Peripatetic Pastor

Tag: Peripatetic Pastor

  • WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE REFORMED? THE REFORMED ACCENT

    A few weeks ago (it’s been a busy season for me), I started a short series of posts posing the question: what does it mean to be Reformed? This question is much mooted these days. I noted, for example, that the Calvin Theological Seminary promotional magazine, forum (yes, that’s how they write it), gave over its…

  • WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE REFORMED?

    What does it mean to be Reformed? For several reasons—reasons I will lay out in a subsequent post—it’s an odd question. But if you hang around in the ecclesiastical circles which I frequent, you will hear it asked. Often. I recently received a promotional magazine from Calvin Seminary, a school I once attended.  featuring that question:…

  • ONCE, ONLY

    ONCE ONLY War was in the air. It was the leadup to the First Gulf War. Armies were poised to invade Kuwait, and the news was alarming for many of us. What would happen? Would it spread? Would war come to us? At that point in 1991, we were blessedly innocent of the prospects of…

  • QUESTIONS AND CONVERSATION: READING THE AKEDAH

    One task in literature is to formulate questions and construct counter-statements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue; responsiveness.  –Susan Sontag, quoted from The Best American Essays 2023, edited and with an introduction by Vivian Gornick; Robert Atwan, series editor, p. ix. The Bible…

  • I CAN’T GET NO SATISFACTION: TOWARD UNDERSTANDING THE CHRIST STORY

    Louise Erdrich’s novel LaRose is a Christ story. Erdrich does not say so, but she hints at it. And such a strange story it is. The story begins with a killing. Dusty, the young son of Peter and Nola Ravich jumps down from a tree just as Landreaux, Dusty’s uncle, pulls the trigger to take down a…

  • WHO NEEDS CHURCH?

    Early in my time as lead pastor of a congregation I served for more than thirty years, I happened on a comment from Eugene Peterson, almost always a wise commentator on the role of the pastor. Peterson mentioned that he was an avid reader of the poetry of Wendell Berry and that wherever Berry mentioned…

  • MAESTRO: How Bradley Cooper Gets Bernstein Wrong

    Movie Notes September 25, 2021. We were emerging from the COVID lockdowns. The Bellingham Symphony (BSO), a fine regional ensemble under the direction of Yaniv Attar, had been producing online concerts, but however fetchingly they are done online concerts are not the same as a live performance. Now, for the first time since the pandemic…

  • THE POPE’S BLESSING

    This week the front page of the e-edition of the New York Times prominently featured two religion stories, each in its own way about whether the church will fully accept LGBTQ people and same-sex marriage. The lead story was the pope’s decision to allow priests to bless same-sex unions (“Pope Francis Allows Priests to Bless Same-Sex…

  • Anselm Kiefer and Hope: A Christmas Meditation

    To plunge into the art of Anselm Kiefer is to plunge into controversy. Is his art a profound meditation on the human condition or sophisticated kitsch? Is it monumental or bombastic? Is it liberating and brave or dour and depressing? (For a recent evaluation of Kiefer’s art, see Daniel A. Seidell, “Where Do You Stand?…

  • WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS AND WHAT THE BIBLE DOES

    Usually the question is what the Bible says. In my denomination, for example, we have carried on a long and often acrimonious debate about what the Bible says about women and a shorter but no less acrimonious debate about sexuality.  The standard procedure in my denomination for these kinds of questions is to appoint a…