was packed. Mom would have liked that. And all five “first ladies” were in attendance–she would have liked that too. She would have

Before we get started, let’s clear the air: people in the know on such things claim the only liar more gifted in deceit than James

I’m working away on something, when Alexa offers me “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” ancient Americana penned by Stephen Foster, no

There ought to be a turnout. There ought to be a sign a mile back–you know, “Scenic Overlook” or something akin to warn drivers on

How long ago? It was back in the days of the dropkick, a move designed to surprise the defense and turn what might have looked

I don’t know where Dad got his hair cut regularly, but I remember that a trip to Cedar Grove, just down the pike, was rare,

If my sense of the past is anywhere close to accurate, I’d guess John A. Vogel was a silent type who, on the rare occasion

I didn’t see the Twin Towers go down on 9/11. Let me take that back—because I was in class, I didn’t see the collapse, not

It’s that season again when, out back whacking weeds, I’m accosted by Sunday School melodies that seep into my consciousness from some obscure memory tank

Just exactly why the Fool Soldiers decided to rescue the hostages White Lodge and his band had captured–and abused–is a question no one will ever

For someone like myself, not to bring up the CRC Synod, which begins today, is quite frankly impossible. Pardon the me-ness of what’s here, but

David Brooks’ gracious tribute to Tim Keller in Tuesday’s New York Times is the kind of lament that manages somehow to bring light into and through the palpable

I’d like to believe it was the music that did it. What was going around him, what spread like a prairie fire, must have tested

If you’re following the Trail, when you get to the river, hold on to that GPS because while finding the First Council Monument doesn’t require

The town is growing, developments sprouting here and there, as what was once a sleepy village becomes more and more suburban Chattanooga. Traffic flows eagerly

What do I remember? The place was close enough to Vicksburg to visit the battlefield, which was primarily a siege of that Mississippi citadel Gen.

There’s much about it that’s mythical, that takes the music way beyond its own unique syncopation and opening guitar riffs into something so big that

There may come a time when someone’s great-grandma discovers a dusty old day book some long-ago ancestor left behind, a broken mess of scribbled-in remnants

Come January, what you’ve got to work with here is a snowy quilt, occasional azure up above, dusky grasses the color of buffalo calves, and

We were in Spakenburg, the Netherlands, the whole Schaap family, because I wanted to see what that world looked like–I had to see it to

‘Twas in the moon of winter-timeWhen all the birds had fled, That mighty Gitchi ManitouSent angel choirs instead;Before their light the stars grew dim,And wandering hunters

“You ought to see it–it’s right there on your way home. Just turn right, into Dakota City. Watch for the signs.” That I didn’t know

You really can’t miss that scary cover, but let me help you with the small print. On the first day, the program offers great music

Three things about my grandparents’ grave you may miss unless I point them out. The first is my bottom half, in white shorts, so telling

There were littler ones, babies even, hard as that is to consider. It looks to me as if the lineup in this proud old photo

In her illustrious family, Rosalie couldn’t help but feel crowded out. I mean, her siblings were a “who’s who” of life among the Omaha in

Couldn’t be more different, I suppose. In Rome’s famous Borgese Galleries’ Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s David is an immensely commanding presence that isn’t just to look at.

I am not a theologian on this blog, or a pastor. I have no authority to say this, but I think there’s a spiritual virtue

Right now, our big bluestem are heavy with seeds, the patch closest to my window sky high, seven feet, I’m sure. We planted them years

At 96 years old, Frederick Buechner left this vale of tears and passed, as my Native friends might say, into the spirit world.  I should

That Alice Kirk Grierson loved her husband is clear from the letters she sent him, full of devotion that wasn’t simply practiced or platonic. For

That she might marry seemed so unlikely that the possibility never even arose. Her physical condition–she’s a quad, has been since birth–put marriage somehow out

“You’re going to be someone’s ancestor–act accordingly.”  A big guy–I didn’t catch his name, but I’m sure he’s someone with standing–held forth at the Hollywood

You simply had to know. Most of those who traveled the two-lane highways I did across the state last weekend did know, I’m sure, and

He was just eleven years old. He was at the post office on a Saturday, a place where, back then, the news was told every

It’s not that Patton was a good man–that’s not why his troops loved him. He wasn’t. It’s not that he was even all that successful.

