Jan 19
Last Thursday afternoon was an afternoon like many others, for me. The workday was winding down; I was cleaning up a few loose ends before heading home to take my daughter to the pool for swim club. In many ways, it had been a good afternoon—nice and quiet, mostly uninterrupted, and ideal for sermon writing and reflection. Read more
Jan 18
I am in the midst of a fairly busy stretch of sermon preparation, worship scheduling, article writing, class planning, etc, etc, not to mention the ordinary demands of life with a young family, so apologies for the lack of substantive and/or original posting around here over the last little while. I hope to rectify this deficiency shortly, but in the meantime, here’s another arresting quote from William Willimon’s Why Jesus?: Read more
Jan 14
Yesterday was one of those happy days when a little brown box full of books shows up on my doorstep, and I had just enough time to grab one of them as I ran out the door with my daughter to swimming lessons. Twenty minutes later, after collapsing poolside nearing the end of what felt like a long day, I read these words that open William Willimon’s Why Jesus?: Read more
At any given time, I have between 25-30 unpublished, half/barely-started posts or links to interesting articles occupying space in my “drafts” folder. Needless to say, things can get buried pretty easily, so I try to periodically root through this folder to see what I once thought was interesting/worth posting on, and to determine what might need to see the light of day (or be consigned to the cyber-scrap heap!). Read more
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my post “Pockets” has been featured this month over at High Calling’s “Around the Network.” It’s always nice to be recognized—especially in the context of writers and thinkers whose work you respect and admire. Be sure to check out some of the other posts that are highlighted as well. I’ve only made it through a few so far this morning, but I have thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated each contribution I have read. Read more
Jan 5
While I’m still in the reflection mode occasioned by a new year and a trip through my journals, I’ve been thumbing through a few of the books that I was reading and reflecting upon in my younger years. Lesslie Newbigin was a writer and a thinker that was immensely helpful to me as I was beginning to negotiate such themes as the uniqueness of Christianity, the nature and limits of reason and faith, and the shape of discipleship. Newbigin’s books were a gift then, and they remain so today. Read more
Yesterday was a quiet day at home and my wife was doing some sorting and cleaning around the house. Around mid-afternoon, she emerged from one room with a large stack of papers and presented them to me with a little smile on her face. I looked at the first page on the stack and knew why she was smiling. The pile of paper was a prayer journal that I had kept during my mid twenties. During this apparently pious (and prolific!) period of my life, I journaled nearly every day, filling a number of thick notebooks with my religious musings, longings, entreaties, and expressions of thanks. Read more
So Advent has come and gone and with it, the liturgical theme of “waiting” for God. Every year, we rehearse the story, we light the candles, we read the Scriptures, and we wait for the Christ child. Every year, we are told, Jesus comes to us anew. Every year, our waiting ends on Christmas day only to begin again next year. Waiting, it sometimes seems, is endless. Read more
I came across this image today and couldn’t resist posting it.
There are probably a number of ways of interpreting it on this Christmas Eve, 2010. Does it portray the decreasing relevance of Christmas in a mostly secular culture? The slow demise of the hope and faith of the season into a sea of nihilistic postmodern despair? The long overdue demise of the confused mixture of pagan and Christian imagery so prominent in our culture this time of year? Some combination of the above? Read more
An interesting article from last week’s National Post… Apparently, youngsters in Quebec daycare centres will henceforth be allowed to see religious imagery and symbols but not to have them explained: Read more
I couldn’t help but chuckle at the conclusion of tonight’s edition of Coach’s Corner on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada. Cherry’s shtick was his usual combination of lightly-informed, opinionated bravado and Canadian hockey machismo, but as is increasingly often the case, it was also the opportunity for him to step up his soap box. Read more
Dec 17
This poem came through the inbox today and I thought it was too good not to share. In a season where the words that fill our days are so often kitschy and sales-pitchy, it is refreshing to come across better ones—words that are simple, beautiful, and true. Read more
A post by Andrew Stephens-Rennie over at Empire Remixed has got me thinking about confession. My sense is that confession is seen as something of a dirty word in our culture, conjuring up all kinds of unpleasant images of nosy priests and slavish religious rituals meant to assuage unnecessary guilt. Confession isn’t a popular concept in a self-obsessed culture suspicious of religious power and those who wield it and where we seem to almost instinctively think of ourselves as victims of the myriad forces that act upon us rather than active and willful contributors to the brokenness of our world. Read more
Once a month or so, a few of us head over to the local Presbyterian church to help out with their weekly community lunch. Every week, this church opens its doors to the community for soup, sandwiches, conversation, or just a chance to get out of the rain. The church is located right beside a high school, so they get a lot of high school students, but they also get a small contingent of folks who don’t have a whole lot and could use a hot meal. Read more
Over on a previous post, there has been an interesting conversation going on about the nature of preaching and the role it plays (or ought to play) in the life of the church. A number of issues have been raised, but among the more interesting (and personally relevant!) ones, from my perspective, is the extent to which the task of preaching is used to legitimate the existence of religious “professionals.” Read more
On my walk home from work yesterday, I listened to part of a lecture on the nature of science. The speaker was very matter-of-factly talking about matters of cosmology, describing the forces that contribute to the ongoing operations of the cosmos, the relationship between the sun and the moon and the earth, and the general picture of how life is produced and sustained on this big chunk of rock rotating “as on a spit” around a fiery ball. Throughout the portion I listened to on my walk, the speaker’s voice barely changed in its tone. You could never have guessed that he was speaking about some of the most profound mysteries the human mind has ever approached. He could have been reading the instruction manual on how to clean my barbecue, for all his voice gave away. Read more
Dec 2
A friend sent this to me yesterday and it made me smile. There is probably no shortage of insightful theological/cultural commentary that might be offered on this—something about the irony of the music that once graced the cathedrals of Europe being brought into our modern cathedrals of consumption and hedonism, about the subversiveness of importing the themes of this piece into a secular context, about the potential reorientation of our conceptions of what is important at Christmas etc, etc. Read more
I preached my thirty-sixth sermon yesterday, which, in and of itself, is not a particularly momentous number or occasion, but which nonetheless, was an experience that provoked a bit of reflection. Preaching is a practice that has taken some time for me to grow into. I still find it incredibly odd that people actually entrust me with twenty minutes of their precious time on Sunday morning. And I often think that God has an incredible (or incredibly weird?) sense of humour in sticking the introverted kid who talks too fast and stutters too much in front of a microphone every Sunday. Read more
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Rumblings 