Jan 12
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
This past Sunday’s sermon touched briefly on the experience of meaninglessness. The text was Genesis 1:1-5 and I focused on how the creation narrative portrays God speaking life and light and beauty and purpose into the cosmos. Yet so often, in our world and in our lives, this seems more than we can believe. We postmoderns are restless people who have difficulty accepting that there is a big story within which our individual crazy, chaotic stories can find their place. We are fragmented and unmoored people who are divided and distracted in so many ways. Read more
“They must not believe in God.”
These words from my daughter came after a conversation we had been having at bedtime about someone who she had heard yelling at their baby. For her, it was clear: someone who believed in God simply would not do something as monstrous as scream “shut up!” at an infant. People who believe in God don’t do such things, after all. Right? Read more
This morning, I read of Christopher Hitchens’ passing and felt very sad.
I did not know the man personally, of course, nor did I share many of his convictions about the world. Indeed, Hitchens spent a good deal of time and energy (articulately and entertainingly) attacking some of the things most important to me. But today’s news really hit me. It was kind of like hearing that a friend had died—or at least a distant cousin that you once stayed up late into the night having an intense conversation where you both got really worked up and ended up simply having to agree to disagree! Read more
Over the last few months, one of our adult classes at church has been reading through Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity. We’ve had some very interesting conversations, a few of which have revolved around the issue of what the Christian approach to pluralism ought to be. Is McLaren endorsing universalism? Relativism? Do all paths somehow lead to the same God? Is he advocating the abandoning of religious particularity in favour of a kind of fuzzy quasi-Christian humanism? These questions and others have animated some lively discussions about how we ought to live and think in our pluralistic context. Read more
Part of this morning was spent listening to an interview with Chris Martin and Jonny Buckland from Coldplay on CBC’s Q with Jian Ghomeshi. I am one of those people who has always unapologetically loved Coldplay. I realize that they have grown too popular to be respectably cool anymore—that they are too mainstream, too commercial, too pop, too successful, too rich, too catchy, too whatever. I don’t really care. I have loved every album they have put out so far, and their newest offering, Mylo Xyloto, is no exception, whatever pronouncements might come down from on high via the musical intelligentsia. Read more
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
Last night, I finished a book. Not a particularly momentous occasion, you might think—and certainly not worth celebrating online. But it was significant to me for the simple reason that I haven’t been doing much of this lately. Finishing books, that is. I’m very good at starting books—I must have fifteen or so on the go at any given moment—but lately I’ve noticed that making it to the last page is an increasingly rare occurrence. Read more
A few years ago, I remember taking one of those online “spiritual gifts” tests with several co-workers. Needless to say, I am fairly suspicious of these sorts of things in general and particularly when they claim to be discovering something as open to abuse, misunderstanding, and misappropriation as spiritual gifts. I have always been of the opinion that spiritual gifts are the kinds of things that are discovered in community via the wisdom of mature Christians, not as a printout generated by responses to a handful of formulaic online questions. Read more
A very interesting article from Julian Baggini in The Guardian came through the reader this morning (h/t: Jesus Creed). Baggini talks about our tortuous relationship with “certainty” in the postmodern west, and questions the notion (set forth by fellow Guardian columnist Mark Vernon) that uncertainty is a virtue. Baggini’s article is worth quoting at length: Read more
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
One of the questions I have come to dread over the years is the “so what do you do for a living?” question. It’s not that I am ashamed to be a pastor, it’s simply that very often the discovery that I am “religious” can be something of a conversation-stopper. Pastors are strange creatures, to be sure, and many people seem unclear about what to do when encountering one outside of their natural habitats (i.e., a church). At the very least, disclosing that I am a pastor often makes the conversation instantly stranger, as people either a) hastily and awkwardly change the topic; b) begin to laboriously and not altogether coherently demonstrate how they are religious too; c) explain why they don’t go to church anymore; or d) stop talking altogether. Read more
Like most people, I was saddened to hear of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ passing yesterday. I am certainly no technophile (although I do love my MacBook) and my knowledge of the world in which Mr. Jobs was so influential is minimal, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, based on the little I do know, I marvel at the impact this man and the company he founded have had upon how we live in the modern world. It seemed like Jobs was not only a visionary leader but a genuinely decent human being. Not a bad combination. Read more
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
It is not at all uncommon to hear some variation of the story that 18-30 year olds are one of the most under-represented groups in the church today. It seems that young adults are fleeing the church as soon as they leave high school, and only starting to trickle back once they have their own children, if they make their way back at all. While some of the reasons for this are undoubtedly related to the general transience of this age demographic, it’s a worrying trend that has been and continues to be the subject of exhaustive analysis. Read more
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
There is much about how religion and Christianity are understood and publicly discussed in our post-Christian Canadian context that produces a mixture of bemusement and genuine puzzlement for me. This week’s entry in the “head scratcher” category comes via an article from Wednesday’s Globe and Mail by Kate Soles that tells the story of her process of decision-making on the issue of whether or not to get her baby baptized. Read more
One of the things that we most desperately crave as human beings is meaning. We want our own individual lives to be meaningful, and we want our lives to somehow fit into some larger narrative of drama and purpose. We want our brief moments on this cosmic rock to matter. Read more
 | paulhikes on Castles of Regret |
 | Sharon on Give Praise |
| inquisitivelypinkcd4… on The Irrelevant Moral Stra… |
| inquisitivelypinkcd4… on The Irrelevant Moral Stra… |
| inquisitivelypinkcd4… on A Poem to Remind Us Who We… |
