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Posts from the ‘Current Events’ Category

Nov 13

4 Comments

Crime and Punishment

My morning has been punctuated with a handful of giggly messages linking to an article published in the London Free Press today. Apparently, a junior hockey player with the OHL’s London Knights was ejected from a game on November 6 and subsequently slapped with a hefty five game suspension. What was his crime, you might be wondering? Did he take out a few teeth with a vicious cross check? Leave the bench to get involved in a melee? Concuss someone with an elbow to the head or a hit from behind? No, none of these things. His transgression was to call a player on the opposing team a “Mennonite.” Read more

Nov 6

8 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany: On Freedom and Curiosity

So, another Trump presidency. Today, I have very conservative Christian friends and acquaintances who are exultant and triumphant. I have very progressive Christian friends and acquaintances who are utterly crestfallen and/or enraged. As anyone who has read this blog for more than a minute likely knows, I have a deep and abiding suspicion of politics on both the right and the left, a disdain for the way in which politics has become little more than tawdry entertainment and has hollowed out our social discourse, and a profound concern that for too many Christians, politics has become their religion. But I’ve written about at least some of these matters before, so I won’t go there today. Read more

Oct 17

14 Comments

But Please, Don’t Forget to Find the Human in Your Enemy

I’ve had a few conversations recently about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book The Message. Coates is, of course, massively popular due to books like Between the World and Me, among others. He was a correspondent with The Atlantic and has garnered a large audience due to his writings on social and political issues, specifically on matters of racial injustice and white supremacy.
Read more

Aug 30

Where (and How) Do We Go with our Sorrow?

The first headline that greeted me when I opened my laptop this morning was the news that NHL star Johnny Gaudreau and his brother Matthew had been killed by a (most likely) drunk driver while riding their bikes in New Jersey. The scene is heartbreaking to contemplate. Two brothers out for a late-summer bike ride, a few days ahead of their sister’s wedding. One can imagine a joyful family reunion full of laughter and kids and grand-kids and the anticipation of all the celebrations around the weekend nuptials. All shattered by a moment of madness. A young woman, widowed, two very young children who will almost certainly never remember a thing about their father. A family, gutted. It is all so very, very sad. Read more

Jul 26

9 Comments

This is Precisely Who We Are

So, there’s this big scandal involving the Canadian women’s soccer team at the Olympics. Apparently, two Canadian staff members were caught attempting to use a drone to spy on the New Zealand team’s practice. This is obviously not a good look for Canada as the Paris Olympics begin. Canada is supposed to be squeaky clean and wholesome and peaceful and tolerant and inclusive and blah, blah, blah, all the other nice, good, neutral things that we have ever laboured to convey to the world around us. “Cheaters” doesn’t really fit the image we wish to project. Read more

Jul 16

8 Comments

Orphans

I saw a screenshot in the aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt on Sunday. Some academic somewhere saying something to the effect of, “So close!” The gleeful comments obligingly took their place below. Should have had better aim! Dammit, just an inch the other way. What a glorious day this could have been! Etc., etc. The screenshot was captured as a gotcha moment. Look at all these self-righteous “progressive” elites who claim to have the moral high ground, wallowing around in the mud of glorying in an attempted assassination. It was all so wearyingly predictable. And of course, if it had been Biden’s ear that was grazed, the same sad scenario would have been playing out in different corners of the internet that are emotionally invested in being perpetually aggrieved in other directions. We are, it has seemed to me for a very long time now, grossly and terrifyingly invested in who and how we hate. Read more

Jun 6

2 Comments

Comfort My People

Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God (Isaiah 40:1)

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A friend recently passed along a dialogue between Richard Dawkins, perhaps the world’s most famous atheist (at least at the moment) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, perhaps the world’ most famous former atheist and Christian convert (at least at the moment). I’ve written about her story a bit here and here. The interview provides a fascinating window into some of the dynamics that appear when someone “leaves the team.” Hirsi Ali was an enthusiastic supporter of the New Atheism back in the early part of the twenty-first century, but for a variety of reasons, from the political to the intensely personal, recently defected and joined “Team Christian.” Dawkins does his (cringily awkward, at times) best to be supportive of Hirsi Ali as a friend but remains utterly incredulous that she could have turned to such “nonsense.” Read more

May 22

31 Comments

Did You Hear the Thing That Guy Said?!

“Did you hear about that speech that the player from some football team gave? I don’t know his name, the quarterback, maybe? The team was called the Chiefs or something.” So began a conversation over dinner with my daughter the other day. She was of course referring to the by now (in)famous commencement address given by Kansas City Chiefs placekicker (not quarterback) Harrison Butker at Benedictine College in Atchison, KS. My daughter has never watched an NFL football game in her life. But she knew about this football player’s speech (and she had a few opinions). Which I found interesting. Read more

Apr 16

3 Comments

Who Else Will Put the Stones Down?

