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By Craig Kocher
When I walked into the chapel at Hope College on a Sunday night late last spring, I worried that my worst fears about faddish campus ministry would be realized. A large stage had been built where an altar should have been and I didn’t see a Christian symbol anywhere near the six guitar players, who were letting loose as if opening for Jars of Clay.
I was in Kansas City recently to work on a story. I could have stayed in cool, hip Midtown, or a decent hotel anywhere, but friends invited me to stay with them at Cherith Brook, a new Catholic Worker house in a rough part of town.
I should qualify “Catholic Worker.” The friends who started Cherith Brook are Presbyterians.
By Timothy Larsen
A chalice has never been a part of my congregational life. My idea of ecclesiastical architecture has always been folding chairs in a gymnasium. When it comes to essential objects for the liturgical life of the church, I’ve always thought that the one thing needful was an overhead projector. For communion, my home church serves grape juice and Saltine crackers broken into bite-size bits.
By Susan Olson
Mai-Anh spent spring break in Florida volunteering at a camp for children with life-threatening illnesses. Now she will tell anyone willing to listen that the trip, an alternative spring break trip sponsored by the chaplain’s office, has changed her life.
By Jonathan Marlowe
I have been to the hospital so many times for someone else’s surgery that it’s second nature. I put on my clergy badge, which makes me feel official and professional, and show up at the hospital door all smiling and cheerful. I try to make small talk about the weather or the game on TV last night, thinking that might take their minds off troubles and ease their anxiety. Until recently, I didn’t know if my efforts worked or not. They might just have been too nice to tell me it doesn’t.
But now I know.
Our new church arrived Saturday. It came in a trailer packed with enormous ingenuity by Portable Church Industries. We’ve been calling it “a church in a truck.”
Sound strange?
Let me back up.
Clifford Geertz, the renowned anthropologist, once said that he had lived “a charmed life in a charmed time” (Available Light). A member of the “greatest generation,” as a navy man during the war he was spared having to invade Japan by the atomic bomb. When he didn’t know what to do after the war, a high school teacher suggested he attend Antioch College, where his liberal arts degree was paid for by the GI bill.
I don’t know anyone who’s gotten through the first semester of seminary without feeling overwhelmed. The sheer mass of reading is too much for anyone to master. I worry that future ministers and theologians are being shaped to read in undigestible quantities rather than to read carefully and well. It’s a long way from the habits of contemplative reading that ancient Christians taught—learning to chew on scripture like a cow does its cud, to use a popular medieval example.
By Louis R. Carlozo
Here is news, to paraphrase newspaper guru Gene Roberts, that isn’t breaking but trickling and seeping without much notice: Newspapers are still very much alive.
Let’s dive in by way of analogy. Remember when a little thing called television came along in the 1940s? It was supposed to kill off radio for good: Who wanted to listen to a box without pictures when something new, sleek and flashing was available?
By James Howell
I’ve just spent a month with my congregation studying “the will of God.” A local talk show interviewed me on the subject, and the host, not the friendliest interlocutor on matters of faith, posed a hard question just as the producer was gesticulating that the commercial break was rushing headlong our way: “How can you know what God wills? Give me an answer in three seconds.”
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