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Posts by Ryan

May 23

Religion and Violence: An Interesting Conversation

Some friends are visiting from Alberta and we spent part of yesterday over at a market in North Vancouver. After a bit of shopping our friends’ kids were getting a little restless so we camped out in the play area for a while and let them run off some steam with the other kids. As we were sitting around watching the kids play, we struck up a conversation with a gentleman who was there taking care of his granddaughter. After a bit of pleasant small-talk, the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, to where everyone’s from and what they do. Read more

May 17

2 Comments

Rippling

Richard Handler is, as far as I can gather, the resident philosopher at the CBC, and I’ve come to enjoy reading his articles since I first came across him several months ago (officially, he’s the producer of the CBC radio program Ideas). This week’s article deals with the subject of death—our omnipresent fear of it and one way of dealing with it from an unbeliever’s perspective. Read more

May 12

3 Comments

The World According to lululemon

Like the dutiful Vancouver husband/father that I am, I marched off to lululemon on Saturday to see if I could find my wife a gift worthy of both her maternal skills and her status as an emerging distance runner. lululemon is a Vancouver company famous mainly (I think) for its yoga-wear (although I couldn’t help but notice that their tags say “designed in Vancouver, made in Cambodia”). At any rate, it is, apparently, where all the cool moms get their workout gear so off I went to see what I could find. Read more

May 9

12 Comments

The Peculiar Human Organism

One of the central components of my thesis (which is, mercifully, coming closer to completion) is that the new atheist account of reality is not “deep” enough—it does not provide a rich or satisfying enough account of the phenomenology of being human. Huge swaths of human existential concerns are relegated to the realm of evolutionary peculiarities or “misfirings” in the attempt to squeeze everything into what John Haught has called an “explanatory monism” which assumes that one mode of explanation—the scientific one—is all we need. This reductive approach to human beings is then held alongside (awkwardly and incoherently, in my view) an arrogated moral authority in the attempt to discredit the very religious traditions which it is unwittingly borrowing from. Read more

May 5

2 Comments

A Circuitous Path to Environmentalism

When I was a kid I distinctly remember feeling, at times, somewhat resentful of my “Mennonite-ness.” It wasn’t anything distinctly theological (although like many kids, I suppose, there were moments when I didn’t like being “the Christian” amongst a group of friends who mostly were not) or cultural (I don’t recall particularly liking borscht at the time, but ours was not a family that clung to any of the typical cultural identifiers of German “Mennonite-ness” too fiercely). I knew enough Christians to mitigate the unpleasantness produced by my status as a “cognitive minority,” and there were enough sweet German pastries to offset those Mennonite dishes that happened to offend my palate. No, the source of my resentment lay elsewhere. Read more

Apr 25

9 Comments

Ehrman and Wright on the Problem of Suffering

The following exchange on beliefnet is worth checking out for those interested in the problem of suffering and evil, and how the biblical narrative addresses (or fails to address) it. Bart Ehrman is a former Christian and professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina who has recently authored God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer. N.T. Wright is a biblical theologian, the Bishop of Durham, and the author of numerous books on the the historical Jesus and the early church, as well as, more relevant to this discussion, Evil and the Justice of God. Read more

Apr 22

4 Comments

A Strange Salvation

One of the dangers of choosing a thesis topic related to a relatively recent (and controversial) socio-cultural phenomenon is that there is invariably a lot of material produced on the subject that one should at least attempt to keep abreast of while writing. In the case of the phenomenon that is the new atheism, this is proving to be a monumental task. Read more

Apr 18

2 Comments

Writing Space

A while back I came across this interesting pictorial feature on the spaces where writers write. Perhaps it is just the myopia and delusions of self-importance produced by spending days on end in an office trying to bang out a thesis which leads me to believe that others might be interested in such a thing, but I needed a diversion, and snapped a few pictures of the space where I spend a good part of my days. Not quite as inspiring as some of the photographs from The Guardian (Hilary Mantel’s is among my favourites), but a place that I have grown rather attached to… Read more

Apr 14

15 Comments

How Do You Know?

This weekend, a friend alerted me to an interesting DVD special where four of the more prominent atheists out there right now (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) get together for a round-table discussion. The two hour unmoderated discussion is, interestingly, entitled “The Four Horsemen“—a reference, presumably, to the protagonists’ understanding of themselves as the agents entrusted with the hastening of the demise of the blight upon human history that is religion.
Read more

Apr 7

72 Comments

Offended by God?

