I love St. Augustine of Hippo. That might not seem like a big deal, but since at least the time of John H. Yoder, Augustine has been on the outs with the Anabaptist world, seen as the author of all that was...
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When Hosea prophesied at the sunset of the northern kingdom of Israel, he cast a vision for the people’s future by recalling their past with God. It’s been all downhill since Jeroboam II: king after king...
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Drive south out of our community toward Wichita and you’ll spot an advertisement for a bunker. It’s not a billboard, but a display of the real thing: a full-size corrugated steel hidey-hole. It looks like...
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So this is how the world ends: not with a bang or a whimper but with the sound of your last square of toilet paper going down the tubes. God’s people have been here before (sort of) — enemies from within...
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I almost drowned in the ocean once. I consider myself a strong swimmer, and that afternoon I confidently waded out from the beach and slipped under the waves. Except that those waves began to batter me as a...
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When the miners in the collapsed Copiapó mine in Chile were finally rescued and shuttled to safety through three miles of stone on Oct. 13, 2010, Chilean president Sebastián Piñera was there to greet them....
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We were driving through the night in a pickup truck somewhere in the deserts of northwest Mexico. After an evening church gathering, I and several other hermanos were headed home, bumping along in the back as...
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Lake Titicaca, impossibly wide and deep and high above the sea, fills an immense mountain trough in the Andes along the Peru-Bolivia border. The lake is so big that it encompasses rocky islands. Strangely...
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Last fall I grafted a half dozen varieties of apples onto my apple tree. I’m a poor and inexperienced grafter, so not surprisingly only a couple of them took. I discovered one in the spring — a stout...
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One thing I love about Kansas is the mountains. Oh, we have them all right. They’re just buried under 600 feet of Harney Silt Loam. These Kansas mountains, called the Nemaha Ridge, are composed of massive...
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Oh, for a video camera trained on the tomb on that original Easter Sunday! How perfect it would be to witness the grinding of the grave stone, the genuflection of the soldiers, the gleaming of the...
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While the chief priests and elders schemed to kill Jesus, a woman entered Simon the leper’s house and blessed him with costly perfume. “Why this waste?” said the disciples. “This ointment could have...
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A Peruvian pastor friend tells the story of leading a group of young evangelists out to some remote villages along the sinuous mountain roads of the Andes. When a lamb darted in front of their van pursued by...
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When the State of Illinois decided to expand I-74 just north of our family farmstead in a multiyear spate of civil engineering angioplasty, my father decided to move our house. This was no small feat. Our...
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Sometimes I talk to my seatmates on the plane. Sometimes I don’t. But when the young woman next to me had a panic attack brought on by her just-discharged-from-Afghanistan post-traumatic stress, how could...
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I wonder how much of our modern lives is about fleeing silence. True silence is a fearful thing for many, a disconcerting, bulgy reality that we do our best to avoid. I recently learned of Orfield Laboratories...
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Afriend once waxed poetic about the peace he experienced when receiving the communion wafer in the Catholic mass. Since I had been reared on a diet of just-a-symbol cracker breads and grape juice cuplets, I...
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There may be nothing more unsettling to the (post)modern mind than zeal. Faith’s OK, many suppose, so long as it’s small and well-behaved, trotted out on a short leash at the odd moments — like birth...
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When we visit family in Lima, Peru, that cement city hustling under a concrete sky, we’re always a little taken aback by the traffic. Though our surprise could be chalked up to country-mouse sensibilities,...
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I’ve been coaching third-/fourth-grade soccer along with another dad this fall. (No, I don’t know what I’m doing — though thankfully, my friend does!) We drill the kids. We scrimmage with the kids. We...
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