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Posts from the ‘Culture’ Category

Nov 28

“We Spend So Much of Our Lives Wandering in Dreams”

A meeting cancellation last night left me with the delightful predicament of how to fill a few an unexpected few free hours. Option A was parking myself on the couch and watching a hockey game, but that space was, lamentably, already occupied by my wife and daughter who were engrossed in a movie. So, naturally, I decided to pick up a book by David Bentley Hart 🙂 (I’ve written before about the delights and challenges of reading Hart before here). The Experience of God is not quite the test of one’s vocabulary (and the blow to one’s pride) as some of Hart’s other works, but it’s still not exactly the shallow end of the pool. 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

Oct 16

12 Comments

The Backfire Effect

Attention! Brace yourself. A major announcement from the world of science came down yesterday morning.

Are you ready?

Apparently, people are not always, or even often persuaded by the facts when they are involved in an argument over an issue they feel strongly about.

Stunning, I know. Read more

Oct 1

4 Comments

Be Still

Last week, I was driving somewhere and listening to a podcast about religion and spirituality in Canada. The topic of conversation was the “crazy busy” lives that many of us lead, what this says about us, how it affects our spiritual lives, etc. I was listening to this podcast on my way from a meeting to the hospital after spending a good chunk of a morning I had hoped would include some sermon prep time responding to nearly thirty emails. Once I was done at the hospital, the rest of my day would include racing back for my son’s volleyball game, then taking him and my daughter back into the city where she would go to swim club and my son and I would race to the in-laws for a quick supper. After that, I would drop my son off for guitar lessons a bit early so I would have time to pick my daughter up from swim club and get her something to eat before guitar lessons ended. Then, at around 8:00, we would be home. My wife might be home, but she wasn’t sure what time the meeting that began after her full work day ended would be done. The theme of the podcast that day was, um, a little ironic. Read more

Sep 20

7 Comments

Why Is It Good to Be Free? (Gil Dueck)

As I vaguely alluded to in my previous post, freedom has been in the news here in Canada with QuĂ©bec’s proposed “secular charter” and all of the commotion this is stirring up. Freedom from religion? Freedom for or of religion? Whose freedoms win? How do we prioritize?  Of course, these questions extend far beyond the boundaries of QuĂ©bec cultural and political realities. They are alive and well wherever we turn in our increasingly globalized, post-Christian world.  

I started to write a post about some of these themes, but then came across this piece that my brother Gil wrote a few years back. Not being able to improve upon this, I am reposting it here. His challenge to critically evaluate our love affair with freedom is a timely one, as is his reminder that, for the Christian, love, not freedom, is and has always been our true north. Read more

Sep 18

6 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany

I’m sitting here on a grey, rainy Wednesday morning thinking that it’s high time I wrote something here.  It’s been over five days of silence on this blog, which, if the social media experts are to be believed, is a virtual eternity fraught with all kinds of weighty perils.  I am surely running the risk that readers will look elsewhere, that traffic will decline, that my “brand” will suffer, that I will fail to “build upon momentum” or any number of other hazards that come with blogging too infrequently.

So, right.  Time to write.   There are certainly no shortage of potential topics. Read more

Sep 6

It’s (Too) Easy for Me to Be Offended By the Bible

I’ve been thinking about Richard Beck’s piece from yesterday about how being offended by the Bible seems to be the unique province of educated, liberal folks, and about how those “on the margins” seem not to be nearly as scandalized—even by the really nasty parts. I’ve been thinking about this in no small measure due to the fact that our church has spent a bit of time in “nasty” texts in our preaching and worship this summer (Leviticus and Joshua, for example), and I have, on occasion, found myself almost apologizing for the Bible, almost assuming people will be offended by it. I know that people in our church struggle with the Bible. I struggle with the Bible. It this merely a function of my/our social location? Read more

Aug 22

8 Comments

Up and Down

My infallible WordPress stats counter tells me that this blog recently passed the 700 posts and 8000 comments mark. We had a little party, WordPress and I, which consisted mainly of the WordPress minions showering me with randomly generated congratulations and what I imagine were intended to be inspirational quotes. I’m not too proud to admit that I choked up a little. So touching, that WordPress would take the time…

At any rate, the passing of this momentous milestone means—that’s right, you guessed it!—it’s time for another tortured, myopic reflection upon the nature of blogging where I predictably vacillate between self-congratulation and self-flagellation and various other points in between. If you’ve seen this movie before, please feel free to ignore the following and put your next ten minutes or so to more profitable use elsewhere.

Seriously.

