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Posts by Ryan

Feb 13

14 Comments

Evil Little Monkeys (And the Things They Can’t Live Without)

A few people in my social orbit have passed along a recent article by Jen Gerson on the demise of the “New Atheism.” I suspect this is because I devoted my master’s thesis to critiquing the movement way back in 2007-08 and people (rightly) assume that I retain something of an interest in the movement. I did not really expect the New Atheism to age well. And it has not. It seems to have, like everything else post-2010, descended into the black hole of identity politics (could a movement whose key voices are older white males really have expected to survive the last decade?!). Additionally, it turns out that people seem to need more to go on existentially than the cold, dreary world of scientific materialism. Again, not exactly a stunner. Read more

Feb 5

6 Comments

“Is Your Eye Evil Because I Am Good?”

I’ve written before about how Jesus’ parables sound different at different stages of one’s life. The story of the lost son, for example, is a story that seems to contain almost the whole of human failure and frustration, hope and longing, love, and desire. I have at various points in my life identified with the recklessly destructive younger son, the self-righteous older brother, and the heartsick father. I doubt I’m terribly unique in this. The story sounds different at forty-eight than it did at twenty-two. It’s the kind of story that can keep one company for a lifetime, opening new truths, unlocking new understandings, making sense of some of the terrain covered along the way. Read more

Jan 16

3 Comments

On Manifesting

I hope you all enjoyed the holiday season and are manifesting a life giving 2024 for you and your loved ones. 

So began an email that I received this morning. Which, I confess, kind of put me in a bad mood. What kind of an idiotic greeting…?! I spluttered in my brain. Whatever I was “manifesting” at the moment, it would likely not have been very life-giving for myself or for my loved ones. Hopefully nobody was within the blast radius of whatever corner of the universe my thoughts were commandeering at that moment. Read more

Jan 9

1 Comment

To Bow Down and Scream

I recently sat with someone who was dying. Yes, I know we’re all dying, but in this particular person’s case, death had moved from the category of “abstraction” to “unavoidable reality.” Which is always a difficult movement, and one with no small amount of anguish attached to it. This suffering is not unto death. So said Jesus about Lazarus’s predicament to Mary and Martha, at least in his majesty King James’ version of the gospel of John. But so much suffering is. Unto death, that is. Or, at the very least, a reminder that it’s coming. Read more

Jan 3

7 Comments

In Search of a Mea Culpa

So, Harvard president Claudine Gay has resigned. This has felt inevitable pretty much from the moment she and two of her Ivy League colleagues couldn’t bring themselves to offer an unambiguous response to the question of whether or not calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment in the wake of October 7. It felt like even more of a foregone conclusion after evidence of multiple instances of plagiarism in her published work began to surface. Read more

Dec 31

6 Comments

The Year of Our Lord

Today marks the last day of the year of our Lord 2023. Usually, this time of year has me scrambling some nostalgic year-end-ish kind of post together. I’ll often check my statistics from the last year, highlight the five most read posts, and write a short blurb about each. I’ll say thanks for reading and hope that all of this might give this little blog a bit of a bump in views as one year ends and another begins. Read more

Dec 29

The Village

My wife and I were recently wandering around the shops in Whitefish, MT where we had decamped for the weekend to celebrate our anniversary. Many of the shops sold various knickknacks (coffee mugs, tea towels, greeting cards) with funny, often irreverent little sayings on them, which I sniggered and guffawed at, dutifully capturing the greatest hits on my iPhone and sending them to my friends back home while my wife perused slightly more highbrow fare. If you think that sounds like a rather juvenile and unimpressive way to spend part of an afternoon, well, you’re not wrong. In my defence… ah, who am I kidding, I have none. Read more

Dec 25

The Gift Too Great to Make Sense Of

What can I give him, poor as I am? What indeed: for God today has recreated the world and refashioned you and me in his own image. God today has burst open the frontiers of all possible and imaginable experience and come among us. The Maker of all reaches out his hand and touches [us]. And for that reaching out there is no exchange, there is no fit return that we can make. God’s pure, causeless, gratuitous love can have no answer, except some faint fumbling echo of that very gratuity and pointlessness itself; the gift too great to make sense of.

— Rowan Williams, from a sermon called “Christmas Gifts” in Open to Judgment

Image source.

Dec 21

4 Comments

God, is that You Calling?

At a Christmas party last week, I became the proud owner of an orange rotary telephone. This artifact came into my possession via a gift exchange where guests were instructed not to buy anything. Typically what happens at these kinds of gift exchanges is that people either set to work doing virtuous things like baking a loaf of banana bread or they rummage around in their house for something that either don’t need, don’t like, or think would make for a hilarious gag. I’m pretty sure some of the gifts at this particular party have been circulating for at least half a decade. It’s all great fun. Read more

Dec 19

3 Comments

The Thing

My son is just over 6’10 and he hates basketball. How much fatherly despair can fit in one sentence, I wonder? Far more than is good or healthy or sane, to put it mildly. Right around the time he passed his dear old dad in height (I think he was eight or nine) and it became obvious that his height might just confer an athletic advantage or two, said dad began to invest considerable and wildly disproportionate emotional energy into his son’s sporting pursuits. Basketball, obviously. Volleyball. Hockey, for a short time. Football, as middle school gave way to high school. Without exception, my son’s interest in these sports failed to even come close to his father’s. His general approach to sports could be summed up in a word. Actually a lonely syllable would suffice. Meh.

