James C. Schaap

Maybe a good teacher could have tried it, some whirling dervish with Obama’s eloquence, Solomon’s wisdom, and Tina Fay’s comic touch.  Someone young, for sure.  Someone connected, someone who says, as if by instinct, “my bad."  I really wanted to,…

". . .to the great God, nothing is little. . ." You know?--I really ought to imprint that line on a t-shirt: "to the great God, nothing is little." It's hers--Mother Teresa's--and it's just plain beautiful, isn't it? But then…

  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 rifle butts in order to cross a river flowing with current fast enough to knock…

  "The 150 evangelical leaders who met behind closed doors on January 14 to anoint a Republican candidate for President were wise not to have invited me.”  So wrote David Neff of Christianity Today in what I thought was a brave overview…

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, I-43, that would come to link Milwaukee and Green Bay, Wisconsin.  It was backbreaking work.…

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 be walking across the floor at the caucus meeting when Ron Paul's name is announced…

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 he should have. We thought old Bill was ancient, but he was likely a decade or more…

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, claims there's one gorgeous female cardinal in a bush just off the deck that wants…

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 "lie," and she says so because she believes--and, on the face of the earth today,…

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 like to sing the old songs once, too. They're not pushy people, believe me. The…