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Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) and MinnPost (minnpost.com) aired a number of these essays on All Things Considered or published them online. This collection would not exist without the All Things Considered former Producer Jeff Jones, who first welcomed a submission following the Nickel Mines school house massacre. Former assistant MPR News Editor Eric Ringham, whose gracious foreword appears here, encouraged continuing submissions for the commentary page. MinnPost Managing Editor Susan Albright rarely declined a request and, like Eric, offered a wise editor’s pen that improved each essay.

Wipf & Stock has been a joy to work with, thanks to Administrative Assistant Brian Palmer and my editor, Assistant Managing Editor Matthew Wimer, who were a quick email or phone call away during the publishing process.

Professors Esther Cornelius Swenson’s and Willem Zuurdeeg’s collaborative work in the field of analytic philosophy of religion is the indelible ink in which Be Still! is written. Likewise, Kosuke Koyama’s metaphorical theological method and observation that exceptionalism is humanity’s one sin altered the lens through which I have come to see the world. Koyama’s provocative statement is applied here to racial, cultural, religious, national, gender, and species forms of exceptionalism. Thanks to Mark Koyama for permission to include his late father’s faithful testimonies to the reign of God in this collection.

Life is nothing without good friends. Carolyn Kidder and Mona Gustafson Affinito pored over every word, improving the text with valuable comments and the eyes of a copyeditor, although it was the final copyediting of Gillian Littlehale (Gilly Wright’s Red Pen) who whipped the manuscript into final shape. Emily Hedges, Courtenay Martin, Austin Wu, and Dennis Aubrey encouraged me to believe writing and publishing were more than exercises in vanity. Steve Adams, Faith Ralston, Chuck Lieber, and old friends and seminary colleagues Wayne Boulton, Don Dempsey, Dale Hartwig, Harry Strong, Bob Young, and Steve Shoemaker have sustained me through thick and thin. After ten years of sharing our blog, Views from the Edge, Steve Shoemaker’s verse and poetry appear in Be Still! Wayne Boulton, my seminary roommate—fellow Presbyterian teaching elder, scholar, author, faithful friend, and cheerleader—graciously consented to write the introduction for the book.

My deepest thanks goes to my spouse, Kay Stewart, who spent as many hours working on this project as her sometimes cranky, absentminded husband. This collection would not have made it to the publisher were it not for Kay’s daily encouragement, patience, mercy, guidance, and extraordinary wisdom. Kay’s good cheer over morning coffee and interruptions of obsession rescued the text and the author from solitary confinement. Every page has Kay’s fingerprints all over it.

Last, but by no means least, is a group of men who would be shocked to find themselves mentioned anywhere but in a courtroom. “The Brothers of Opal Street,” as they called themselves—eight black homeless former inmates of Eastern State Penitentiary in North Philadelphia—had a farewell conversation in late August 1962, with me, a naive nineteen-year-old church street outreach worker. As we sat on the stoop of a boarded up tenement on Opal Street, they said good-bye with the startling instruction not to return to the ghetto. “Go back to ‘your people’ and change things there. Only when things change there will there be hope for the people here.” What they called “my people” were in the white western suburb of Philadelphia. I have come to believe that last day on Opal Street was its own kind of ordination. This book is in memory of them.