Over the course of my thesis research over the last year or so, I have come across a lot of different reasons for doubting the existence of God. One major stumbling block for those who reject Christianity is those parts of the Bible which seem to justify actions that we consider to be culturally backward, confusing, and irrelevant or, even worse, immoral. And I think that most Christians, if they’re honest, will agree that there are parts of the Bible that they find baffling, frustrating, or, possibly, just plain offensive. Read more

Mar 29

9 Comments

Dostoevsky and Dawkins on the Significance of Origins

There are few things better than getting free books. Last week a friend of mine happened to find himself helping clean out the basement of James Houston (one of the founders of Regent College) and was rewarded with a stack of books for his troubles, some of which, due to my friend’s generosity, found their way into my hands. Among these books is Houston’s two-volume compilation of various “letters of faith” written down through the ages and arranged into a year-long collection of daily readings. Read more

Mar 24

5 Comments

I Wish Jesus Didn’t Have to Die

Last Thursday I took my kids with me to our church’s Maundy Thursday service. I wasn’t really sure how they would react.  It is, after all, a fairly somber and dark service, whose purpose is to lead its participants through the fearful events of Jesus’ final days. I had some reservations about even exposing a couple of impressionable six-year-olds to the full weight of the Easter story, but my apprehension intensified when they informed me, after watching a steady stream of volunteers moving to the front to read the selected Scripture readings, that they wanted to read one too. Read more

Mar 23

An Easter Quote

[T]hough the historical arguments for Jesus’s bodily resurrection are truly strong, we must never suppose that they will do more than bring people to the questions faced by Thomas, Paul, and Peter, the questions of faith, hope, and love. We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like lighting a candle to see whether the sun had risen. What the candles of historical scholarship will do is to show that the room has been disturbed, that it doesn’t look like it did last night, and that would-be normal explanations for this won’t do. Maybe, we think after the historical arguments have done their work, maybe morning has come and the world has woken up. But to investigate whether this is so, we must take the risk and open the curtains to the rising sun. When we do so, we won’t rely on the candles anymore, not because we don’t believe in evidence and argument but because they will have been overtaken by a larger reality from which they borrow, to which they point, and in which they will find a new and larger home. All knowing is a gift from God, historical and scientific knowing no less than that of faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.

N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Mar 17

4 Comments

Signs of Life

Anyone who is a parent of small children will have first-hand experience of the sheer volume of clutter that can be accumulated by the simple presence of little people in the house. With each passing day, the mountain of “stuff” seems to get bigger and bigger and when you’re living in a limited amount of space this stuff can get, well, pretty annoying. Half-finished drawings, completed and uncompleted assignments from school, innumerable stuffed animals, little cars, hockey sticks, crayons, gum and candy wrappers, jewelry, dolls, music papers, books… on and on the list goes. And as exhausting as it is to catalogue this endless collection of items that somehow find their way into our house, it’s even more frustrating to be faced with it at the end of a long day when the kids are finally in bed. Read more

Mar 15

4 Comments

Worth Reading

I came across two pieces of writing today well worth taking the time to have a look at. First, there’s an excellent article by Tom Ryan recently posted at The Other Journal. Here’s a little excerpt from what is an excellent challenge to the church to be honest about both the the inherent limitations (epistemological and otherwise) of being human, and of the uniquely human capacity for spiritual transformation in and through doubt: Read more

Mar 7

40 Comments

The New Atheism as Inadequate Theodicy

Another shameless self-promotion alert!

The Other Journal is an online journal that explores a whole range of issues related to the intersection of theology and culture. This month their focus is atheism, and they’ve been gracious enough to publish an article I wrote which attempts to summarize the main gist of my thesis. From now on whenever the inevitable “so what are you writing about?” question comes up, I can just refer them here…

If you’re interested, here’s the link.

Mar 4

2 Comments

Wishful Thinking

“Hope” and “change” are words that are being slung around quite regularly lately. From Obama, Clinton and McCain south of the border to Ed Stelmach in my home province of Alberta to the eminently hopeful Oprah Winfrey, everybody’s selling something revolutionary—something which will offer us a brighter future, one in which things will, finally, change for the better. Hope might not be very realistic, and it may be historically unjustified, but it certainly does sell, as politicians (and Christopher Hitchens) know as well as anyone. Read more

Feb 29

1 Comment

Googling Eschatology

This article from today’s Globe and Mail caught my attention if only because I had a conversation with a friend after hockey on Saturday night where he described a virtually identical situation. He was tucking his daughter in at night and she asked him “dad, when does the world end?” Like the author of this article, who recounts how she dealt with her four-year-old’s “where do we go when we die?” question, he was dumbfounded and didn’t quite know how to respond. The guy beside him said “just do what I do whenever my son asks me a question I don’t know the answer to—tell her you’ll look it up on the internet later”—an option also considered by the boy with the existential crisis in the article. Read more

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