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Posts by Ryan

Aug 10

8 Comments

Personal Relationships

One of the things that I have found frustrating at various points throughout my life is how the language of “personal relationship” is used in (usually evangelical) Christian contexts. Often times, the end goal of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection was (and is) described as some variation of providing a way for human beings to have a “personal relationship” with God. What is needed, we are often told, is to invite Jesus into our “heart” to be our “personal saviour” and then begin cultivating our “personal relationship” with him via an amalgam of pious-sounding, mostly solitary activities. Of course this isn’t true across the board, but it’s true in enough contexts to have fairly broad traction in many denominational and cultural contexts. Read more

Aug 7

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Fidelity

This is henceforth going to be required reading for any and all pre-marital sessions I am a part of.

I don’t necessarily agree with every aspect of how the author diagnoses the problem, and I might have some questions about her “decision” not to suffer, but what a breath of fresh-air in the divorce-happy, narcissistic culture we live in!

Aug 3

24 Comments

Sad Stories

Yesterday I was reading Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes while my son sat across the table munching away on a late breakfast. It’s a magnificent book that tracks the journey of an African girl who gets taken from her home, sold into slavery, and spends the bulk of her lifetime in conditions of appalling cruelty and inhumanity a world away from her home. It is a beautifully told tale of an incredibly strong, courageous, and good woman, but it is also a story of unspeakable suffering, depravity, and loss. It is a story that does not shrink from laying bare the evil of which human beings are capable. Read more

Jul 26

3 Comments

God Has No Grandchildren

From Richard Rohr’s Radical Grace:

Every generation has to be converted anew. Each generation has to know for itself the fidelity of God. Each generation has to do its own homework and walk its own journey of search and surrender. No person, ritual, or institution can finally do that for you. There are no spiritual coat tails on which to ride, they just give us a good head start.

It’s not enough to say that my mother was Catholic, my father was Christian, or “I am a son of Abraham” as Jesus put it. Until you come to that time in your life when you choose that you have been chosen, when you accept that you have been totally accepted, the real process of personal transformation has not begun. God has no grandchildren, it seems. Only children! And mercifully, many, many of them, because there are as many and varied journeys as there are people.

Jul 21

13 Comments

Thinking your Way to Faith

A while back, I had a conversation with a young couple who had differing religious perspectives about how they anticipated raising future children. One of the options floated about was something like this: “We’ll just raise them ‘neutral’; we’ll expose them to as many religious and irreligious options as possible and let them make up their own minds.” Well, that sure sounds admirable enough. Give them the choice. Don’t stuff anything down their throats. No indoctrination or coercion whatsoever. What could be more honouring of the individuality and freedom of our children than that? Read more

Jul 17

7 Comments

Christian Pluralism

I finished Dallas Willard’s Knowing Christ Today a few weeks ago, but I still find myself returning to it from time to time. It’s a thought-provoking book—one that I would highly recommend reading. Especially interesting was his chapter on “Christian pluralism.” Ever since I was a kid, I remember wondering how/if God could justly condemn those who didn’t make an explicit verbal profession of (the correct version of) faith in Jesus when so many throughout history have never even heard of Jesus (which is what I was told, by various people at various times). That sure seemed, well, immoral and for some time it was a significant stumbling block for me. Read more

Jul 12

4 Comments

The Two Mountains

This morning our church was privileged to have a guest speaker to deliver the sermon—my twin brother Gil. Unsurprisingly (and completely unbiasedly), I thought it was a great sermon. Gil was preaching on John 4 and the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. There’s a lot going on in this passage, but Gil zeroed in on the two mountains that the woman queried Jesus about: Read more

Jul 11

7 Comments

Because the Bible Says So

A few days ago, Arts & Letters Daily linked to a book review called “Does God Hate Women” from The New Statesman. On one level, the book being reviewed seems fairly unremarkable. It predictably and, in some cases justifiably, indicts religions for their historical subjugation of women and “exposes” God and his followers as being anti-women. Those religious folks who have the audacity to claim that religion might have played any kind of emancipatory historical role for women are mocked and described as engaging in “theological contortions” that are untrue to the real nature of their religions (which, presumably, their atheist critics alone understand).  Read more

Jul 6

19 Comments

Hockey Heaven

Well, we’re nicely into July now so I figured it was high time for a post about… hockey? What can I say—I’m as Canadian as they come. Like many kids growing up on the prairies, I was obsessed with hockey as a child. I played on ice, on grass, and on concrete. I played table hockey and video game hockey. I watched hockey religiously every Saturday night (we didn’t have a TV for part of my childhood so every Saturday night my brother and I would race across the yard to my grandparents’ house to watch Hockey Night in Canada on their black and white television). I collected hockey cards and my brother and I would spend hours arranging them according to every conceivable category, memorizing endless numbers of players and their statistics along the way. Read more

