Author: Josh Bishop

Something in the Water

Two of Michigan’s best-known breweries — New Holland and Founders — are celebrating their 20th anniversaries this year, but that isn’t all they have in common. They both brew high-quality, unique beer. They’re both known, at least in part, for their bourbon barrel-aged stouts (Dragon’s Milk and KBS, respectively). And they were both founded by… Continue Reading →

Community in Christ

The muffled tap of felt-bottomed pieces on a chessboard. Queen to king’s rook 3. Knight’s pawn captures pawn. And then a mistake. An unnoticed piece slides diagonally to take the queen, and one of the players quips with a grin, “You Protestants — always forgetting about the bishops.” Sure, it sounds like the punchline to… Continue Reading →

Generation Spark

To really wrap your mind around the work of Generation Spark, you first need to get a handle on the nones and the dones. Let’s start with the “nones,” a term used in the media as a shorthand way to talk about those who identify themselves on surveys and polls as having no religious affiliation.… Continue Reading →

Hope’s Aspirational Faith

For the first time in more than 150 years, Hope College has adopted a formal statement of its Christian character. Why now? And what does the college expect to do with it, anyway? To be fair, for the first 100 years, Hope had no need for such a statement. As a denominational school of the… Continue Reading →

Complexities of the In-Between

Dr. Ernest Cole is a man who doesn’t quite belong anywhere. Cole spent much of 2018 — including a summer trip to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. — researching and writing his third monograph, which explores dislocation, displacement and the trauma of finding oneself in different spaces. In particular, he’s examining the work… Continue Reading →

Nursing Research on Mother’s Milk

Across the board, the research is clear: Breastfeeding is healthy for infants and nursing mothers, has a positive long-term impact on children’s intelligence, and can benefit families and communities. Yet many mothers who decide in advance to breastfeed their babies stop sooner than they’d planned. “We know that the number one reason that mothers don’t… Continue Reading →

A Form for Memory and Grief

After a deeply personal experience with grief, poet Dr. Susanna Childress turned to a new-for-her form of writing — one that requires vulnerability, trust and creative risk-taking, both personally and professionally. Her new collection of essays, Extremely Yours: Observations on Being Disordered, will be published by Awst Press, with an anticipated release in 2020.“I think… Continue Reading →

Clean Water for the Global Greater Good

If you’ve gone backpacking, you may be familiar with Sawyer point-of-use water filters — small, easy-to-use devices that allow outdoor enthusiasts to drink water safely from streams and other natural sources. But how well do they work, really? And not just in the United States, where their use is primarily recreational, but in countries where… Continue Reading →

A Passion for Interfaith Dialogue

Allison LoPrete ’19 opens with a greeting given by the risen Christ himself: “Peace be with you.” It’s the opening of a liturgy that one might expect to find in Sunday morning worship services around the world — or perhaps in Hope’s own Dimnent Memorial Chapel four times a week. “And also with you,” the… Continue Reading →

How Sanctification Works

“From the moment of birth the human person is becoming.” This first line of Dr. Angela Carpenter’s Responsive Becoming: Moral Formation in Theological, Evolutionary, and Developmental Perspective sets up an interdisciplinary exploration of how we go about “becoming.” One essential element is moral formation, and it’s this aspect of the human experience that Carpenter focuses… Continue Reading →

Identity Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa

Dr. Virginia Beard was into identity politics long before the issue showed up on America’s front pages. For more than a decade, she’s investigated how religion, ethnicity and gender influence democratic attitudes and behaviors. In two papers finished in 2019, she lays out how religious identity affects attitudes toward democracy in some countries in sub-Saharan… Continue Reading →

Can You Feel the Forró Beat?

The rhythms of Afro-Brazilian music still echo the ancient drumbeats of Africa — carried across oceans on slave ships, adapted across the centuries, and today encompassing both a distinctive cultural identity and a communal national bond. Christopher Fashun (at right in photo) spent four months of 2019 in Brazil as a Fulbright Scholar, researching the… Continue Reading →

Faith of Our Foremothers

The Rev. Dr. Lynn Japinga has spent years telling the stories of the women of the Bible and, in many cases, doing her level best to redeem the reputations with which she feels they’ve been unfairly saddled over the centuries. “I joke that stories about women are always about either sex, violence, or sex and… Continue Reading →

On Display: Selections from an Interesting Life

Untitled 1982Alexander Liberman (American, born Ukraine 1912-1999)Painted steelLoan from the M.L. Brummel Collection A new exhibition opening at Hope’s Kruizenga Art Museum this fall reflects the lasting power of the college experience — and the unexpected ways that even one part of it can enrich a life for the 60-plus years (and counting) that follow.… Continue Reading →

A Sacred Space

If you step into the newly renovated Saint Anne Oratory at the Carol C. Schaap Chapel in the basement of Graves Hall, where the former Schoon Meditation Chapel was located, you’ll find it to be a place of peace and quiet, of uncommon beauty — a place of palpable sacredness. As the Most Reverend David… Continue Reading →