Susan La Flesche Picotte simply could not have dreamed of a hospital as a child. She wouldn’t have known what a hospital was. Her father was a

I’m quite sure I didn’t leave them an option. I sent them off on a Saturday afternoon for a performance of Purpaleanie, a stage play put

I don’t want to be disagreeable. I may be feeling this way, as if I’m on track toward irascibility, given that I just passed a

It was never an easy thing to do. . .heroic?—yes, but never particularly easy. Even though they had no idea where it was they were

The copy on most of the exhibits was written in Dutch, so we missed out on a lot. I didn’t complain–then or now, thirty years

For some time now, I’ve admired the life of a 19th century missionary, Sheldon Jackson, whose name I found on a monument up top of

“Let’s have a conversation,” or so my neighbor Brian Keepers suggested wisely on Monday. “Do you see patience as a virtue or a privilege?” It’s

There was a celebration of some sort in the gym that day. I don’t know why or what was being celebrated anymore, but the place

We watched him shave–at least I did. I mean, I didn’t stand there gawking like some silly ten-year-old idiot, but when he was up beside

Okay, this little story feels for all the world like urban myth, but some stories just beg to be told whether or not they happened,

Men, women, and children huddled in covered wagons crossing endless prairie seem to beckon all by themselves some hovering, mounted Native war parties up on

Nobody gets paid. Let’s get that out of the way. A goodly number of us do commendable and even exhausting work on this now ten-year-old

I don’t mean this to sound like a “dance macabre,” an old late-medieval allegory of death. I swear it wasn’t. Don’t think of that Saturday

If you’re a prairie kind of person, some ordinary flat-lander, and if you consider Iowa’s rolling landscape as the very definition of normal, then you can’t

Part of the shock that first morning at a rural medical clinic in Ghana grew from my innocence and perhaps my substantial prejudices, the hefty

Her apparel suggested a sect I didn’t recognize. Her husband wore a great bushy beard. He appeared to be a man not afraid of work—farming

Out here on the eastern emerald cusp of the Great Plains, on some balmy early fall days it’s not hard to believe that we are

A few scrappy, three-foot cuttings, no bigger than buggy whips, are coming up from the front yards of a half-dozen houses that, together, may someday

And this, you have to believe, was one of the grandest moments of her life, the day that Dutch royalty–King and Queen–visited Michigan and called

It might be fanciful. No one who was there was alive when the book was written, but let’s just assume the writer did her homework

Odd-looking thing, really. Its keyboard makes it a piano or organ of some sort, but it comes packaged in what looks like a suitcase far

It doesn’t bug me. The truth is, I love it, but it does scare me a bit: my granddaughter is becoming something and someone more

Once upon a time, he shot at surfacing German subs in the North Atlantic, tried to pick off the crews who were aiming anti-aircraft flak

It’s a bit of an embarrassment really, or so I discovered. I’d never heard of the monument until it showed up on a local on-line

The whole thing’s a stretch, but what the heck–I’m lovin’ it.  Sheriff Pat Garrett plugged Billy the Kid, a notorious gunslinger, after hunting him down

Perhaps it was more typical than not–that night, I mean. The guy worked a high-crime district, West Palm Beach, where being a cop meant hot

If you look closely, you can tell it’s not the Great Plains. That big tree is too perfect; prairie trees get mauled regularly by incessant

There isn’t much we know about Aunt Gertie’s death. It happened on a foggy night in November, 1949, along a lakeshore cloaked in a mist

“What places do I really have to see when I’m here?” I asked the woman behind the desk at the Osage visitor’s center. “You must see

If the place sounds cliche-ish, you can’t blame Garretson, SD, because doggone it, not every Siouxland burg has a tourist trap built in. Seriously, Garretson’s

On my mother’s side, my Dutch-American ancestry has been here since before the American Civil War. My people were among the first immigrants from the

“When you get to the Visitor’s Center, look for the blue dress–it belonged to Judy’s grandma,” she told me. “Judy” is her friend. I’d just

Maybe it was the little chapel she’d insisted on showing me, a place she thought any visit to the Northern Cheyenne mission wouldn’t be complete

It’s not a new story. I wrote it more than a decade ago, so it may well show its age. But I thought I’d try

Once you find the road in—the place is very much out of the way–the signs tell the story. I’ve visited twice, often enough to guess

Got it this morning. Had no idea mature human beings could or would hunt hogs from helicopters, but this Texas outfit thought I might just

It’s all so understandable. From the vantage point of 75-plus years, the war seems ancient history. Besides, so many of those who fought had no

“Some of them just got too big for their britches.” People said that occasionally, that some farmers who went down during the Farm Crisis of the

You’ll drive a long way to find a sandy beach on Minnesota’s north shore. That humpy stuff roiling beneath your feet looks and feels like

Truth be told, there weren’t all that many people around. I was a little disappointed in the size of the crowd–three or four dozen, most

A couple of weeks ago, out west on the Oregon Trail, I couldn’t help being astounded by both the clockwork and the sheer number of

“It was a test,” he told me, after pulling me aside. “It’s a story I thought you’d like, a story I wanted to tell you.”

