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Posts from the ‘Consumerism’ Category

Jan 26

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Play Without Me

I’ve spent a good chunk of the past day and a half or so in a hotel room while my wife attends a conference. This has afforded me the delightful privilege of uninterrupted time for catching up on a bit of reading, napping, going for short walks. And for watching sports.

I love sports. I have always loved sports, whether this meant playing or watching. As with many Canadian kids, when I was younger it was mostly about hockey, but I could watch pretty much anything—football, basketball, skiing, tennis, track and field…. Even baseball, if I was particularly desperate. Not curling or golf, though. Never those. And not boxing (we had mercifully not yet been presented with the disgusting abomination that is UFC at that point). Even as a child, I understood that one must have standards. Read more

Oct 31

Planted: Book Review

I distinctly remember the first time I heard about the work of A Rocha, a Christian conservation and stewardship organization that began in Portugal through the work of Peter and Miranda Harris, and has since branched out around the world. I was sitting in a first year Christian Thought and Culture class at Regent College in 2005 and Peter Harris was lecturing on creation care. Read more

Jun 11

3 Comments

Value Added

This morning was an errand-running, back-and-forthing, radio-in-the-car-listening kind of morning. Part of the time was spent listening to an interview with the “The Minimalists.”Ryan Nicodemus and Joshua Fields Milburn are currently on a mini-tour through Alberta to promote their book called Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life. It’s a familiar enough riches to rags kind of story. A couple of young, single, fabulously wealthy young men gradually discover that money and stuff can’t buy fulfillment and happiness and they decide to downsize. They flee the trappings of corporate America for the mountains of Montana where they live simply, write books, start a website and a small indie publishing house, and do all kinds of other things to spread the gospel of simple and intentional living. Wonderful stuff.

Today, however, was not the morning for me to hear the clarion call to simplicity and minimal living. Today is a day when I am feeling less than enthusiastic about the merits of smaller and less.  Read more

May 28

8 Comments

For Sale

I spent part of this past weekend reading Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble. The book is about the personalization of the Internet—about how companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon (to name just a few) are buying and selling information about us in order to “customize” search engine results, provide “recommendations” based on past purchases and assumed preferences, to suggest links and articles, to “connect” us with like-minded people or potential romantic partners, etc. Pretty thoughtful of them, right? I thought so too. Read more

Apr 18

Give Me an Answer… Now!

Among the lessons we are learning with each large-scale tragedy in the digital age, is that our insatiable appetite for “news,” for answers, for solutions can and does lead to some fairly shoddy journalism. In a world where traditional news sources must compete with social media and public journalism, the only thing worse than not getting the story right is not getting the story first. And so we see predictable results like the ones that have been on display since the bombing in Boston on Monday (and which will no doubt continue with today’s tragedy in Texas). We have a suspect… No, wait, we don’t… The suspect is of x ethnicity… No, wait, that was inaccurate… There were x number of people killed… No, wait, that’s not exactly true… And on and on it goes. Read more

Feb 5

14 Comments

Sex and Spectacle—This is Prophetic?

Like hundreds of millions of my fellow humans, I spent part of Sunday watching the Super Bowl. I don’t particularly care for American football (I prefer the real version, where they don’t wear armour and stop for a break every 10 seconds or so), but we were invited to someone’s place to watch the game, and there was to be good food and good people present, so off I went. And, leaving aside the mind-numbing tedium of so much advertising and hype and endless time outs (some unexpected) and the bizarre pre- mid- , and post-game commentary about how God may or may not have been involved in the outcome, it was a pretty good game.   Read more

Aug 27

14 Comments

Difference as Essence

It is not at all uncommon for me, as a pastor, to encounter some variation of the question, “So, what’s the deal with all the different denominations in Christianity? Why can’t you all agree on anything?!” Read more

Jul 20

4 Comments

The Scratching of Itches

Regular readers of this blog will know that the subject of my masters thesis a few years ago was the rise of “The New Atheism” (the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett) and that I interpreted this phenomenon not as the inevitable triumph of scientific rationality over superstition (as many of the authors were fond of claiming) but as a form of protest atheism against the evil in the world and against a God that they expected better from.

