22 articles from 16 issues, 1996 to 2026
Spiritual autobiographies remind us how the Spirit sustains faith through the long road. Drawing on Schweitzer, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Douglas F. Fletcher names ten weapons against evil and reflects on perseverance as a gift God himself secures.
Billings preaches the biblical pattern of barren wombs becoming the very means by which God brings forth promise, from Sarah through Hannah to Elizabeth. A talk about waiting, hope, and the kind of fruitfulness that resists every category we try to put around it.
Edwards encountered Ernst Lohmeyer's name as a footnote in his doctoral research and was haunted by the cryptic note that a 'higher power' had carried him off to a 'still-unresolved fate.' The piece traces Lohmeyer's witness under three regimes and what his disappearance can teach us.
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.
Part two of Burgess's keynote on John 14:6 picks up the human longing for life that is more than survival. He locates the answer not in the desperate self-renewal our culture sells, but in the gift of life that comes to us from outside ourselves through Christ.
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.
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.
What did it cost the church fathers to hold the line on the Trinity? Gerald McDermott recalls how Basil and the two Gregories were dragged reluctantly into the fourth-century conflict, suffered for it, and prevailed, and draws six lessons for a church in conflict today.
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.
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