Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Culture’ Category

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

Jun 3

Beautiful Things

I spent part of my day off yesterday watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. There’s a great scene and a great line near the end of the film where Walter Mitty (played by Ben Stiller), the “negative assets manager” for Life magazine and, at least as we are led to believe at the beginning of the film, quite possibly the world’s dullest human being, finds himself, through a strange set of circumstances on top of a mountain in the Himalayas. In the scene, he has just (literally) stumbled across Sean O’Connell (played by Sean Penn), the reclusive, elusive world-travelling photographer whose work Walter has been processing for many long years at the magazine, and who he has been trying to find for the whole film. Read more

May 16

2 Comments

On Behaving Badly

The news lately has regrettably been dominated by the exploits of (mostly white, powerful) men behaving badly. From the generally boorish and odious behaviour of Toronto mayor Rob Ford to the racist attitudes of Los Angeles Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling, it’s been some pretty unsightly viewing and listening.  A few rambling reflections, then, on these and other matters that I’ve been thinking about lately…  Read more

May 14

8 Comments

Blind About Faith

Over the last few months, I’ve been following a blog by former Seventh Day Adventist pastor Ryan Bell. The blog is called Year Without God, and chronicles Bell’s decision to take a break from God, walk away from the church, and try living like an atheist for a year. I have more than a few reservations about the project itself (I’ve written about them here), but it has been very interesting to ride along with Bell in the post-church, post-God landscape. Read more

Apr 23

11 Comments

Religious Professionals

I was driving my son to guitar lessons the other day, trying to keep up while he talked a mile a minute. I was only half listening (shameful, I know), but in one of his stories I caught the word “priest.” This isn’t a word he uses often, and my curiosity was piqued. I’m always curious about how my son understands the weird and wonderful contours of the church/religion-land that his dad happens to inhabit. I think my world is a bit of an oddity to him. He knows that I read books and talk to (and at) people, that I busily bang away on my laptop, writing sermons, writing articles, writing, writing, writing. But I sometimes think he wishes I had a more respectable job. Like building things or selling things or fixing things or growing things… things you can see and touch in the real world. Or teaching zombie apocalypse preparedness courses. You know, something useful. Read more

Apr 15

Fences

Spring seems to have finally, laboriously, tentatively, intermittently have sprung here in southern Alberta, so I spent my day off yesterday on a motorcycle ride. The glorious first ride of the year. My dad and I meandered south through the small predominantly Mormon towns that dot the landscape between Lethbridge and the American border before crossing the Milk River ridge and heading west. Then it was through the Whiskey Gap and then a tour along the brown snow-flecked foothills in the shadow of the majestic Rocky Mountains. After a quick stop for lunch we turned back north through the Blood Reserve before the final turn east to arrive back home in time for the kids to be get home from school. It was a lovely ride—clear blue skies, relatively warm temperatures and, best of all, little wind to speak of. Read more

Mar 27

2 Comments

Broken Along the Way

I had planned to be in Edmonton today for the seventh and final national event of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, but a combination of an unexpectedly clogged schedule and yet another batch of bad weather in the winter that refuses to die means that I am, instead, watching the events on my laptop on this snowy spring morning.  The opening ceremonies are taking place right now—the prayers, the speeches, the parade of dignitaries across the stage.  It’s all very good, but the audio’s not great, so my mind is drifting.

Read more

Mar 26

5 Comments

How Things Work in the World of (Mostly) Rich Western Christians

It seemed like every time I ventured into the wonderful world of social media today, I was greeted by a new salvo from one side or the other of World Vision’s recent yes-we-do, wait, no-we-don’t position on whether or how they will hire gay Christians to work in their organization, with all the predictable bleating and threatening and pulling of support (in response to both decisions) echoing around the corners of evangelical Christian-dom. It was all very sad and pathetic, and mostly it just made me embarrassed to be a Christian.

Read more

Mar 24

4 Comments

A Gift is for Giving

This past weekend, we were privileged to have Cheryl Bear from the Nadleh Whut’en First Nation community in northern British Columbia as a special guest here in Lethbridge at both our Mennonite Church Alberta Annual Assembly on Friday and Saturday, and at our morning worship service on Sunday.  The timing of the event was significant here in Alberta, as the Truth and Reconciliation’s final national event will be taking place in Edmonton this week (Mar 27-30).  Cheryl is gifted musician and storyteller, and it was delightful to both hear from and get to know her over these short few days.

