Joining the CC Club
From the “on the off chance you’re interested” file: Today this blog was officially welcomed into the fold of the Christian Century Blog Network: Read more
Posts by Ryan
Oct 5
4 Comments
Parasitic Religion
Yesterday as I was driving around town, I listened to parts of a CBC Radio interview with outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins who was in Canada promoting his new book. Based on what I heard, it was fairly predictable fare—Dawkins delighting in cataloging and heaping scorn upon the exploits of fundamentalist young earth creationists, the program host knowingly mm-hmming and piling on the ridicule. Nothing demonstrates one’s intellectual and moral superiority more ably than making fun of the ignorance and dogmatism of fundamentalists, after all. Read more
A (Mini) Milestone
A few months ago, I came across this picture on Gil’s blog and had a good chuckle. There is much that is true about this caption. Blogs are a dime a dozen, and most vastly overestimate both the scope of their influence and the significance of their content. I printed the picture off and it hangs beside my desk as an omnipresent reminder of the perils of blogging. Read more
Unto You
Walter Brueggemann’s Prayers for a Privileged People arrived in my mailbox this morning. On page one, I read these words: Read more
Consumers vs. Disciples
This morning I was involved in a conversation about “consumer-driven” models of church. Especially in a cultural context where churches find themselves competing for “market-share” with other churches, it becomes quite easy for churches to come to see themselves as “service-providers” in some form or another. People come to us to have their “religious” needs met and we are expected to accommodate them by providing a package that is uplifting, inspiring, intellectually stimulating, or some other desirable adjective along with a whole host of articulated and unarticulated social needs. If we don’t meet these needs appropriately or enthusiastically or sensitively or “relevantly” enough, well, there’s a whole host of other churches that will (or will claim to). That’s what churches are for, after all. Read more
A Pastorally Adequate Theodicy
Way back in my first year as a philosophy student at the University of Lethbridge, I took a class which dealt with the various philosophical responses the problem of evil (free will defense, best-of-all-possible-worlds defense, process-theology defense, etc). The class was taught by a flamboyant, bombastic, atheistic Jew who claimed, nonetheless, to be angry at God and to be determined to personally offend each one of us and force us to abandon our simplistic understandings of important questions like the problem of evil. I think he liked the idea of taking the first class to try to terrify and overwhelm a bunch of 18-19 year old kids (many of whom were “religious” in some form or another) who had never seriously thought about some of these questions. Maybe it made him feel important or smart or irreverent or superior. I don’t know. But at least initially, I wasn’t very impressed. It seemed like a rather adolescent and petulant display and I wasn’t much looking forward to the class. Read more
Faith Waits
Faith is a way of waiting—never quite knowing, never quite hearing or seeing, because in the darkness we are all but a little lost. There is doubt hard on the heels of every belief, fear hard on the heels of every hope, and many holy things lie in ruins because the world has ruined them and we have ruined them. But faith waits, even so, delivered at least from that final despair which gives up waiting altogether because it sees nothing left worth waiting for. Faith waits—for the opening of a door, the sound of footsteps in the hall, that beloved voice delayed, delayed so long that there are times when you all but give up hope of ever hearing it. And when at moments you think you do hear it (if only faintly, from far away) the question is: Can it possibly be, impossibly be, that one voice of all voices?
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark
On Fish Wars and a “Drive-By Culture”
Vancouver Island is not a place known for being a hotbed of some of the “culture wars” that take place south of the border. As far as I’ve been able to tell in one year, it is a very post-Christian environment with a whole bunch of eclectic spiritualities from quasi-paganism to charismatic Christianity to the garden variety unreflective secularism that you see anywhere else in the modern west. Having said all that, I’ve been surprised to notice that the “fish wars” seem to have a small but noticeable presence over here. Read more
Tribes and Translations
Scot McKnight has been blogging about the controversy generated by the TNIV announcement (see here and here for Scot’s thoughts; see also here for discussion on this blog) this week as well and offers the following humorous synopsis of the “tribalism” that accompanies the varied and sundry English translations. I suspect these resonate a bit more deeply south of the border, but they’re recognizable in the Great White North as well (and pretty funny, in my opinion): Read more
It’s 1989 All Over Again!