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Jan 12

3 Comments

Freedom From Ourselves

I’ve come across this in a number of places this week… Apparently, you can now purchase software to force yourself off the internet. Freedom is a program designed to keep you offline for up to eight hours at a time, freeing you up to be creative, productive, on task, and healthy and happy to boot, no doubt. Technology to save us from technology. Just what we need. Read more

Nov 15

Less Than Perfect

One of the “joys” of driving around town with my kids has been my forced reacquaintance with top-40 radio. For some reason, my children don’t seem to appreciate listening to CBC Radio One, and it usually takes approximately thirty seconds of time in the car before we’re bouncing along down the highway to the latest offering from whatever band or artist is currently enjoying/milking their moment in the sun. It’s been remarkable to hear the many different ways in which the same four chords and the same two or three themes can be employed to produce an astonishing amount of truly abysmal music. Read more

Oct 21

9 Comments

Peace, Pietism, and Personal Branding

Part of this week was spent at a gathering of Alberta Mennonite pastors just north of Calgary. The drive alone would have made the trip worth it. I had forgotten how spectacularly colourful autumn in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains can be! More importantly, though, it was a good opportunity to connect with new colleagues, as well as to get a sense of some of the strengths, challenges and theological perspectives of a conference that is still fairly new to me. Read more

Oct 4

11 Comments

Guilt and Gratitude (Gil Dueck)

On the drive in to work today, the radio airwaves were abuzz with conversation about “Occupy Wall Street”—a series of demonstrations in New York City against the economic inequities created/sustained by the global financial system.  Too many resources in the hands of too few, too much greed and corruption, too much abuse of power, etc, etc.  The voices on the radio were full of passion, moral outrage, and conviction that this movement was the beginning of “something big.” Read more

Sep 21

8 Comments

“We Are Distracting Ourselves Into Spiritual Oblivion”

I’m in the midst of a very busy stretch right now, so there’s not a lot of time for original posts. This morning, however, in the midst of my busyness, I came across a few prescient quotes from Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing on the struggles we often have with paying attention to and nourishing our spiritual lives. Rolheiser identifies three main things that work against what he calls a sense of “interiority,” and all three seem to pretty  much hit the nail on the head: narcissism, pragmatism, and unbridled restlessness. Here’s a bit of what I read prior to heading out into another busy (!) day: Read more

Aug 16

31 Comments

Run For It

Conversations with a few friends over the last little while have got me toying with the idea of attempting a half-marathon later this year. I have taken a few halting steps (literally and metaphorically) towards this goal in the last few days, but it remains to be seen if these will be sustained. It’s not hard to jog for a few kilometres in the midst of what has been a glorious Alberta summer, but when the cold and the wind make their inevitable appearance? Well, let’s just say that my resolve will likely face a more formidable test. Read more

Feb 22

9 Comments

Religion as Interior Decorating

Because it is loosely related to themes under discussion here over the last little while, and because it is a pretty accurate reflection of current religious appetites (especially here on the west coast), and because it is pretty amusing, and because, well, I just like posting David Bentley Hart quotes: Read more

Jan 24

41 Comments

On “Relevance”

Over at Faith and Leadership, Timothy Larsen has posted a withering critique of the church’s never-ending pursuit of the Holy Grail of “relevance.” It’s a pretty short article, and well worth the read. If you are at all involved in church leadership and recognize some of your own experience here, perhaps you will be emboldened and spurred on to determined new heights of (appropriate) irrelevance. If nothing else, perhaps it will evoke a kind of grim laughter for those who have spent any time at all in and around certain expressions of North American church life. Here are a few memorable quotes from what I found to be an insightful (if disturbing) article. Read more

Jan 11

13 Comments

The Church, It is a-Changing

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

Jun 14

32 Comments

The Naked Anabaptist 6: Justice

Well, I am moving at a downright glacial pace to the conclusion of my series on Stuart Murray’s The Naked Anabaptist. If anyone’s still following along, I’m on to the the sixth of Stuart Murray’s seven core convictions of Anabaptists: Read more

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