Read more

Mar 14

2 Comments

The “Self-Aggrandizing Fairy Tale” Upon Which We All Depend

Earlier this week I turned the last page of Joseph Boyden’s highly acclaimed third novel, The Orenda, recent winner of CBC’s Canada Reads and, to the great consternation of many, long listed, but not shortlisted, for the prestigious Giller Prize. It is, as many have said, a remarkable book about the seventeenth century Huron-Iroquois wars in what is now Eastern Canada, and the French Jesuit colonial missionary enterprise that inserted itself into the mix. It is gripping, insightful, heartbreaking, and, yes, at times almost unspeakably violent.

Read more

Feb 4

1 Comment

All Apologies

In order to relieve the tedium of trudging aimlessly around the house in a fog of sinus-clogged misery, I spent part of yesterday watching Mitch Miyagawa’s 2012 documentary, “Sorry State.” Miyagawa figures that his family might just be the most apologized-to family in history, at least when it comes to official government apologies. His Japanese father was apologized to by the Canadian government for being shipped off to southern Alberta during World War II. His Chinese step-father was apologized to in 2006 for the head tax in the early twentieth century. And, finally, his Cree step-mother was on the receiving end of PM Stephen Harper’s 2008 apology for government run residential schools. That’s a lot of apologizing.  Read more

Jan 29

13 Comments

Time to Talk

I deleted my Twitter account today. I had been a Twitter-er or a tweet-er or whatever the right term is for just under two months during which I produced a grand total of fifty-five tweets.

I apologize to both of my followers.  Read more

Jan 27

12 Comments

An Hour at the Mall

On the way back from a weekend conference, my wife says she wants to stop at the mall.  Just for an hour or so.

I don’t like malls.  Especially huge malls like this one.  I don’t like the idea of the mall or the reality of the mall.  I don’t like the orgy of reckless consumption that they represent.  I don’t like the bright lights and the crappy pop music that bleeds incessantly through the speakers.  I don’t like the labyrinthine layouts that seem designed to trap and confuse me, imprisoning me in the mall’s frightful and constricting embrace. 

All of this not liking was pulsing through my brain as I (wisely, no doubt) replied, “Sure.  Let’s go to the mall.” Read more

Jan 26

10 Comments

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

Jan 7

21 Comments

Look at Me, I’m Taking Atheism for a Spin!

So, this one is generating a bit of discussion online today. Apparently Ryan Bell, an American pastor (or former pastor), is going to give atheism a try for a year. He has found himself, over the last number of years, following the well-worn ecclesial trail from orthodoxy to heterodoxy and has arrived at the point where he’s just not sure he can do the whole God thing any longer. He’s not sure what he believes any more, so he’s going to play the field.

Starting with atheism: Read more

Dec 19

4 Comments

“A Contracting Sense of the World”

I have a growing section on my bookshelf devoted exclusively to books about how the Internet and social media is changing who we are and how we think. Each of these books says roughly the same thing in different ways. Our (ab)use of and enslavement to our devices is turning us into increasingly shallow, selfish, insular, and inattentive creatures. Our digital habits are making us less productive, more easily distracted, and unable to devote sustained attention to anything that doesn’t come in the form of Internet-sized morsels of information. I have read each one of these books on my shelf. Each time, after I turn the last page, I gulp and think, “Oh man, that was (uncomfortably) accurate. I need to change some of my habits.” And then a week or a month goes by, and I am right back to business as usual, treating my days as little more than a wearisome exercise in managing a never-ending torrent of disconnected, redundant, even useless information. Read more

Dec 17

3 Comments

Making Straight

I think that the main problem with our world right now is that there’s just not enough spirituality.

I had gone to a local café to get out of the office and try to get some reading done, but I quite literally couldn’t help but overhear the preceding assessment/diagnosis of the plight of the planet and its inhabitants taking place at the table beside me. It was a couple of university students, if their meticulously dishevelled and painstakingly ironic appearances were anything to go by. The more enthusiastic of the two—the one doing most of the talking—had evidently taken a few introductory philosophy and religious studies courses, judging by the peppering of his discourse with references to Gandhi, Jesus, Plato, and the Bhagavad Gita (not to mention a reference to that most estimable of Zen masters, Phil Jackson). The other young man seemed more interested in the Shakespeare he was trying to read, but he seemed content enough to allow the spiritual wisdom to pour forth unabated from his friend. Read more

Dec 12

2 Comments

On Choosing to See

Reading David Bentley Hart makes me happy to be a Christian. The closing few pages of The Experience of God are simply a joy to read. Hart’s diagnosis of our present cultural moment with all of its lightly informed and category-confusing debates about atheism and religious belief is penetrating and razor-sharp (not to mention more than a little unsettling!). More importantly, though, his call to return to wonder at the very heart of existence and gratitude toward its source, is welcome and necessary.

It’s easy to gloss over long-ish quotes, I know. But resist the urge in this case. Hart has much to say that is worth thinking about. And he says it, as usual, in truly arresting ways. Read more

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »