Peripatetic Pastor

Tag: Peripatetic Pastor

  • A MEDITATION ON TRUST: TRUSTING EACH OTHER IN A TIME OF DISTRUST

    What you have done here by ceasing debate is incredibly harmful to what sense of trust the minority has in this body. (Cara DeHaan, from the floor of the synod of the Christian Reformed Church, June 2023) . . . [Vitalik] Buterin [founder of Ethereum and cryptocurrency theorist] argues that one of the most valuable properties…

  • DENOMINATIONAL SOUL: A SECOND TAKE ON SYNOD 2023

    Let’s step back from the dumpster fire that ended Synod 2023 of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) and take another look at the synod and what it might tell us about the shape of the denomination—its strengths and perils. And, perhaps, what it may tell us more generally about the shape of the church—the conservative,…

  • ENDING UGLY

    ENDING UGLY For the second year in a row, synod—the 2023 synod of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC)—ended ugly. This may be an omen for the life of the denomination. The synod clock ticked towards 3:00 in the afternoon, 3:00 PM being the deadline for adjourning synod. There were flights to catch, schedules to keep.…

  • A LITTLE LESS LOST: RECENTERING OUR FAITH

    My wife and I recently returned from Europe. While there, we walked the cities, Amsterdam and Milan, in particular. We frequently were forced to bring up Google or Apple Maps (and sometimes both at the same time) to get walking directions. Truth be told, the programs don’t work well for walkers, especially not in old…

  • THE ART OF IMPERFECTION: A MEDITATION ON MICHELANGELO’S LAST WORK

    Pietas–works of art that portray typically Mary alone, holding the dead body of Jesus, are a form of devotional art. They pay homage to the suffering of Jesus and to the suffering of his mother. They are more than that. In the hands of the masters, they are an examination of the relationships between hope…

  • TRADITION

    “Tradition!” Tevye, the milkman sings at the beginning of Fiddler on the Roof. It’s a great beginning, as Tevye walks us through his village and points out how things are done and why. Well, not why. Tevye mostly doesn’t know why they do things the way they do. It’s just what they have always done.  Despite the song,…

  • CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM AND THE FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM

    “What keeps gnawing at me,” he writes, “is the question, what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?” (Letters and Papers from Prison, Kindle edition, page 353). Compared to what Bonhoeffer was going through in April of 1944, for those of living in the US or Canada these are easy times. True,…

  • NO BEARS (2022)

    Directed by Jafar Panahi (Iran) In 2010, Jafar Panahi was arrested in Iran on charges of disseminating antigovernment propaganda. Part  of the Iranian New Wave and already well-known in the West, Panahi was convicted, put under house arrest, and forbidden to make movies or to leave the country for twenty years. In the thirteen years…

  • THE GOSPEL AND THE FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM

    We have failed our people. We—I have in mind people like me: preachers, church leaders, professors, bloggers—have failed those who come to our churches, week to week, who listen to what we say, who go to our Bible studies, who read our books, who look to us for a word from the Lord. We have…

  • THE BIBLE AND THE FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM

    Are we coming to the end of Protestantism as we know it? In Snow, a novel by the prize-winning Irish writer John Banville, a Catholic bishop asks the beleaguered detective, John Strafford, a Protestant, “How long can you go on protesting?” Strafford doesn’t answer. But as both the bishop and Strafford know, Protestantism has long…