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Essay

but you let it go…

A few weeks ago Jes Kast-Keat wrote a post about Vampire Weekend's new song "Ya Hey." (You can read it here...) For the past two weeks I've bee listening to it over and over. Its a personality flaw, I hear an interesting song and beat…
Jason Lief
July 6, 2013
Essay

plain beauty

We all have biases when it comes to a sense of place. Most of us struggle to break free from false perceptions about a people and a land that we aren't familiar with. I don't blame people for their narrow minded dismissal of the northern…
Jason Lief
June 22, 2013
Essay

inefficiency

The calendar says June so I guess summer is upon us. It just doesn't feel like summer in Iowa; the high temperature's been in the 60's all week. Despite the weather the rhythm of summer is starting to settle in. The kids are adjusting to…
Jason Lief
June 8, 2013
Essay

Naked Reality

A week ago today I was in San Francisco, CA standing on a bluff looking at the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a beautiful day, about 65 degrees or so, blue sky, with a wonderful sea smelling breeze blowing off of the Pacific. I walked…
Jason Lief
May 24, 2013
Essay

Going

Yesterday was graduation at Dordt College. Over 300 students sat up on the stage, waiting for their diploma, so they could leave. Graduation day has a strange aura about it. Professors are still grading, but most are glad the end has come. Parents and family…
Jason Lief
May 11, 2013
Essay

Spring: The Birds, the Bees, and Baseball

As I was driving with my daughter the other day the chit chat gave way to a more serious topic. "In school next we're going to talk about sex," she told me. "We're going to talk about girl parts and boy parts." I didn't know…
Jason Lief
April 27, 2013
Essay

Fire in the Dark

This semester I'm teaching a course on the topic of Christianity and popular culture. We started the semester reading selections from Niebuhr's Christ and Culture and Andy Crouch's  Culture Making, trying hard to make the case for a Kuyperian transformational approach to how we should…
Jason Lief
April 13, 2013
Essay

God rested

Does the precise locus of this Saturday, at the interface between cross an resurrection, its very uniqueness as the one moment in history which is both after Good Friday and before Easter, invest it with special meaning, a distinct identity, and the most revealing light?...The…
Jason Lief
March 29, 2013
Essay

Courage

Twice, yesterday, I got teary eyed. I don't cry easily; I guess it's a character flaw. But yesterday - twice - I ended up wiping tears from my eyes. What's strange, maybe even embarrassing, is what caused this moist, salty, discharge. Two separate movie scenes:…
Jason Lief
March 16, 2013