Stuff in the Basement

I don't remember who delivered the commencement address at Dordt College in 1970. It was someone from the Reformed faith, I'm quite ...

I owe an apology to literally hundreds of students, not because I somehow shipwrecked their lives or clouded their futures, but because I so...

  I'd say "they're back," but in truth they've never left, just taken on some darker fashion choices for the winter. ...

It's that season again when, out back, whacking weeds almost daily, I'm accosted by Sunday School songs seeping into my consciousnes...

You can call them my words, and they likely are; but the ideas belong to Abraham Kuyper, around whose writing many of my ancestors organized...

“May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us;. . .” One of my grandmother’s older sister, I’m told, had had a very difficult life in the ...

There's a bridge out there, barely visible from here. It's far right, half way up the picture. "The bridge to nowhere" som...

Native activist Mark Charles likes to say that the word reconciliation doesn't really apply in movements or attempts to bring Indigenou...

Look--let's be honest. What the denomination I've always been a part of is facing is an issue that has torn just about every other d...

For a half century I've been up in front of people, reading things aloud--stories, essays, meditations. In fact, I've got a thing go...

They're not all alike, thank goodness. There are differences, trust me, but I've just spent an inordinate amount of time among old m...

Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble.   For three days, the child bled profus...

His name was identifiably Dutch—Tilstra, maybe. . .Kevin Tilstra. Out of two thousand students in the Phoenix high school where I taught, h...

When the two remaining pilgrims began the return trip from St. Louis, what they faced was yet another arduous journey, this time back north ...

Flathead chief and family, 1855--George Catlin Consider Old Ignace, a trapper, born somewhere near Montreal, who, in the early 19th century ...

All the way out here, halfway across the country, over hill and dale of the Alleghenies, through cities like Akron, Chicago, Davenport and C...

An Auxiliary robe  Maybe it was the music. I'd like to think it could have been. After all, some old preachers claim that when Satan was...