20 articles from 11 issues, 1996 to 2023
The Pentateuch ends with Moses dying outside the promised land. Dearman reads that anticlimax theologically, finding in it a pattern: ministry passes from one hand to another, the work continues without us, and the inheritance belongs to those who come next, all by God's design.
Billings is dying of cancer, and the bones inside him are described by a doctor as 'like Swiss cheese.' He writes about how Christians and the wider culture talk about death, and why those two ways of talking diverge so sharply at the end.
War is hell, but coming home is its own hell. Tietje, a chaplain to combat veterans, listens to soldiers without a narrative for what they've lived, and finds in Holy Saturday the strange grace that the gospel has already descended into the hell of being lost.
Lewis wrote A Grief Observed after losing Joy Davidman to cancer in 1960. Barnes reads Lewis through his own grief after his wife Lorie's death in 2016, and finds something neither sentimental nor stoic: an honest path through the territory grief actually traverses.
Death blows the empty clichés out of pastoral ministry like an umbrella in a hurricane. McSween focuses on the funeral service and sermon as the place where a Reformed pastor has a unique Word to proclaim, and where the gospel is most acutely needed and most easily mishandled.
It's hard to picture John Calvin grieving, or writing tender letters to bereaved friends. Nixon shows that we should picture exactly that. The Reformed tradition's reputation for being rigorous-but-cold is a caricature, and Calvin himself is the first witness against it.
Aguzzi defines the terms of the euthanasia debate carefully, distinguishes the various forms it takes, and offers a Reformed argument that suffering is not the worst thing that can happen to a person and that physician-assisted death cannot be reconciled with what the Christian tradition teaches about life and death.
When will pastoral ministry ever be easy? Preaching on 2 Corinthians 4, Mary Holder Naegeli says it never will be, and finds in Paul’s hardships three reasons for hope: this is not heaven, glory is coming, and God is strengthening us.
What does a hospital owe parents whose child dies before birth? Rhonda Lindamood and Cleo Williams describe the perinatal loss program nurses built at Carilion New River Valley Medical Center, from memory books and photographs to support groups and memorial services.
Why do so many parents who lose a child before birth find no place in the church to grieve? Susan Cyre describes her congregation’s memorial services for these families and prints the order of worship and litany it uses.
Is there a difference between pain and suffering, and does the gospel say anything to it? C. Ben Mitchell classifies the kinds of suffering, grounds a theology of suffering in the fall and in the hope of the world to come, and asks what the church must do for the dying.
How does a believer give thanks in the middle of a long and terminal illness? Deborah and Lyle Thorpe’s prayer of thanksgiving and praise, drawn from Scripture, rests in God’s sovereign care and fixes its eyes on the unseen things that last forever.
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