Read more

Dec 15

1 Comment

A Soul’s Worth

Last year around this time, I wrote a short piece on my first Christmas at the jail, about how Christmas carols sound different surrounded by plastic and concrete than they do in candle-lit church sanctuaries, about how lines like “And you, beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low” or “For sinners here, the silent Word is pleading” seem somehow more urgent or pressing or something here. The familiar words come crashing into the ugliness of the human condition from out there in “abstract theology land” with startling force. Read more

Dec 13

11 Comments

The Mysterians

Last night, I spoke with a friend about prayer. A mutual acquaintance had received bad news. What do we pray for? Peace? Healing? Comfort? Strength to endure? “Thy will be done” (those four words we pray when we run out of ideas, the last best expression of hope and resignation whereby we collapse into the words of Christ himself)? What does prayer even do? Are we trying to get God to get busy with what he would otherwise be disinclined to do without our entreaties? Does God require arm-twisting? Is there a critical mass of prayer required to move the divine needle? When it comes to the nature of prayer, it doesn’t take too long before we’re in head-scratching territory. It sort of defies airtight explanation. “I pray because Jesus prayed and because he told his followers to pray” can sound like a cop-out. Or it can sound like the deepest, truest thing one could say. Depending on the day. Read more

Dec 5

10 Comments

What if There Isn’t Room in My Heart?

I clicked on the headline somewhat unthinkingly (as I too often do). “The forgotten war in Syria.” It’s a place and a people that has a unique place in my heart given our church’s efforts to sponsor refugees during the Syrian refugee crisis, given the number of words that I wrote and spoke around that time advocating for a compassionate response, given the Syrian men, women, and children that I have come to know in our city over the last eight years or so. I had done a recent presentation on our church’s response to the Syrian crisis at a conference a few weeks ago, so I suppose that contributed to my reasons for clicking the link. But mostly I clicked because the war in Syria had receded into the shadows of my heart and mind and I probably felt like it shouldn’t have. Read more

Dec 1

7 Comments

A House with Many Entrances

It’s been fascinating to observe the ongoing parsing of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion to Christianity. I’ve reflected on it briefly (here and here). This conversion been the subject of conversation with friends and acquaintances. It’s led down all kinds of interesting little trails. What counts as a “legitimate” conversion? It is even right or proper to speak of such a thing? Is the language of conversion simply a way to speak about subjective preference? Can we actually make the argument that some belief systems are “better” or “truer” or “more useful” in the context of pluralism in all its forms? Is “conversion” the right word to use for being persuaded by a cultural or civilizational argument? Should there not be some kind of emotional, spiritual, or affective component to things? How does what we’re converting from affect what we end up converting to? So many questions… Read more

Nov 28

2 Comments

Disneyland

I had barely walked through the door of my office at the jail when a guard showed up. “There’s an inmate who’s been trying to get a hold of a chaplain since Saturday. His kid is in on life support at the hospital. He wants to talk to someone. We suggested “Health Care,” but he wasn’t interested, so…” I gulped. Said I would “take care of it,” whatever that could possibly mean. I leafed quickly through some of the requests that had trickled in over the weekend and noticed two from this poor guy. I’ll call him Terry. Could someone please come see me… pray for me… pray for my son? My heart heaved a little. Read more

Nov 21

6 Comments

All Are Welcome?

“So, I’m getting out tomorrow… and, well, I think I’d like to stay connected, or, you know, kinda figure I need to stay with church and stuff… I dunno, do you have any advice or suggestions?” The guy sitting across from me in bleak, concrete interview room at the jail struggled to make eye contact, shifted around constantly. He had a cut over his eye and had limped noticeably as he walked into the room. He had been semi-regular in my bible studies over the last year or so. He rarely said much, but when he did it was measured and thoughtful. I told him I was happy to hear that he was getting out. He didn’t seem as happy for himself as I was for him. Read more

Nov 16

8 Comments

Tell Me About Your Relationship with Jesus

This was the surprising invitation put to Australian musician Nick Cave on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast recently. Not exactly the sort of thing one expects to hear in a forum typically devoted to the nuts and bolts of music production. But Cave does talk about God rather a lot, so I guess fair game. There was some knowing chuckling and qualifying and maybe a bit of embarrassed hedging. It’s such a retrograde, naïve, provincial question, after all. Who talks about their “relationship with Jesus” anymore, other than perhaps a few benighted yokels from the Bible belt? Right? Read more

Nov 14

5 Comments

Tuesday Miscellany: Wars and Rumours

I sat down in my study this morning in a bit of a state, a bunch of things belligerently crashing around in my head. So, I decided to try to give them some shape. Or at least to let them out. It gets crowded and unruly in there.

***

Paul Kingsnorth is quickly taking up residence in my category of “people who I’ll read anything they write and listen to anything they say.” I’m sure he’ll be delighted to learn this—it’s a very exclusive category. His 2021 article “The Cross and the Machine” is one of my favourite conversion stories ever. His path has wound through the bored religious apathy of childhood, a more determined atheism in young adulthood, a deep love of ecology and environmental activism, Zen Buddhism, Wiccan paganism, and pretty much anything else he could take for a spin. Read more

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