Found it. I just hadn’t read the small print. I had turned right off the gravel road and headed to the scruffy Cather Township cemetery

We were blessed to get into the place. The blasted Covid stuff is closing everything these days, and with good reason. But our permission to

It was, I’d like to believe, at least something like this rendition–big choir, lots of folks on stage. I was a boy–kindergarten, first grade or

He was a colleague, my boss, my editor and, for a long, long time, our neighbor and good, good friend. From just across the street,

The land out back is vacant, all flood plain.  Nobody will build behind us, so we’ve got an acre of grass, native flowers, and Russian

[Two weeks ago, in a comment, David Stravers asked about men and women of conviction in America’s western saga. I responded with a few names

In his statement, [Tribal] Chairman Frazier cites the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty that says “no white person or persons shall be permitted to settle upon

I didn’t know her well, just enough to tip my hat maybe, if I’d ever worn one. Probably said “hi” is all. She lived on

When Sven Johnson, his wife and two children, left their native Norway, they spent the next eight weeks crossing the choleric Atlantic in a sailboat.

My granddaughter was, back then, just a little girl, third grade maybe, but one Sunday morning, I remember, she was already starting to wax nostalgic.

Years ago, when I was revising a novel, Romey’s Place, I didn’t know how it should end. What I knew when I’d started the major revision

Someday, I’m going to put this one on canvas. I know–it’s no stunner, but I loved the image before I saw it through the screen

It’s still there. Maybe. I haven’t been out there for some time now, but as long as that abandoned place is circled by a substantial

Don’t know whether he actually carried the Good Book through the west in those early years. The story goes he took carried a copy of

In another day and another time, the buildings crowded on the block made all kinds of sense. The school’s own precious history makes clear that

He wasn’t exactly a kid. There were kids galore on both sides–18-year-olds just out of high school and scores of 17-year-olds who quit school years

The first one was twelve feet wide, still quite a production because Jesus, Mary, and the babe were mud-sculptured, then baked, then painstakingly painted. Back

It was my idea to bring in an expert. For a couple of years in the 90s, I was chair of a board that ran

What do we know about her? She was just a kid really, no more than two years old, but she was cutting edge, a propeller-driven

It’s purple. Well these days, some twenty hot years of Dakota sun later, St. Charles Church looks a bit pink; but originally it was purple.

One of the cement plates standing in the park holds an image of the house she lived in here in Earlville, a little white house

Religious visions were everywhere in the years preceding the Civil War. Boom towns out west here may have been hell holes for a time, but

Out in the middle of nowhere, the old white frame building is all that remains of a heart-felt dream that, as an answer to prayer,

It’s not a particularly good picture, but it’ll have to do. That’s our house up at the top, maybe fifty yards or so away from

I don’t know how exactly–or who–told me I had to read Beloved. I do remember having a single copy of three Toni Morrison novels–one of them

Hattie says that just before her mother got married, she’d left the farm to start working in a grocery in Springfield, SD, where some young

Let me tell you a story: Fifteen years ago, I was in line at a grocery store, behind two Hispanic men checking out. The clerk—a

Could be an early 20th century shot from a lot of places on the map. There’s a hill up the street, but the place looks

After just about forty years of teaching students from all over the continent, I came to believe, grudgingly, that no geographic group adored their “homeland”

I didn’t know him–couldn’t have. He was killed four years before I was born. For years I wouldn’t have known his story any more fully

Last night I couldn’t help thinking of an old story told to me long, long ago by an organist–the organist, the very one who’d been asked

Job’s friends had his health in mind, but none of them, nor their arguments, could satisfy the emptiness in his soul. He’d lost everything, his

The only means of getting man and woman, beast and wagon across the rain-swollen Niobrara River was by rope, hand over hand. Dozens of oxen

Your great-grandpa wasn’t sure where he was Sunday, but, as you know, that’s not unusual. For some reason, he was expecting a trip to the

“Why are they called Canada geese?” our third-grade grandson asked us last week. It seems no one really knows; after all, they show up in