From the “it’s about time” file comes today’s news that my beloved Calgary Flames have decided to rewind the clock and wear retro jerseys from the 1980’s for five home games this year in order to commemorate their 30th anniversary. These jerseys will always have a special place in my heart. The Flames wore these the night they became the only visiting team ever to hoist the Stanley Cup in the hallowed Montreal Forum (and made a 14 year old boy very happy!). The return of the jerseys are just the first step. I can see it all now… The glory of 1989 is returning! Read more
Lost in Translation
This morning’s tour through the blogosphere led to the discovery that Biblica (formerly the International Bible Society) is giving up on the 2002 revision of the New International Version of the Bible (the TNIV) because of the “mistakes” of this translation. As someone who actually likes the TNIV and uses it somewhat regularly, I was surprised and a little disappointed to learn about this. I realize that the TNIV is not a perfect translation and that, like every translation, there are biases and interpretations that come through, but it’s one that I’ve come to appreciate over the years—not least because of its commitment to render the original text in more gender inclusive language. It’s a translation that I don’t hesitate to recommend to others, whether they are long-time Christians or they’ve never cracked open a Bible in their lives and are just curious about what they might find. Consequently, I was interested to discover which “mistakes” the publishers were talking about. Read more
The Good Life
Those who have been following the previous two discussions about what our response to suffering ought to be, what resources we draw from, and what kinds of ethical paradigms inform how/where we locate suffering might want to check out Gil’s latest post. He’s been reflecting on Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self where Taylor contrasts something like “traditional” ethics, where our vision of goodness and human dignity is grounded in a transcendent God (or Good), and a modern naturalist approach which sees the “good life in terms of a heroic determination to face a meaningless existence with courage.” Read more
What Do We Do With Pain?
I was thinking about the conversation taking place around my previous post as I continued to get acquainted with William Willimon this morning. The conversation is around the proper Christian approach to suffering. How should we suffer? How should we view it? Is it an unwelcome intruder into the very essence of reality? The divinely appointed means through which Christians demonstrate their allegiance to Jesus? A strategy for effective Christian leadership? I think most of us who have been touched by the Suffering Servant have some sense that suffering ought to somehow be different for us even if we’re not sure what that looks like. I don’t know many people who actually desire or welcome pain but I think we intuitively sense that Jesus somehow changes how we look at (or ought to look at) suffering even if we aren’t always very good at articulating how. Read more
“I Know What God Does With Pain”
From the “sobering quotes” file, comes this morning’s offering from Richard Rohr: Read more
A Grand Thing that Ought to Be True
Most of us who have been Christians for a little while or a long while have moments where we wonder if we really are right about this whole God business. Some days it seems like nothing could be more obvious than that there is God out there guiding and sustaining the cosmos; on others, it seems like the remotest of possibilities.
Near the end of Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner quotes a character from a George MacDonald novel who has this to say about this question of questions: Read more
God’s Angry Again…
Yesterday a tornado unexpectedly touched down in Minneapolis. Apparently, according to pastor John Piper—a champion and defender of God’s specific sovereignty over all things—the reason for this ordinary (and, relatively minor—no loss of life or even injury) event has to do with God’s anger at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ECLA) for considering the ordination of homosexuals at their annual convention in the same city that the tornado touched down in. Here is Piper’s conclusion about the “meaning” of this event: Read more
The Whole Vast Drama of Things
Apologies for the lack of posting over the last little while—I find myself going through one of those stretches where I have very little that seems worth saying. Of course one of the benefits of times when words and ideas seem to desert us is that we can lean on and be nourished by the words of others. The writings of Frederick Buechner have often been a source of such words for me. Sometimes I feel that posting long quotes from the work of others is just a way of avoiding the sometimes painful process of writing myself; other times, I just feel grateful to have stumbled across something wise and glad to be able to share it. Read more
The Weeping Mode
As a parent of young children, I often wonder about how much of the pain and brutality of the world we ought to expose our kids to—which conversations do they need to be absent from, which books and films could they do without exposure to, and when it is appropriate to let them in on the secret that the world can sometimes be kind of a nasty place (I suspect it’s quite often not as much of a “secret” to them as we might like to think). There can be a fine line between helping your children see that the world is a safe enough place to love and learn and grow and not shielding from the reality of a messed-up world in desperate need of compassionate, committed, and resourceful people to make it better. Read more
Rumblings 