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Posts from the ‘Culture’ Category

Jul 6

The Bad Boy

For the last week or so, my wife and I have been eating breakfast with an eye on whoever’s playing at Wimbledon. I’m developing a fondness for the game, I have to say, both watching and playing. Although I suppose you can’t really call what I do on the tennis court “playing.” But I digress. There have been some fascinating matches at the All-England Club over the last few days, not least watching Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic continue to dominate well into their thirties. Hooray for the old guys. Read more

Jun 24

4 Comments

On Forgiveness

I’ve been thinking about a line from the Dave Eggers quote that I used in my previous post: “Every new generation purports to be more empathetic, and yet every new generation is less forgiving.” This is certainly what I observe out there in the world. There is enormous social capital to be gained via the performance of empathy, particularly when it is directed in the right ways and toward the right targets. Forgiveness is the much harder and less-traveled path. There are fewer (public) rewards and far greater costs to forgiveness. Empathy can easily be absorbed into the personal branding project. Forgiveness, not so much. Forgiveness is slow, often painful, patient, quiet work. Read more

Jun 21

6 Comments

Friends vs. Allies

I have, over the course of nearly a decade and a half in pastoral ministry, encountered people who have quite specific plans about what should happen in the event of their death. Some plan out their own funerals to the letter. Some ensure that their organs will donated to science. Some write letters to remain unopened until after they are gone. It’s interesting to see what people prioritize as they think about their impending death. In today’s New York Times, Agnes Callard did something like this. Only, it wasn’t her physical death she was planning ahead for. It was her cancellation. Read more

Jun 17

9 Comments

Choosing Vinyl in a Digital Age

There’s a term that has gained wide traction over the last number of years to describe our unique cultural moment. Disenchantment. It’s a term used mainly by philosophers and historians and theologians to describe the fact that faith feels different in the twenty first century west than at most other parts of Christian history and even human history, more generally. Read more

May 25

7 Comments

On Demons, Soul-Sucking Disillusionment, and Keeping Christianity Strange

Over breakfast with friends today, the conversation inevitably turned to the latest murderous school shooting in America (yes, the second half of that sentence is truly insane; as if there should or could ever be a “latest” in such a grotesque category). “What would possess someone to do such a thing,” someone asked? “Maybe the word ‘possession’ is an apt one,” I almost offhandedly opined. Maybe there was something demonic going on. How else to explain such evil? We reach for extreme explanations for things that seem unexplainable. There was an awkward pause before we moved on to safer explanatory terrain. Drugs. Mental health. Social isolation. Violent video games. Yeah, probably. Read more

May 17

1 Comment

Means and Ends

Are you happy? Would you like to be happier? Are there tweaks to your habits that could move you up a few notches on the happiness scale? How is happiness achieved, maintained, measured? I come across a lot of articles these days on happiness. Maybe it’s because there is so little of it out there in our depressed, anxious, and addicted times. Maybe I’ve reached that life-stage where my eyes are drawn to them like a moth to a flame. Maybe the algorithms are steering my my weary and manipulable brain down the paths they have deemed most likely to be profitable. Maybe Elon Musk is somehow to blame. Read more

May 11

1 Comment

On Building the Things We Love

My daughter and I were invited on a podcast a while back where the topic was “reconciliation.” What is it, how do you work for it, what shape ought it to take, etc. Would we be interested? Well sure. But we were both quite clear when the invitation came that we did not see our relationship as some kind of abstract exercise in reconciliation but as a father and a daughter. We were not placeholders for a theory of racial relations. We were family. Read more

Apr 28

2 Comments

Thursday Miscellany (On “Lived Experience”)

Well, the half-written posts and fragments and links and barely formed loosely connected ideas are piling up in my drafts folder. I need to do some digital (and mental) housecleaning, as it were. So, I guess today shall be a miscellany day. Here’s some of what I’ve been thinking about over the past few weeks. Read more

Feb 15

15 Comments

Tuesday Miscellany (A Whisper and a Scream)

It’s Tuesday morning and I’ve, um, been thinking some thoughts. Nothing well-formed enough for a substantive post on its own, but a few loosely connected fragments that need to be expelled from my brain so I can move on to other things… Read more

Feb 8

12 Comments

On Abstaining from Generalizations

It may surprise readers of this blog to know that I was a trucker in a previous life. In my early twenties, before I went back to university, I used to haul hotel furniture across western Canada. I remember more than a few harrowing winter trips over the Coquihalla or into the bone-chilling north. It was long and lonely work and I only did it for a few years, but it was an interesting and valuable experience. I have my class one license to this day. I’m not going to lie, there were days during these last two years of pandemic when it looked like an attractive option! Read more

Feb 4

14 Comments

The End Will Not Come Easily

The end of the pandemic will not come easily.