We visited Stratford-upon-Avon, of course, toured Shakespeare’s house and watched the Royal Shakespeare Company perform Julius Caesar in the Royal Shakespearean Theater. I vaguely remember the grave

Some heartfelt sympathy is in order for St. Boniface. After all, he lost his head to the Frisians when he decided to go back to

By the time American troops got to Europe in 1917, African-Americans had an established, but not celebrated history in military service of our country. In

“Sunday, October 15, we went to church. The wind was then blowing wildly, but this became worse further along in the day. When we got

A January thaw is what all of us look forward to out here, a breath of warmth that reopens our hope that someday soon April

I snapped this shot at the Somalia exhibit at St. Paul’s Minnesota History Center. I wanted a picture of the plow, that wooden contraption in

The story goes that Michelangelo used to come by St. Peter’s Basilica at night to stand there before his sculpture, not because he was so

Apparently, millions of evangelicals believe the Christian faith is greatly imperiled in America, more than it has ever, ever been. I don’t share their fears,

1981. Maybe 82. Right there somewhere before word processing shoved typewriters out the window and into obsolescence. Back then, I had a Sherman tank that

  A Mormon monument stands out there in the middle of nowhere. You have to hunt to find it, search hard simply to get up

  The monument to the doge Giovanni Pesaro, in this church, is a curiosity in the way of mortuary adornment. It is eighty feet high

The church where I grew up had no altar, no altar boys, and no priests. It had no wall-size oil painting of Jesus, and certainly

Just a week or so ago, the LDS church told its millions that they should cease and desist from calling each other “Mormons.” Maybe, as

  A full rack of ribs, with beans and slaw, will cost you twenty bucks at Buffalo Chip Saloon and Bar, Cave Creek, AZ. Sounds

Some years ago now, I walked through the valley of the shadow of death when I sat for several days at the bedside of my

It’s an odd title, Mystery Having Eight Mothers, and she didn’t have an editor. You can’t help but smile at an occasional misspelling, and often there’s little

He’s the Queen’s scribe, the man–the artist–responsible for creating England’s most important state documents. He’s the royal calligrapher, an artist, a past chair of the

School was less than a block away when I was a kid, so I walked, every day, sometimes out the front door, sometimes the back.

It may well have been one of the best marketing ploys I’d ever come up with–get former Iowa Governor Robert Ray to come out west

You’ve probably never heard of Herman the German and likely never stopped to greet him in New Ulm, Minnesota. Then again, you could have driven

This summer, see if you can find your way to the Trail. You’ll have to hunt to find it, but here and there along the

When Julia Ward Howe sat down to refashion a much beloved Union battle hymn the troops called “John Brown’s Body,” she created new lyrics and

There’s something vintage Old Testament about the story, something decidedly like myth. But it happened; and just a bit north of Topeka, atop a hill

A century ago this month, my great-uncle came down with pneumonia. He was on his way to France to fight the Huns, WWI, the “Great

Fifty years after it went out of style, he still wore his hair–great hair, by the way–in a duck tail. Had he let it grow

The night Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, four of us—small-town, small-college, white boys—were following the Gulf’s eastern shore on an all-night trek from south

Not long ago, Sherman Alexie, among the most prominent Native American writers in America, lost his mother. He’d lost his father years before, but it

The first matter of business when white folks came to the region was roughing out claims so they knew where each of the others was

Mildred Armstrong Kadish, in Little Heathens, her darling memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the Depression, claims that her family had only two

When James Fenimore Cooper complained about the novel he was reading, his wife told him to put up or shut up, to just go ahead

[It was not my intent to use this poem today, but Matthew’s comments yesterday offered an opening. Jelle Pelmulder, Sioux County’s (IA) first school master, wrote

  I wasn’t born and reared here. My home–I’m not sure how anyone finally defines that word–is really the western shore of Lake Michigan, where sunrise

Coventry, England, a city of 250,00 in the West Midlands, boasted significant industrial power when the Europe went to war in 1940, industries Hitler wouldn’t

If I heard it once, I heard the story a dozen times. It was all about the gendered shape of conversation. Went like this. One

That the hide painting is mislabeled is no one’s fault, really. Somewhere along the line of ownership it was likely a slip of the tongue

by James Schaap People who knew him claim that the late great President of Dordt College, Dr. John B. Hulst, a very proper man who

Johnnie, get your gun Get your gun, get your gun Take it on the run On the run, on the run Hear them calling, you

You’ve got to be my age or older, and you have to have been born in a small town to know what I’m talking about,

You think I’m exaggerating when I say that from up there on the hill, you can watch your dog run away for three days, but

Just exactly how many wives he had—or has, since he’s only out of circulation, not breath—isn’t clear. Estimations go beyond what you can count on

I worked there for only three summers. I’m sure there was summer help, like me, who worked there longer, so I probably can’t claim a

To me, the word Tabaski sounded more like a seasoning than a holiday weekend—but Tabaski, Festival of the Sacrifice, is an age-old Muslim gala of

His foundation is in the holy mountains.       The LORD loves the gates of Zion More than all the other dwelling places of Jacob.    

