“I am feeling confused right now about what I want to give my neighbor.” A letter from a friend captured the feelings of many Americans this spring. This was back when “the Head Cheetah” – the only name I’ve heard her use for President Donald Trump that could also be...
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Uncertainty: The Beauty and Bedrock of Statistics
Sarah Hamersma
Data come in many forms. A survey might capture a snapshot of a person’s political views. A long-form interview might gather insights into parenting strategies. Ethnographic work by an embedded researcher might uncover patterns in a subculture that take months to...
The Gift of Death
Leslie Verner
Rebekah taught me to drive stick shift in her husband’s Jetta on the narrow northside streets of Chicago. She was a preschool teacher, so we all bargained that her patience would outlast her husband’s in teaching me to shift gears and stamp down the clutch at just the...
Deeper Still
Doris Fleck
My life was uncertain before I was born. The American poet Carl Sandburg warns, “The greatest certainty in life is death. The greatest uncertainty is the time.” My family wondered if my time on earth would be mere months. My parents, Henry and Helen Dyck, came to...
Church for the Broken and Weary
Rachel Pieh Jones
Sometimes church feels more like the kingdom of pretenders than the kingdom of God. When someone I loved tumbled into depression, I dropped my life and flew across borders to be there. The first Sunday we spent together, I asked if she wanted to go to church. “No,”...
The Politics of Polyphonic Singing
Dhananjay Jagannathan
In more ordinary times, on Sunday afternoons twice a month, I can be found on the streets of New York with a dozen other singers, performing the sacred music of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. Well, not always in the streets – on cold days in the winter we...
The Colour of the Soil
Gracy Olmstead
In 2016, I wrote a piece on agrarianism for Comment, considering the changes wrought in the world of farming by the Industrial Revolution, and arguing for a system of farming that put health and sustainability before machine efficiency. I was asked by the magazine’s...
Wisdom for the Wilderness
Anne Snyder
“It’s not about the destination. It’s about the journey.” “Learn to be, less do.” “The only constant is change.” Popular proverbs like these have drenched our cultural landscape for as long as I can remember. Each time they’re rediscovered, preached and parroted as if...
Christian Witness and the Election
Peter Mommsen
Earlier this month, the ecumenical group Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) published a statement on Christian witness and the US elections on the website of First Things. ECT was first convened in 1995 by Richard John Neuhaus and Chuck Colson out of a desire...
Leadership, Forgiveness, and Our Loves
Michael Van Pelt, Ray Pennings
Dear Ray, Shortly after the COVID-19 lockdown started in Canada, I gave a talk at a staff meeting with two primary thoughts. The first was that leaders were going into a time of tremendous complexity. We would need to make decisions with limited knowledge of the...