These words, from Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen in today’s New York Times, state what is self-evident to many, particularly here in Canada where the so-called “Freedom Convoy” has dominated the news over the past week or so. For many, relinquishing the emotional urgency that this pandemic has thrust upon us has the feel of a bitter concession. “The End of the Pandemic May Tear Us Apart,” warns Petersen’s ominous headline, and after the two years we have all endured, few would doubt this is true. Read more

Jan 14

5 Comments

“I’m Just Following the Science”

For the past few years, I have devoted my sermons between Epiphany and Lent to addressing questions of faith from our congregation. These can range from vexing passages of Scripture to topics dominating the news to quite personal questions about death and suffering and the silence of God. I’m regularly encouraged by how thoughtful the congregation I serve is. These sermons are often among the hardest and most engaging sermons I preach each year. Read more

Dec 31

2 Comments

2021 in Review

It’s been… a year. Another year dominated by Covid, another year where we have vacillated between anxiety and hysteria and confusion and apathy and fear and anger and many other things besides. I cast a quick glance back at last year’s year-end post and read what I wrote: “the general sense seems to be that the next spin around the sun has to be better than the one that’s drawing to a close.” Was it? Well, maybe. I dunno. I guess it depends. Who knows much of anything at this point. I confidently predict 2022 will be better. Or worse. Or the same. Read more

Dec 16

13 Comments

Disarm You with a Smile

I found myself in a very long line up at the post office the other day. Without my phone. So, you know, pretty much the worst thing imaginable. Instead of pretending to attend to very important business or burying my nose in the (mostly trivial) minutiae of other people’s lives in worlds far away, I was forced to lift my gaze and pay attention to the actual world right in front of me. It was unsettling and disorienting. I barely made it out alive. Read more

Dec 13

9 Comments

Music, Despite Everything

Yesterday morning before worship, I saw a headline in a major Canadian newspaper imploring me to “at least try to pretend that I care about the BC drug overdose crisis.” I paused on that headline. What exactly was it telling me to do? I thought I cared at least a little about the poor souls trying to deaden their pain and loneliness and despair in any way possible (in BC or anywhere else), but it seems that it wasn’t enough. I should care more, evidently. Or care differently than I was at present. But how would I know if or when I had cared enough or in the right ways? And according to whom?

Read more

Dec 1

12 Comments

The Only One

That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever read! This was my decidedly uncharitable and exasperated reaction to a sentence that I read over my toast and coffee morning. The offending sentence was a wildly enthusiastic recommendation on the cover of Kate Bowler’s new book No Cure for Being Human. The writer of the sentence that so aggravated me was a certain Glennon Doyle who had this to say about the book and its author: “Kate Bowler is the only one we can trust to tell us the truth.” Right. The only one. I tried (and failed) to resist the temptation of saying (audibly), “I guess that means I shouldn’t pay attention to your stupid book recommendation because I can’t trust you to tell me the truth.” Read more

Nov 16

3 Comments

A Despairing People

A bit of a follow up to my recent post, Harshly Drawn Lines. In a recent editorial for a Comment issue on our ideologically polarized times, Anne Snyder talks about the “tribal hermeneutics” that increasingly dominate everyday conversation. There are few topics these days, she says, that can’t be pressed into the service of the all-important and all-consuming task of identifying which “team” someone belongs to, whether they are safe or suspicious, whether their views are pure or poisonous. We are forever in sorting mode. Read more

Nov 3

9 Comments

Harshly Drawn Lines

I have a lot of conversations these days about the anger and polarization that seems to be increasingly ubiquitous in our culture. Whether it’s the toxic spaces of online “discourse” or the high school gym where parents divide over COVID restrictions and how they affect school sports or the radioactive topics of race, gender, and sexuality, so many people seem to be really, really annoyed and really, really determined to sort people into the categories of “righteous” and “unrighteous” according to where they stand on these issues. I can’t recall a time where people have seemed so divided, where so many conversations seem to have tripwires around every bend, where normal interactions our neighbours carry with them a level of suspicion and anxiety that would have once been almost unimaginable. Read more

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