The news from Salt Lake City is not particularly comforting if you’re Mormon. One of the mighty has fallen, a saint from the inmost circle

I’m not sure why, but I think a killdeer is by nature given to excessive worrying. Ever hear ’em? But then, I suppose they have

“It is best that we do not behold our spiritual beauty.” Rev. D. R. Drukker, The Beauty of the Lord. Eerdmans, 1927. Okay, at least

The word lobotomy strikes terror in the heart of most of us today, despite the fact that the procedure was once the darling of mental health professionals–and

I wasn’t surprised to read what was there on the cemetery stone because I had known some time ago that Joseph Four Bears was a

In the cold of January, fifty-plus years ago, I sat in a car full of guys, my cased-up 16-gauge double-barrel in my hands, heading out

We visited Stratford-upon-Avon, of course, toured Shakespeare’s house and watched the Royal Shakespeare Company perform Julius Caesar in the Royal Shakespearean Theater. I vaguely remember

Two Tai Dam men, both of whom immigrated to this country as refugees after the Vietnam War, are grocery shopping. Seriously—this happened. Both of them

She’d asked me to drop by her class because the topic seemed like something I’d have some thoughts about. That’s what she told me in

During my college years, the highest I ever rose on my summer job was about five feet off the ground aboard an army surplus caterpillar.

It was a very old church, although not as ancient as many throughout the Netherlands. And it was right on the street, middle of town,

Metaphors and other descriptors, like men’s ties and women’s scarves, move in and out of style. No respectable preacher can say much about the church

It’s much bigger than you might imagine, but then it had to be. Once upon a time, it was home to as many as 10,000

I’m thinking that you have to be of a certain age, a certain vintage, to use a word like ungodly with any seriousness. There’s open

From her chair in the living room, she knew something was wrong because the sound she was hearing just wasn’t right, as if the door

A January thaw is what all of us out here look forward to right now, a breath of warmth that reopens our hope that someday

A Yankee looks upon a horse or any animal simply as a machine out of which to get as much profit as possible at the

Some psychologists want to drop the last initial in PTSD. They claim that to call PTSD a “disorder” makes the condition appear unusual. It isn’t.

What’s altogether possible is that it’s not a great novel. What makes me believe I can write a novel good enough to be published these

I suppose “9/11” has already edged out “11/11” among our memorable national numerical icons, but I’m forever imprinted with the latter too. In me at

Last night, late, I crossed “the black snake” three times on my way home from Rock Valley. Things have changed in the last few weeks.

There’s so much to this story that’s old news, so much that’s so awful yet so obscenely ordinary, that what happened is almost predictable. To

The intent of the confab, according to news sources, was love, to bring together hungry Christian conservatives with rowdy Donald Trump, who doesn’t talk a

Not far away, just across the road and the tracks and around the bend of the river a bit northeast of here, there’s a spot

Chickamauga was a very costly Confederate victory. The total of 16,000 Union casualties was second only to the Battle of Gettysburg that summer, but the

Years ago, I listened to Phillip Yancey reading from a new book of his, a book titled What’s So Amazing about Grace? A couple dozen

For a decade at least, we’ve spent hours and days and years and ages, or so it seems, at old folks homes, places that it

There was a girl, I remember, but I don’t remember her. There was a girl, someone I’d met just that day–someone we’d met because I

I’m told the male kestrel is grayish blue, even orange-looking, which means the determined hunter who entertained our whole family so royally during a wonderful

Like most every other retired gent, I worry, sometimes promiscuously but not to madness. Yet.  But I do. I worry about lots of things, like whether

I hope you’ll agree there is some beauty in this image, an elegance to what Emerson called snow’s “frolic architecture,” something dazzling or graceful in

  I was just eight or nine–this happened a long, long time ago. I was just a kid. I honestly can’t remember how it was

