Current Issue: Christmas 2007
Reading Platonic (and other) Text-Maps by Tom Tredway
Most maps are mini-pictures of the landscape they represent, but written texts can also be “cartographic.” Pietists have, of course, been guided by one such text-map above all others. We are told that in confused or uncertain moments some of our forebears would simply open the Scriptures at random, point to a verse on the page, and seek to divine from it what the Spirit was seeking to tell them. One presumes that they were trying to avoid inflicting their own ideas on Holy Writ. They wanted the Bible to guide them, not the other way around. But one wonders what they did when a verse seemed, at least at first, to have little or nothing to say to the matter in question. What, for example, could Isaiah 44:24-25, I am the Lord, who made all things, who also stretched out the heavens, who by myself spread out the earth, who frustrates the omens of liars, and makes fools of diviners, mean to a Swede trying to decide whether to book passage on a steamer bound from Göteborg to New York in 1878? (I leave it to you, reader, to speculate on that.)
Alaska’s Two Covenant Schools by Paul Swanson
Rural Alaska is defined as the vast regions of the State not connected to the North American road system and is primarily populated by Alaska natives. In 1887, the Covenant Church began missionary work in one of these rural regions. Only the Orthodox, the Presbyterians, the Friends, and the Moravians, along with the Covenant were doing missionary work among the Alaskan natives at that time. Somehow the Covenant either chose or was assigned the villages around the Norton Sound. Today the church in most of these villages is the “Covenant” church.
Sightings in Christian Music by Glen Wiberg
Through my friendship with Phyllis Holmer, I have begun a correspondence with a longstanding friend of the Holmers, Dr Andrew Burgess, Professor of Philosophy and a Kierkegaard scholar at The University of New Mexico in, Albuquerque. Dr Burgess is also a graduate of Minnehaha and was a student of Paul Holmer. I would like to share part of a letter which I wrote this past summer to Dr Burgess.