Last week’s Origins Online blog post explored views expressed in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) about the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Women winning the right to vote was itself a revolution. It undermined the idea that men represented their families in public life. […]
It has been a century since the United States ratified and certified the 19th Amendment to the Constitution–in August 1920. The 19th Amendment was in one sense the culmination of more than a century of activism, perhaps most famously associated with the “Declaration of Sentiments” […]
“Diphtheria in Paterson” the headline read. The article announced that School No. 12 in the city’s New Holland neighborhood was closed after twelve students had died from the infection. The building stood at 33-41 Bergen St., the center of an area city officials described as […]
“What’s happening is unprecedented!” I keep hearing people say that about Covid-19 (a coronavirus). Some seem to mean that a pandemic like this is unprecedented. Others mean that the public health response—shutting down schools, sporting events, perhaps eventually churches, etc.—is unprecedented. Neither is unprecedented, really. […]
What shapes an identity? What makes a community? I grew up in Dutch Reformed immigrant communities in towns and rural areas in Ontario, Canada, in the 1970s and early 1980s. My father was the “dominee” in a series of congregations from the Ottawa region to […]
Our traditions usually feel age-old, as if we’ve always done them that way. But those traditions often are recent in origin or at least recent in the peculiar way we celebrate them. This is true of our “liturgies” of Christmas and the New Year. In […]
Origins Online? Why? I am a digital person. I have a blog and several social media accounts. But I remember when life was analog. I learned to type on a manual typewriter in the early 1980s. In college I wrote papers and an undergraduate thesis […]