Authors /
James Calvin Schaap
James Calvin Schaap is emeritus professor of English at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. He blogs at Stuff in the Basement, part of the CCblogs network.
Giving thanks in a world of horrors
During the groaning evil of the Thirty Years War, a pastor wrote the hymn “Now thank we all our God.”
September 21, 2018
The true believer
According to white supremacist Peter Tefft, Charlottesville was only a beginning.
August 15, 2017
The flourishing church
You'd be hard-pressed to find a more popular word in evangelical circles today than flourishing. But are the churches described that way avoiding complexity?
February 27, 2017
Betsy DeVos and the kingdom
I share Dutch Calvinist heritage with Trump's pick for education secretary. I wonder if we see God's kingdom the same way.
January 19, 2017
Men, women, and locker rooms
When Bible ministry leader Beth Moore spoke out this week about the objectification of women, I remembered something my wife taught me.
October 13, 2016
What can't be said
Didn't know him. Not at all. Never met him probably, although he might have been in a classroom sometime long ago when I visited his high school. I didn't know his wife or his family either, nor had I ever met them that I know of. But he was just a kid, too young to die.
His obit is so lovingly written that I could only hope to do it that well myself.
February 18, 2016
Uncivil disobedience
There has never been a great movie about John Brown. Seriously, hard as it is to believe, no one has ever created a real blockbuster about America's most famous abolitionist. Amazing....
October 11, 2015
Who's going to teach religion?
I'm embarrassed to admit it, embarrassed because it took graduate school to teach me something it's hard to imagine I didn't learn much earlier. I don't want to blame my teachers. I don't think of them as nincompoops. If I didn't learn what I should, I probably wasn't listening.
But I'll never forget working on some graduate school research paper—probably something about John Milton—and stumbling on history so elementary I was embarrassed I didn't know it.
September 21, 2015
Why we lead the nation
As we walked out of a room where my 95-year-old father-in-law had just had an eye exam, he wheeled his walker into a waiting-room area. To say the least, he's not quick on his feet. What's more, he needs at least four. One of these days that walker will be closeted, and he'll have to back into a wheelchair. I know he dreads it.
May 10, 2015
What I had to learn
The subjects themselves weren't young, which is to say they weren't kids. They were adults, and, often as not, they were either at or approaching senior citizenship....
February 13, 2014
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What I won't forget
The night
Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, four of us--small-town white boys--followed the
Gulf of Mexico's eastern shore on an all-night trek from south Florida to New...
April 4, 2012
"Grace and Truth"
Confession
time. Once, years ago, when I was a college student home for a break,
my mother, who taught piano for most of her life, declared that she...
January 27, 2012
Growing Pains, by Randall Balmer
We have friends who decided to release their children from all obligations to attend Sunday worship when those children turned 18....
March 12, 2002
A Visit to Vanity Fair, by Alan Jacobs
Because of his uncommonly fine use of language and the gracious character which emerges from his work, Alan Jacobs, who teaches English at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, has always struck me...
October 16, 2001