Jul 1

8 Comments

Stuck in the Cave

It’s fairly common these days to see religious belief presented as a kind of primitive holdover from our superstitious past. So in that sense, yesterday’s article from the National Post‘s religion blog, “Holy Post” was nothing new. What was interesting was the angle Prof. Hank Davis has apparently taken in his book called Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in the Modern World. The objects of Davis’s criticism—what he sees as prime examples of “caveman logic”—are the purposive phrases we use in everyday life. “It was a sign,” “thank God,” even “good luck”—we use these phrases seemingly instinctively (in fact, Christians seem to have a whole separate arsenal of them: “it was a ‘God thing’,” “it’s all part of God’s plan,” etc.). But do they make any contact with what is objectively true? For Davis, the answer is obviously “no.” Read more

Jun 29

9 Comments

Laughing With

Thanks to Mike for highlighting Regina Spektor’s performance of “Laughing With” last Friday on The Late Show.  Great song, fascinating lyrics.  Amazing, the places where questions of theodicy will make an appearance… Read more

Jun 29

Some Welcome Counsel

My brother just sent me the link to a series of posts by William Willimon where he offers advice for those starting out in pastoral ministry. I’m approaching the end of my first year of pastoral work, and frequently found myself nodding and mm-hmm-ing throughout this very helpful set of posts. They are very balanced and wise reflections from someone who has been down the road and knows what he’s talking about. There is much worth thinking about (and implementing) in this post, but two quotes stood out. Read more

Jun 21

12 Comments

Freedom, Decency, and the MMVA’s

A few weeks ago I discovered that one of the many useless channels that I am now privileged to have access to as a cable television subscriber is a channel called Much Music (I wasn’t aware that my TV went above channel 100… or what combination of buttons on my remote would lead me to this uncharted territory; for most of my life, I’ve made do with five channels or less).  I used to sneak a peak at MM whenever I could as a teenager because I rarely got to see music videos and was strangely fascinated by this brave new (at least to me) world of music and entertainment. Read more

Jun 18

17 Comments

How Do We Know God?

A quick look at the calendar shows that we are coming up on the one year anniversary of a very happy day in my life—the completion of my thesis. This is probably one of those anniversaries that will remain significant in my mind only, but I figured it’s as good a time as any to reflect on the subject matter I spent sixteen months of my life reading/writing about. I’ve continued to follow the exploits of folks like Dawkins and Hitchens over the last year as well as those who “defend the faith” against them. Mostly, the tone and the content of the discussions have seemed fairly belligerent, sterile, and unhelpful to me. The same old arguments, the same old defenses. People on both sides simply dig in their heels, talk a little louder (or more condescendingly), and try to prove who’s really the smartest. All in all, it’s not very inspiring stuff. On this level, I do not miss the debate. Read more

Jun 13

13 Comments

Can Love Be Trusted?

Related to the previous post about what makes a life “full” or “good, I came across this fantastic (and sobering—be sure to read the last sentence at least twice!) quote from Dallas Willard’s Knowing Christ Today about love as a way of life: Read more

Jun 12

5 Comments

Life to the Full

Last night I spent some time with a group of young adults discussing John 10:10 and what it means to have “life to the full.” What is Jesus promising in this passage? Is it just a spiritual thing? Is he referring to eternal life? A quality or character of life on this earth? What does it mean to say that Jesus came that we might have “life to the full” in a world where so many (including Jesus’ own followers) suffer tremendously? Is fullness related to our material lot in life? How? And, more personally, how “full” are our lives really? Is there a notable quality to our lives that is absent in those who pay no heed to Christ? It was a very interesting conversation… Read more

Jun 8

16 Comments

Apatheism

A friend sent me a link to this article by CBC journalist Neil MacDonald last week.  Apparently, MacDonald locates himself within a growing minority that are increasingly finding the courage to “come out” as non-believers in a cultural milieu that frowns upon lack of professed religious belief (MacDonald is a Canadian living and working in the USA).  Unlike committed atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, however, MacDonald claims simply not to care about the matter. Read more

Jun 5

5 Comments

Willard on Faith, Myth Making, and the “Intellectual Slums”

I’ve been looking forward to Dallas Willard’s latest book for a while now, and was happy to see it arrive on my doorstep yesterday afternoon.  Willard is tackling the question of whether/how the claims of faith constitute genuine knowledge (as opposed to private beliefs, opinions, emotions, blind commitments, etc).  I’ve only had time to read the introduction thus far, but it looks like a very intriguing, not to mention timely, project.  Here’s a few quotes from Knowing Christ Today: Read more

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