Essay

My wife and I were still newlyweds when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down on November 9, 1989.   I remember sitting in the living room of the seminarian parsonage where we were living on Grand Rapids northwest side and watching…

The strike was called for the Friday just before we observed Storm Sunday this year. First Reformed Church of Schenectady, has been following the Season of Creation lectionary during the Sundays of September for some years now. This was to…

“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…

We talk a good deal about vocation at Calvin University. It’s a big part of our first-year programing. We have a four-year innovative program called LifeWork that develops students’ readiness for life beyond college. It’s one of four all-university goals…

You may wish to read my earlier post, God is/is not Conservative It’s only fairly recently that “liberal” became a bad word in the United States. After all, the US is the ultimate liberal experiment--born of the Enlightenment, about freedom,…

Memory is such a trickster. I came across a lost document while helping my dad and stepmom clean out their condo recently, notes from Monday, January 28, 2008, and the opening of the Buechner Institute at King College in Bristol,…

Last Sunday we held a memorial service for my mom, Priscilla Ann Carlson. She died at home with my dad by her side in mid-October due to complications from an aggressive cancer diagnosed a little more than a year ago.…

It was the day of the presidential election, November 8, 2016. I had been asked to preach in chapel at the Bast Preaching Festival at Western Seminary in Michigan. Shortly afterward I found myself driving back home to Ontario. It…