Lately I’ve been feeling a lot of emptiness. Deus absconditus. This darkness is evidently nothing new, seeing as there’s a Latin name for it. Where are you?
Debra RienstraDecember 14, 2019
“Is this the end of the world?”“It usually is.” That zinger appears near the conclusion of the kooky and wonderful Post-Rapture Radio, Russell Rathbun’s 2008 novel, which inventively satirizes American Evangelicalism for its shallowness and materialism. Toward the end of the novel, an eccentric, quasi-prophetic figure…
Debra RienstraSeptember 14, 2019
I've been working this summer on a podcast based on the idea of “refugia.” I wrote about this idea here at The Reformed Journal blog last May. Thanks in part to the encouragement of my colleague Dave Koetje, Professor of Biology at Calvin University, I’ve been exploring…
Debra RienstraAugust 17, 2019
When Mount Saint Helens erupted in May of 1980, it lost 1,300 feet of elevation and gained a new mile-wide crater. The debris avalanche and ashfall from the volcanic blast devastated the mountain and its surroundings, crushing, burning, killing, and coating everything in ash. Everyone…
Debra RienstraMay 11, 2019
English has always been a hungry language: it readily devours words from other languages and from inventive word-crafters, assimilating new words into its own rich, varied vocabulary. English never seems to lose its appetite for new morsels, borrowed or fresh. These days, in response to…
Debra RienstraMarch 30, 2019
“Does ‘image of God’ make us lazy?” I jotted this in my notebook earlier this week, between phrases like “hinge point in history” and “geophysical tipping point.” I was listening to a lecture by Kathleen Dean Moore, a moral philosopher, nature writer, and environmental activist.…
Debra RienstraMarch 16, 2019
As you spend a few last hours this summer in your Adirondack chair under a shady canopy of leaves—with that feeling of autumn’s imminence causing you to contemplate decline, aging, and the end of civilization—you might consider distracting yourself with some “climate fiction.” Sometimes short-handed…
Debra RienstraAugust 4, 2018
But neither Toller’s problems nor religious despair in general are particularly Calvinist, nor do I think that’s what Schrader means to suggest. Schrader has long thought about what it means to capture the holy in art, and a portrait of despair is one stunningly effective…
Debra RienstraJune 9, 2018
With everything going on in the news this week, we might as well come right out and discuss what we’re all thinking about anyway: the apocalypse.
Debra RienstraMay 20, 2017
