Dec 16
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
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?
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
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
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
Mark Zuckerberg’s week hasn’t gotten off to a particularly great start. First, Facebook and its apps (What’s App, Messenger, and Instagram, most notably) were offline for around five hours on Monday. Which, when you’ve deliberately manufactured addiction your products customers have come to depend on you is, like, forever. And then, today, former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen testified before US Congress that the social network knowingly “harms children and fuels polarization” because it “elevates profits over safety.” Huh, who would have thought? Not the best few days for the brand, you could say. Read more
Hi folks. It’s been over a month since I posted anything here. I’m not sure if that’s ever happened before in the eleven-and-a-half years of this blog’s existence, but it certainly feels strange to me. There’s no grand reason for the silence other than the usual suspects. A bit of writers’ block, a dearth of inspiration, bit of generalized fatigue, a summer holiday followed by an immediate jump into the deep end of the pool in church ministry. It’s been a stretch of time where time and energy have seemed a bit thin and where the words seem harder in coming than usual. Read more
One of the podcasts I’ve been periodically dropping in on lately is Bari Weiss’s Honestly. Weiss’s story is an interesting one to me. She had the job I imagine many writers covet. She was an editor and writer at The New York Times, the journalistic equivalent of reaching the summit of the mountaintop. It’s not the sort of job you leave. But last year she did. In her resignation letter, Weiss cited the Times’ drift from being a publication that at least attempted an objective pursuit of the truth toward being a tool for disseminating an implicit (or explicit) orthodoxy that is “already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.” This was not what Weiss signed up for as a journalist. Read more
I’ve been a part of several conversations recently about resilience. What is it? How is it cultivated? And, more specifically to our cultural moment, where did it go? Why does it seem so scarce these days? The question has come most often from anxious parents observing their teenage and young adult kids. Why is everyone depressed, lonely, afraid, confused, and struggling with a mental health challenge? It has also come from those trying to help peers through paralyzing and debilitating social anxiety. Often these conversations about resilience are tinged with a hint of bewilderment. Why do so many seem to have such low capacity for some of the more basic features of living these days? I don’t remember things being like this when I was that age! Read more
No, not that kind of conversion therapy. Just to disappoint (or assuage) you at the outset. I have no desire to wade into the fraught and stormy waters of sexual identity and public policy on such a lovely summer morning. Also, just in case you were tempted to think too highly of me (an unlikely prospect, I grant), I have just ably demonstrated that I am not above the occasional click-baity headline. Sorry, again, to disappoint. Read more
One does not need to be an apologist for the Roman Catholic Church or for the Government of Canada or for the wretched legacy of Indian Residential schools to be alarmed at and deeply troubled by the spate of recent church burnings that have taken place across Canada. I probably should not need to begin a post with a sentence like that—i.e., it should be fairly unremarkable that a person could feel grief and anger toward historical injustices perpetrated by the church and simultaneously be convinced that burning houses of worship to the ground is wrong—but such are the times we live in. We are forever sorting one another into moral categories. It can be a risky thing to risk the wrath of the online mob by expressing the wrong moral sentiment. Or the right moral sentiment directed toward the wrong group. Or the right moral sentiment expressed with the wrong degree of certainty or outrage. Or… well, you’ve presumably been online in the last few years. You get the idea. Read more
It’s the early hours of what promises to be a blistering hot Canada Day. I’m sitting at my laptop, drinking my morning coffee, wearing an orange t-shirt. As you likely know, at least if you live in Canada, the orange t-shirt has come to become a symbol of solidarity with our indigenous neighbours, specifically those who endured residential schools. The idea for the orange t-shirt emerges out of the experience of a young indigenous girl who was given an orange shirt by her grandmother to wear on her first day at a Residential School in British Columbia. The shirt was confiscated, and she never saw it again. Read more
I have several friends who have recently been through diversity training at their companies. This is not uncommon these days. Many corporations are scrambling to keep up with the ethos of the moment, desperate to demonstrate the appropriate levels of commitment to equality and inclusion, terrified that they might be held liable for a stray comment or inappropriate action by one of their employees in the domains of sexuality, race, or gender. Diversity training is the way to cover their backsides. “Oh, so and so said or did bad thing x? Well, we did what we could. They received diversity training. We can’t really help it if it didn’t take.” Read more
Over the last few months, no fewer than three people I know and respect have told me that I should listen to Justin Bieber’s new album. These are all people that know me well enough to understand what a musical stretch this would be for me. Each recommendation was met with slightly hostile incredulity from yours truly. Justin Bieber?! Seriously?! You might as well ask me to forfeit my soul. How would I even begin to salvage the tatters of my reputation? But three people. And people I respect. Hmm, what to do. Read more
Freddie deBoer is, I gather, known as something of a “nice atheist.” He’s not explicitly hostile toward religious belief. His atheism represents more of a surrender than a decision. He believes an atheism that doesn’t come out of a process of loss and pain isn’t worth a whole lot. He’s not going to try to convert you to his unbelief. He has no evident interest in a world where people suddenly cease to believe in God. He would, however, like for you to take it a bit more seriously if this is in fact what you claim to believe. Or, at the very least, for you to be a bit more consistent. If God is the point of the whole show, then you should at least have the courtesy to act like you believed it. Read more
There’s a scene in the opening pages of Marilynne Robinson’s most recent novel, Jack, where the eponymous protagonist has contributed to an unpleasant dinner experience with a certain bishop’s daughter named Della. The walk home is tense and the dialogue is strained. Jack has, evidently, really stepped in it:
She said, “I have never been so embarrassed. Never in my life.”
He said, “Well, you haven’t known me very long.”
Last week marked an anniversary of sorts, at least in the life of many churches. It’s been one year since the pandemic closed our doors, drove us online, kicked into motion myriad restrictions for eventual physical gatherings, etc. It’s obviously been a long and difficult year for many, and for a wide variety of reasons. Read more
Well, here’s a breath of Friday fresh air from the New York Times. It’s an article by Leigh Stein called “Influencers are the New Televangelists” and it compares modern-day social media quasi-spiritual wellness influencers like Glennon Doyle to religious hucksters from yesteryear like Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson. The comparison is apt, in my view, even if the content of their message could hardly be more different. Read more
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Rumblings 