Elliot Ritzema's Blog, page 6
October 18, 2016
Henri Nouwen’s Letters on the Spiritual Life: A Review
Four years after the Catholic priest and spiritual writer Henri Nouwen died
, Gabrielle Earnshaw began archiving his correspondence. Now, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of his death, she has collected some of these letters and released them as Love, Henri: Letters on the Spiritual Life(not to be confused with the essential oils company “Love Henri,” which I just learned about while writing this).
These letters span about twenty-two years of Nouwen’s life, from 1973, when he was teach...
October 8, 2016
Gamla, Masada, and Symbolism
It’s been over a month since my last post about my trip to Israel last summer, but it’s a rainy day and my wife is out of town, so now is as good a time as any to get back to it. Thisis the eleventhsuch post (to read them all,click here).
June 24 AM
On our second day in Galilee, we went east of the Sea of Galilee and into the Golan Heights, which Israel has occupied since 1967. Before then it belonged to Syria, and this is as close to Syria as we would geton this trip. I remember one of the m...
September 5, 2016
The Story of God’s Dwelling Place: A Review
If you’ve been following this blog over the last couple of months, you know I went on a trip to Israel this summer. Onthat trip I gained a newfound interest in the physical details of placesin the Bible. The more I know, for example, about what Jerusalem looked like in the first century, the easier it is to visualize the events that happened there.
J. Daniel Hays has written a useful little book for people who are curious about the physical spaces where God was worshiped in the Bible:The Temp...
September 1, 2016
Galilee and the God of the Ordinary
This is the tenthpost in a series of reflections on my recent trip to Israel (to read them all,click here).
June 23
On our first morning in Galilee, we took a bus from our hotel in Tiberias up to the Mount of Beatitudes. The bus dropped us off next to the Church of the Beatitudes, but we didn’t go inside. Instead, we walked out to a place on the hill where we had a panoramic view of the Sea of Galilee and sat down on some black rocks. One by one, five members of our group stood up and recited...
August 15, 2016
Arad and Contextualization
June 22, PM
This is the ninthpost in a series of reflections on my recent trip to Israel (to read them all,click here).
Our group’s last stop of the afternoon, before getting on the bus and heading north along the Jordan River Valley to Galilee, was at the top of a windy hill. To the south you could see the city of Arad. It turns out what used to be on top of that hill was a southern Judean border town that was also called Arad. It is not unusual for a city bearing the name of an ancient one...
August 1, 2016
Ein Gedi and Water
June 22, AM
This is the eighthpost in a series of reflections on my recent trip to Israel (to read them all, click here).
On the morning after hiking in the dry Wadi Qelt, we went to a place where water was abundant. Ein Gedi is on the west side of the Dead Sea, and its name means “goat spring.” Now they bottle some of the water that emerges from the ground here, and every day in the aisle of our bus there were packs of two-liter bottles of Ein Gedi water to fill up our hydration packs.
Ein G...
July 28, 2016
Ain’t No Wadi Like a West Bank Wadi
… cause a West Bank wadi is hot.
This is the seventh post in a series of reflections on my recent trip to Israel (to read them all, click here).
On the morning of June 21, our group headed north from our hotel along the Dead Sea and into the West Bank. We went for a long hike along the Wadi Qelt (also known as the Prat River), which begins near Jerusalem, runs east through the West Bank, and empties into the Jordan River near Jericho.
The focus of this hike was on experiencing the Judean wil...
July 23, 2016
Bite-Sized Gladwell: A Review
I like reading Malcolm Gladwell for the same reason I like reading G. K. Chesterton or a good mystery novel. He has a way of looking at reality in a counterintuitive way that sheds fresh light on particular issues and also helps readers to adopt an attitude of curiosity about their own surroundings.
What the Dog Saw is a collection of Gladwell’s articles from the New Yorker that were published in the ’90s and early 2000s. The movements of the articles generally follow a few standard beats:
July 21, 2016
Advice About Visiting the Dead Sea from Someone Who Went There Once
I’ve been writing reflections on the pilgrimage to Israel I took in June of this year. To read all of them, click here.
Here are nine pieces of advice I gleaned from the two days I spent at the Dead Sea last month:
When you’re going down the steep descent toward the water your ears will start to pop, and you might wonder what is going on and think maybe you have a cold or something, but then you remember you’re headed to the lowest place on earth and such things happen there. Hotels onthe De...July 17, 2016
Lachish and Signal Fires
I’ve been writing reflections on the pilgrimage to Israel I took in June of this year. To read all of them, click here.
June 20, PM
Our group’s last stop on our first full day in Israel (after Azekah, Beth Shemesh, and Mareshah, where we had lunch in an olive grove—not to be confused with an Olive Garden) was Lachish.
On top of the tel at Lachish Like the previous places, Lachish (pronounced la-KEESH) was a town in the Shephelah, between the coastal plain to the west and the Judean mountains...