  Okay, I feel a little embarrassed about admitting it because it’s such a “retired guy” thing to do, thumb through a shoebox of old

Gall was no giant, but he had to have been built like grand piano, broad chest, sturdy muscular arms, and impressively toned body. George Armstrong

She holds this single dream. She remembers life in Amherst, before her husband caught a madman’s urge to go west and start a new life

The woman in the story was a practiced marksmen, or so authorities have concluded. When she and her husband got stopped in the black SUV

  I may be wrong, but I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a sermon on that particular OT passage, something out of II Kings, a

Yesterday afternoon I sat with a old man who, once upon a time, shot at surfacing German subs in the North Atlantic, tried to pick

Two weeks or so after Normandy, he and the team of motorheads crossed the English channel after endless waiting weeks in Great Britain, a couple

  That Sunday night, I had to push myself to go to church, to listen to the still small voice of should in order to get

There has never been a great movie about John Brown. Seriously, hard as it is to believe, no one has ever done a blockbuster about

The title and not the author first caught my eye–Prairie, by someone named Muilenburg, not an unfamiliar name in the neighborhood. I found a copy

When finally we came to the place on the highway where he was killed, I realized neither of us knew exactly where it was–specifically, under

An extra day in Topeka, Kansas hadn’t been on our agenda. The car wasn’t repaired yet, three days later.  It had been, from the get-go,

I can’t argue with anything Thomas Goodhart offered us here yesterday. My first perceptions of nuclear war came when, as a grade-schooler, we snuck under

I don’t know how long it took me to think about how strange it is that everything is “sioux” around here–Sioux City, Sioux Falls, Sioux

It’s going to hurt me to say it. Honestly, it feels like a kick in the shins, a sharp stick in the eye, but I

I am no expert, no theologian, no art historian; but for what it’s worth, I think Tintoretto had it right because the scene must have

  If you’re lucky, you’ll get her. She’ll tell you she was a tomboy when she grew up on the farm, probably mention it more

When you’re a frequent cemetery wanderer, as I am, it’s impossible to miss the importance of someone’s having served in the military . Today, people

The Long Journey Home is the most recent collection of the short fiction of Lawrence Dorr, who contributed to Perspectives and The Reformed Journal for

  Once upon a time, right here where I’m sitting, Holland Township, Sioux County, Iowa, got sectioned into homesteads by a gang of Hollanders up

  When Fred Manfred’s Gerrit Engleking, the raw-boned protagonist of The Secret Place, left northwest Iowa (under a cloud) and went to live in California

  For 500 years “De steen die door de tempelbowers” was sung first crack out of the box at Easter morning worship, or so says

It requires a theology to build a church like St. Anthony of Padua, in Hoven, SD. A couple of grain farmers don’t just get together

The year was 1965. Madison, to a couple thousand high school small-town Wisconsin boys, was Babylon. Milwaukee was our vision of a big city, but

I have been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, “An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul”; for there is not an

Here’s the story the way the docent tells it. There are two halves to the boyhood home of Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th President of these

I know, I know–there are places on earth where at some times of the year day is night and night is day. I shouldn’t complain about

  It was Ian Frazier’s Great Plains that taught me something about the Ghost Dance. I’d never heard of it before; but then, most white Americans haven’t.

And what about the one who stayed behind while the rest of the shepherds took off for town? They had to leave some poor soul

  War stories normally take on the motif of initiation because no one, thank goodness, is ever prepared for watching friends–buddies–die and die fitfully; war

First Snow (upper case) is supposed to fall from heavenly clouds that spill feathers. It’s supposed to descend as if Mother Nature, somewhere up above,

He was my grandma’s only brother, only sibling. He was, therefore, my great uncle, Uncle Edgar, a man who died just a few months before

Only once in rural west Africa did I see anything like this–a man, a male, at the community well–and this time there was good reason.