Still here? Ok, well on with the show, such as it is… Read more

Jul 29

3 Comments

On Capturing Moments

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If we have a memorable experience in the age of smart phones and social media and don’t digitally capture and share it, did it really happen? Read more

Jul 11

4 Comments

Me, Myself, and I

This afternoon, I was browsing around The Pessimist website and briefly flirted with the idea of actually buying something. What, you might ask, was I doing on this site? Well, aside from the fact that it’s a great website (see “The Pessimist’s Guide to Working From Home” which, in addition to being flat-out hilarious, pretty much exactly matches parts of my experience), it’s mostly a sad and predictable story of bouncing around from link to link and then, fifteen minutes later thinking, “Um, how did I get here and what am I doing?!” I didn’t buy anything (although I still kinda want to), but I did get to the “checkout” stage where I was greeted by the following delightful message:

Your shopping cart, like your impoverished soul, is empty.

How can you not appreciate such humour? Read more

Jul 4

3 Comments

On the Waving of Flags

So, today is the Fourth of July and, given that many of the news sources and blogs that regularly track originate south of the border, I expect to be inundated with patriotic media today.  Or media criticizing, redescribing, and reimagining patriotism.  Or anti-American media.  Whatever.  I expect to see a lot that has to do with America. Read more

Jun 26

4 Comments

On Heretics and “Heroic Feats of Cognitive Dissonance”

I’ve been spending some time in the first two chapters of Genesis over the last few weeks as we make our way into a summer worship series on creation. And one cannot read very far in the literature about the first two chapters of the bible without at some point encountering the predictable, tendentious battles between evolutionary naturalism and creation, science and religion, etc. It seems to me that those who get the most excited about these issues often quite badly misunderstand either the nature of science or the nature of religion. Or both. And this tends to lead to a considerable amount of heat and not a great deal of light being generated in public discourse on this issue.  Read more

Jun 18

19 Comments

Seeing the Light

Based on my own entirely unscientific observations, it seems that there is a burgeoning market for “recovering pastor who saw the godless light” stories these days. The genre is familiar enough by now, right? Fundamentalist pastor grows up in the church, uncritically swallows the whole religious package, devotes x number of years to serving as pastor in [insert small Bible belt American town here], gradually begins to have doubts, finally has the courage to leave his (it’s almost always a “he” so far) faith behind, is persecuted, scorned and rejected by his townsfolk and former parishioners still imprisoned by the shackles of fantasy and indoctrination he has so recently (and heroically) shed, and eventually staggers into the warm and compassionate embrace of this or that atheist group devoted to helping recovering clergy. And then, for the triumphant finale, our hero embarks on a life of spreading the good news of atheist liberation on [insert motivational speaking tour here] amassing inspiring (de)conversion narratives of other clergy that he has “helped” along the way. It’s not a bad gig if you can get it. Read more

Jun 17

Blank Screen

As I was driving back from a guest-speaking trip to Edmonton yesterday afternoon, I observed myself doing a funny thing. Every few minutes, I would restlessly pick up my phone and look at it. For no reason at all. It didn’t ring or ping or otherwise summon me to attend to its latest deliverance. It just sat there, silently. But I was quite sure that somewhere in Internet-land there was something going on that I needed to be aware of. Someone was writing something or responding to something I had written or posting something that I probably ought to be aware of. All of these hypotheticals can (and did) get pretty exhausting. Read more

Jun 12

4 Comments

No One is Born Bad (or, Babies are Really Cute)

If I ever do bite the bullet and buy a PVR it will almost be exclusively due to my hatred of television commercials. The prospect of skipping over every moronic attempt to sell me something is a delicious one indeed. But I’m also cheap. What to do? Such are the weighty conundrums of my life.

Anyway, I usually try to hit the mute button when the commercials come on, but I was a little slow on the draw the other night while the kids and I were watching the hockey game. And once this commercial started, well, there was no way the kids were letting me mute it. This comes to us courtesy of People for Good: 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 30

8 Comments

Be Kind to Each Other

I listened to the story of a gay man yesterday. It was a story both tragic and tragically typical. It was a story of knowing he was “different” from his very earliest memories, of being mocked and ridiculed throughout his school years, a story of confusion, anger, and pain, a story of desperately trying to come to terms with an identity that just didn’t fit, a story of a string of unsatisfying relationships, a story of isolation and deep loneliness that persists to the present day.

It was also, of course, a story in which the church played a role. I wish I could say that it was a positive role—that the community that bears the name of the Friend of Sinners had provided a place of refuge and peace for this person… I wish I could say that. But I can’t. We all know that this isn’t how the story usually goes. We know that “rejection” and “guilt” and “judgment” and “fear” and “misunderstanding” are among the words that appear at this point in the story. 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

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