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Posts from the ‘Culture’ Category

May 19

7 Comments

What’s Love Got to Do With It? We Couldn’t Possibly Say…

As I mentioned in the previous post, I spent a lot of time on the road this past weekend. Twenty-six hours in a car on one’s own affords plenty of time for listening to things, and when I wasn’t preparing for the concert by going through U2’s entire catalogue, I listened to a number of podcasts. One of these podcasts, in particular, stood out to me. It was an episode of q—a Canadian culture/current affairs radio program—and the topic under discussion was whether or not love should be part of the sex education curriculum in public schools. Read more

May 13

15 Comments

Five Reasons That I Am Developing a Strong Distaste For “Five Reasons People Are Leaving the Church” Articles

It seems like every second time I open my computer these days I come across the latest instance of what is becoming a very familiar (and obnoxious) brand of writing: the “Five reasons for ____.” genre. Sometimes this takes the form of an “open letter,” a form of writing that is surely unparalleled in its odious ostentatiousness (“Dear church, here’s why no one is interested in you anymore” or “Dear church, let me explain to you why all your young people are leaving,” etc.). Sometimes writers of these pieces come up with really clever and original titles like “Losing My Religion” (I’m sure R.E.M. would be pleased). But more common these days are plain old lists. “Five Reasons Why Nobody Goes to Your Church,” for example, or “Five Ways That You as a Pastor Can Stop Being So Boring and Lifeless” or “Five Ways to Stop Being a Soul-Sucking, Hollow Institution and Start Being Spiritually Vital and Appealing for Twenty-First Century Sophisticates.”

(Those last three may not have been actual titles, but, well, you get the point.) Read more

May 6

2 Comments

Hope and Change

The province of Alberta woke up this morning to, of all things, a majority NDP government. For my American readers, this would be something like the very reddest part of Texas voting in a Democrat. I say “something like” because in reality the Alberta NDPs are probably more centrist than many NDP provincial governments in Canada have been, and because Alberta isn’t quite as far right as Texas. But still. Many were expecting a minority government at best (or worst, depending on your perspective… Myself included). The idea that Alberta—Alberta!—could be awash in NDP orange (and by a considerable margin!) was, for many people, quite literally unthinkable. Until last night. Read more

May 5

3 Comments

On Kings and Kingdoms

It’s Election Day here in the province of Alberta, and for the first time in nearly half a century, it seems that the election will be more than a foregone conclusion. For the past forty-four years, the Progressive Conservative party has been in power in our province, often winning elections in laughably overwhelming numbers. Alberta simply is PC blue. At least that’s how it’s been until now. The political climate is changing, it seems. The PCs iron grip on the province seems to be weakening. There is even talk that they could be defeated. In other words, we have a meaningful election on our hands for the first time in my lifetime. Read more

Apr 8

13 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany

At any given moment, I have around half a dozen half-written blog-posts and/or fragmentary ideas lying around collecting dust in my “drafts” folder. Sometimes these turn into full-length pieces. Sometimes they just forlornly sit there for months on end until I either get sick of looking at them OR forcibly wrench them into a “Miscellany” post. Today, it’s the latter. 🙂

Here, then, my latest assemblage of ideas about totally unrelated topics… Read more

Mar 3

6 Comments

Unlearning

Last night, our family went to see a drama performance called “New Blood” that was held at the local university as part of their “Native Awareness Week” celebrations. The show was put together by high school students from Strathmore, AB, a small town near Calgary and bordering the Siksika Nation, a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Through music, drama, drumming, and dance, the students told the life story of Vincent Yellow Old Woman (the current chief of the Siksika Nation), including his time spent in residential school as a boy, and the later recovery of his Blackfoot culture. It was a moving portrayal of the many losses experienced by indigenous people as a result of colonialism, as well as a stirring call to hope, forgiveness, and love. Read more

Dec 4

10 Comments

Rough Ground

A photographer friend of mine often reminds me of the importance of paying attention to the world around us, of capturing ordinary moments in ordinary places on ordinary days. I’m not much of a photographer, but I would like to be a better payer-of-attention. Lately, I often find myself just sitting and staring, recording images and impressions in my head, trying to remember, trying to write them down…

One of the places I sit and stare is the downtown library. I spend a decent amount of time here. I read while my daughter is at swim club, while my son is at guitar lessons, when I have an hour to kill between supper and a meeting, when I need to get out of the office. The library is a very interesting place to sit and stare…  Read more

Dec 3

17 Comments

Come to Jesus

I was part of a conference call yesterday with a number of young-ish pastors in our denomination where we were talking about Jesus’ prayer in John 17 that the his followers would be “one.” Anyone with even the most cursory understanding of church history will know that, well, we haven’t exactly done so well with this little ideal of Jesus’. Read more

Nov 17

9 Comments

On Contamination

We do a lot of driving in our family. Driving to volleyball, guitar, swim club, band rehearsal, grandma and grandpa’s, and on and on it goes. Many days it is in the car that some of the best, most important, and sometimes only conversations with our kids happen. Today my daughter and I were off to the doctor’s office for a routine visit and the talk turned to the trials and tribulations of teenage life. We talked about cyber-bullying, peer pressure, romantic dramas, sports, classroom dynamics, terrible teachers, and a whole host of other things.

We also talked about racism.

Read more

Oct 23

18 Comments

Kingdom Conspiracy: Book Review

Scot McKnight has a bee in his bonnet. He’s been observing how the word “kingdom” has been used by Christians over the last few decades and he doesn’t particularly like what he sees. The word has become a kind of vaguely Christian (or not) catch-all term to describe generically good deeds that have a connection—sometimes strong, sometimes tenuous—to the ethical vision of Jesus of Nazareth. Rather than pointing directly to the biblical vision of a specific King and a kingdom with a specific people, it often devolves into little more than the baptizing of a liberal, western, democratic ethic from which Jesus could quite comfortably be subtracted. Read more

Oct 9

8 Comments

F*** Everything (Except Me)

I was listening to a radio program this morning about tattoos. Specifically, the co-hosts were discussing whether or not it was permissible to refuse employment to someone because of tattoos in prominent places—places like faces and necks and whatever other places people are finding to ink themselves up these days. Even more specifically, the co-hosts were wondering about if said prominent tattoos contained offensive messages. “What if, for example, someone had a tattoo in a place that was impossible to ignore that said, ‘F*** the World?’” asked one co-host to the other. What if, indeed. Can people who choose to decorate their bodies in such ways expect to be hired in public roles, for example? Do employers have an obligation to ignore such things and focus only on competencies? Murky waters, these are… Read more

Sep 30

20 Comments

Three Girls (And an Orangey-Brown Dress)

Among the gleanings of my morning tour through Facebook land was the discovery that Tuesday, September 30 has been designated “Orange Shirt Day” by the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) here in Canada. Intrigued, I did a bit of snooping around and found the following explanation for the origin of the idea in an article at NationTalk:

Orange Shirt Day is an outcome of the St. Joseph Mission Residential School Commemoration Project and Reunion events that took place in Williams Lake, BC in May 2013. It stems from a story told by former residential school student, Phyllis Webstad, who had her new orange shirt, bought by her grandmother, taken from her as a six-year old girl. She spoke powerfully of how it seemed to her that nobody cared and, in this personal way, it speaks to the many harms experienced by children in the residential schools.

I have no orange shirt, alas, but the initiative has me thinking of a few recent experiences, and about three girls. Read more

Sep 23

8 Comments

The Measure of a Life

Ezekiel Emanuel wants to live for seventy-five years and not a day more. In an article called “Why I Hope to Die at 75” published in The Atlantic, he makes the case for living a full and productive life for as long as this is statistically likely, and for exiting stage right long before the possibility of dementia and depressing decline begin to take over. We are living longer, Emanuel argues, but often the years that we gain are not very good or desirable ones. Indeed, with some researchers forecasting a “tsunami of dementia” by 2050, we may be inclined to agree with Emanuel’s conclusions: Get me out of here long before any of that begins to show up! He’s not arguing for euthanasia (in fact, he’s against it); he is simply expressing how he would prefer things to go. Read more

Sep 9

7 Comments

Our Selves Drift Away

The other day I was racing around some big-box type store, scrambling to get all the back-to-school stuff for the kids. We had adopted a “divide and conquer” mentality with my two kids going in one direction and I going in another for different things, and agreeing to meet at the front till. As I was standing breathlessly in the line up, having emerged relatively unscathed from my close encounter with the panicked hordes of desperate parents, I noticed one particular item amidst all the pencils and paper and geometry sets that I didn’t recall being on the list.

 A bottle of Coke. But not just any bottle of Coke. This one had my name all over it. Literally. Read more

Aug 13

3 Comments

Brain States

Religious fanaticism is, regrettably, front and center in our collective consciousness again in this the summer of bad news. Whether it is Iraq or Israel/Palestine or other places around the globe, many people are quick to point to the role that religion plays in stoking the flames of violence and hatred.

And whenever there is violence associated with religion in the news, we can expect to see articles like “The God Effect” over at Aeon Magazine.  The piece, written by Patrick McNamara, seeks to locate the religious impulse in dopamine levels in the brain. There is, according to McNamara, a fine line between “benevolent saints” and “murderous fanatics.” And dopamine, apparently, is one of the main triggers for when this line is crossed.  Read more

Jul 15

21 Comments

On the Necessity of Equivocation

A few days ago, the Prime Minster of Canada had this to say in an official statement about the latest eruption of violence in Israel/Palestine:

Canada is unequivocally behind Israel. We support its right to defend itself, by itself, against these terror attacks, and urge Hamas to immediately cease their indiscriminate attacks on innocent Israeli civilians.

There is much that could be said about this statement. Read more

Jul 2

13 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany

A few completely disconnected thoughts on an early summer Wednesday…

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I went to see the latest Transformers movie last night. I wish I was joking, but, alas, it’s true. My kids are at the age where they have evidently graduated from little kid Hollywood crap to big kid Hollywood crap, so off we went. I was expecting very little and my expectations were barely met. Lots of explosions and digitally generated creatures and explosions and lame dialogue and explosions and tired old Americana and explosions and—oh, look! The robot trucks have discovered some robot dinosaurs and they will together vanquish the other robot things!—and mass destruction and chaos and explosions and a lame teen love story and a lot of very bad acting. And very loud impressive explosions. Did I mention those? Read more

Jun 16

36 Comments

On Oprah’s Tea and Other Flood-Worthy Inanities

I was sitting in a local Starbucks this afternoon when I saw the most absurd thing in the history of humankind: a big glossy advertisement for a product called an “Oprah Chai Tea Latte.” Alongside pictures of what I can only imagine must be very tasty delights indeed (iced or hot) was a (larger) picture of a beaming Oprah Winfrey, lending her teeth, her hair, her celebrity to this product. What does Oprah have to do with chai tea lattes, you might wonder? I certainly did. Did Oprah Winfrey make this chai tea? Did she create the recipe? Did she enjoy drinking this tea in some kind of unique way? Does she own the tea? Did she import it for our benefit? The advertisement didn’t tell us. It simply presented a picture of Oprah, a picture of tasty beverages and assumed that we would make (invent?) the connection. Read more

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