It is no more, but for a 100 years in Zuni there was only one “big house.”  To say it loomed over the pueblo risks

What I can’t help but notice, almost daily, is that I’m running low on holy water. Truth is, this Protestant has never opened this elegant

Dowa Yalanne is the kind of place that really deserves the word monumental. There it stands like a momentary eruption stopped in time, a bundle

Henry Whipple was one of the first students. Don’t be fooled–not the Henry Whipple, the famous Minnesota missionary who, in 1862, pleaded with President Lincoln for the lives

Count me among the millions of those who watched the agony of Kunte Kinte a half-century ago and were deeply, deeply moved.  Roots, a story–a

It may well have been the very first time I used a camera for something other than family pics, an old Argus C-3 I had

He came along in my life when I needed him, even though I didn’t know I did. I wanted to write, but I knew little

  Yesterday, my neighbor came by and dumped a scoop full of black dirt on what, someday, will be–we hope–our front lawn. What some people

That’s a political rally right here in Alton, Iowa, circa 1903. That’s Teddy Roosevelt gesturing off the caboose of that train, making a stump speech,

There are two women in this story, two women and 125 years. One of them, this one, Renske, immigrated to America at the end of

He was, in a way, both a large part and a small part of the Allied Invasion of Normandy, June 6, 1944–a small part because

Two other mountain men stayed with him, and one of them, Jim Bridger, would become even more famous than he. It was 1823, and they

Just a short chapter into Rudy and Shirley Nelson’s richly furnished international thriller, The Risk of Returning, Ted Peterson, who calls himself a “lost child,” is

A phone call from my mother years ago–I think I was in college–included other news, I’m sure, but what she said after a deep breath

Congratulations to Theresa Latini, blogger-extraordinaire, who gave birth to Eleanor Olivia on April 3! Please remember Theresa and Eleanor in your prayers. Filling in today

The image I won’t soon forget from Haiti’s National Museum is a elaborately rigged ball and chain from the nation’s horrific dark ages, the days

It’s not insignificant. Created in the late ’20s, during the heyday of such memorials, Bryant Baker’s Pioneer Woman stands formidably just off one of Ponca City’s main

It was a while ago now, four short years, counting like a grandparent. I finished with opening prayer at a Sunday dinner, and Pieter, our

On Saturday, January 2, 1847, a young Senecan named Ha-sa-no-an-da, or Ely Parker, then just 18 years old, visited the U.S. Capitol on a trip

  I don’t use the word feeble very frequently, and my guess is that few of us do. If we use the word at all, we’re likely

Conventicle is an odd old word, but kind of fun actually, a word which suggests, by its composition, what it is–a kind of “mini-convention.” Only historians

The Christian Reformed mission at Zuni pueblo, New Mexico, in the 1920s   “Depression times made return to Zuni unlikely,” Casey Kuipers wrote on papers

It’s age.  Why not tell it like it is? I wouldn’t be ornery if I were 24 or even 48.  I’m not.  I’m 65, and

Today, in Sweden, a traditionally Lutheran country, most of the populace, I’m told, will go Christmas-crazy, having fallen in love a few centuries ago with

   Our fascination with the Holocaust seems unending, in part because nothing in the world’s recent past offers us such perfectly sculpted heroes and villians.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, Andrew Vander Wagon, who was never an officially licensed pastor but became one anyway, determined to build a

Every so often Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac features some sweet nostalgia, sure to make almost anyone regret his or her no more being a kid.  Often it’s all

Alexander B. Upshaw, the son of a Crow warrior of some renown among his people, was one of many young Native Americans sent off to

I don’t remember much about coming into Sioux Center, Iowa, in August of 1966. I was 18 years old, and I’d never been to northwest

Here, as elsewhere in nature, it’s really all about sex.  Their raspy lascivious retching, I’m told, comes in four different songs, slightly different takes on

 It arrived in the mail, a gift from my wife’s cousin, who found it while sifting through their aunt’s keepsakes–a bulletin from the First Christian

  So I’m talking to this guy not long ago, a guy I’d just met, and he’s talking about the area, about who lives here

  I don’t believe I will ever sing “Blessed Assurance” without thinking of my father.  He never mentioned that hymn as being among his top

It’s a story I never tired of telling, and it happened just last week–well, July 15, 1838 (and, no, I haven’t been telling it for

  James Russell Lowell, who stood grandly among the literary luminaries of the mid-19th century, created a darling series of thumbnail sketches featuring his rival

Once upon a time, the Schaap family lived here–the island of Terschelling, one of a small chain of islands off the northwest corner of the

The Lighthouse at Westkapelle by Piet Mondrian I stumbled on a incredible war story about Westkapelle, Zeeland, the Netherlands, in a book of World War II

  This morning, Woot’s got a sale on baseball gloves, not just any gloves–Rawlings gloves.  I will not, again, in my life, have need of

  By all accounts, he was a really good guy–good father, good husband, good church-goer.  In some ways, on paper at least, he seems quintessentially

  There was a telephone booth somewhere near the Variety Store back then, a telephone booth I hardly ever used.  There was no need really–I

 There’s just so much about what happened in Boston on Monday that’s going to happen again.  Will people hate?  Yes.  For a dozen reasons or

Hey, I’m no purist.  Maybe I should be–after all, I’ve been a classroom teacher for my whole life, an English teacher too.  I’ve every right

  On a plane, I’m a reader not a talker. In fact, I rather resent jabberers, warm-hearted folks, I’m sure, who make it their mission

I don’t believe I will ever sing “Blessed Assurance” without thinking of my father.  He never mentioned that hymn as being among his top ten

This is yesterday afternoon, a gorgeous February Sabbath, and that’s my grandson writing a message in the light snow on the Floyd River with the

When my master’s program was over, I wasn’t enamored with graduate school, and I rather missed the high-maintenance life of a high school teacher. My

I showed them this old picture, something the turn-of-the century on the Rosebud, most of the kids outfitted in blankets, traditional garb.  We talked about

  It wasnt’ deja vu exactly.  I know that phenomenon, the distinct feeling that time and place is being strangely replicated; you’re somehow sure you stood in

 I’m not unaccustomed to traveling, but yesterday, like a thousand times before, I came up on a huge strip of truck tire, something peeled from

   News flash from CNN, just now read it when I opened my e-mail.  “Winning numbers for the nearly 580 million Powerball jackpot are 5-23-16-22-29.

 Sort of eerie is what it was. We came up over a hill and found it, just across the gravel from a sprawling field full

    Mitt would count them in his column, I’m sure.  After all, they certainly aren’t part of the 47% of us who leech off

She interrupted my sermon. . .but then, I’m not a preacher.  I’m a teacher–or I was a teacher. When I stood before them in that little church

If you look closely here, in this single, little nook of the elegant, Victorian, and spirit-riddled Crescent Hotel, Eureka Springs, AK, you’ll see an arc,

 The neighbors have that iconic Harvey Dunn (“The Prairie is My Garden”)  up on their living room wall, bold and beautiful. Somehow, I’d almost forgotten

The older I get, the more vividly I come to understand that scowl on the face of both father and daughter in American Gothic, an

The shot is not sharp, but you get the picture.  That’s the ocean out there in the background, and the foreground is Laguna Beach.  The

  At least some of its features I could have guessed had I never opened the cover.  It’s plainly and unflinchingly Christian, for one, everything

My father never called himself a Calvinist, and neither did my mother, which is not to say that they weren’t.  If you would have asked

  Almost forty years ago, we went to the very same church, the very same building, that is, except it was, back then, a different

Way back when, I remember Richard Mouw once saying that the whole Christian world would be better off if we’d take seriously ye olde Sunday

Rained here Saturday night. My father-in-law’s little gauge–the old farmer in him couldn’t really live without one–registered three-quarters of an inch, a healthy rain. In

Just a week or so ago, Frederick Manfred would have celebrated his 100th birthday, had he lived. He didn’t.  He died in 1994, from the complications

Of its origins, I’m not quite sure–some freak shop in Old Town, Chicago, circa 1968.  I remember being with my then-girlfriend on what was some

I was born in 1948, but it took me a while to understand the world into which I was, that year, so healthily delivered, or

I envy monastics–sometimes. I envy their intent to zero in on the Christian faith, to delete every iota of worldly pain and pleasure from hearts

  Our lindens are just about the tallest trees in town, I swear.  And there he was, high up top, singing his heart out, that

“. . .to the great God, nothing is little. . .” You know?–I really ought to imprint that line on a t-shirt: “to the great

  Last summer, we’d just passed the bridge at Nijmegen where, 600 yards to the west, hundreds of GIs paddled flimsy Brit boats with their

  “The 150 evangelical leaders who met behind closed doors on January 14 to anoint a Republican candidate for President were wise not to have

The hardest work I ever did was a three-week stint–that’s all–with a road crew cutting sod and laying it down along the new interstate highway,

Case closed.  I’m an Iowan, once upon a time a Republican, and I am at this moment endorsing a candidate.  (Now please stop calling.)  I’d

A half a century ago, I was a kid in a Sunday school class taught by a man who’d taught those classes longer, maybe, than

My wife, who’s now retired and therefore been home more often these days than she’s been in the 25 years we’ve lived in this old house,

Professor Helen Vendler says that Emily Dickinson changed the first word of the fourth line the poem “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” from “sleep” to

Ten years ago maybe, my in-laws, then in their eighties, told us that they had simply mentioned to the pastor, as if in passing, that occasionally they’d