On Sunday morning, a few of us were going through some last-minute details in preparation for the service. Among these, was the addition of a slide to be projected during the sermon. The person who had requested the slide had it ready to go on a USB drive and was going to deliver it to the people responsible for making sure such things happen. I couldn’t help but notice that the USB drive had the logo of a certain political party on it. I made some offhand comment about it. This led to a bit of harmless political banter. “Better not use that drive when so-and-so is running the tech,” one person said with a wink. “Yeah, but other-so-and-so would love it” said someone else.  And so and so forth. It was a light moment of brevity before worship, perhaps even an unwitting acknowledgement that even though we don’t all see things the same way politically, we can still come together in worship. Read more

Mar 28

12 Comments

We Do Not Want to Understand Each Other

I had never heard of Threads before I opened my computer this morning and read an article about it in The New York Times. Evidently, Threads is (or was designed to be) an un-Twitter, er, I mean an un-X or… Whatever. It was to be a “safe space” from the evils of Elon Musk and the festering cesspit of rancour and ignorance and misinformation and disinformation and tribalistic stupidity that he had let loose in the world. Because obviously Twitter was such a peaceful playground of mutuality and rational benevolence before Musk sent it straight to hell. Read more

Feb 29

4 Comments

Thursday Miscellany (“Main Character” Edition)

Today feels like a miscellany day. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading and pondering over the last few days. I’m thinking we may have a “main character” problem in our cultural discourse these days…

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I doubt it will surprise any readers of this blog that I have a rather dim view of the cultural phenomenon of “influencers” on social media. Actually, “dim” would be putting it politely. The fact that we live in a world where people can have cultural influence simply because they are popular is thoroughly depressing and mildly terrifying. There are a good many spectacularly stupid ideas and cultural trends that are rather popular. You may have noticed. Read more

Feb 21

5 Comments

On the Impossibility of Going Backwards

I remember the first time I saw the image to my left. It was almost exactly eight years ago on my first of two learning tours to the West Bank and Israel. On both tours, we visited the Aida refugee camp in between Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Jerusalem. On both occasions we paused at the gate and pondered this haunting image of a giant key. The symbolism was explained to us. Many families in this camp still have the keys to the homes from which they fled or were forcibly displaced during one of the wars that attended the founding of the nation of Israel. The key is a symbol of the memory of this trauma and of the hope that they will one day return. Read more

Feb 13

14 Comments

Evil Little Monkeys (And the Things They Can’t Live Without)

A few people in my social orbit have passed along a recent article by Jen Gerson on the demise of the “New Atheism.” I suspect this is because I devoted my master’s thesis to critiquing the movement way back in 2007-08 and people (rightly) assume that I retain something of an interest in the movement. I did not really expect the New Atheism to age well. And it has not. It seems to have, like everything else post-2010, descended into the black hole of identity politics (could a movement whose key voices are older white males really have expected to survive the last decade?!). Additionally, it turns out that people seem to need more to go on existentially than the cold, dreary world of scientific materialism. Again, not exactly a stunner. Read more

Jan 3

7 Comments

In Search of a Mea Culpa

So, Harvard president Claudine Gay has resigned. This has felt inevitable pretty much from the moment she and two of her Ivy League colleagues couldn’t bring themselves to offer an unambiguous response to the question of whether or not calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment in the wake of October 7. It felt like even more of a foregone conclusion after evidence of multiple instances of plagiarism in her published work began to surface. Read more

Dec 21

4 Comments

God, is that You Calling?

At a Christmas party last week, I became the proud owner of an orange rotary telephone. This artifact came into my possession via a gift exchange where guests were instructed not to buy anything. Typically what happens at these kinds of gift exchanges is that people either set to work doing virtuous things like baking a loaf of banana bread or they rummage around in their house for something that either don’t need, don’t like, or think would make for a hilarious gag. I’m pretty sure some of the gifts at this particular party have been circulating for at least half a decade. It’s all great fun. Read more

Dec 13

11 Comments

The Mysterians

Last night, I spoke with a friend about prayer. A mutual acquaintance had received bad news. What do we pray for? Peace? Healing? Comfort? Strength to endure? “Thy will be done” (those four words we pray when we run out of ideas, the last best expression of hope and resignation whereby we collapse into the words of Christ himself)? What does prayer even do? Are we trying to get God to get busy with what he would otherwise be disinclined to do without our entreaties? Does God require arm-twisting? Is there a critical mass of prayer required to move the divine needle? When it comes to the nature of prayer, it doesn’t take too long before we’re in head-scratching territory. It sort of defies airtight explanation. “I pray because Jesus prayed and because he told his followers to pray” can sound like a cop-out. Or it can sound like the deepest, truest thing one could say. Depending on the day. Read more

Dec 5

10 Comments

What if There Isn’t Room in My Heart?

I clicked on the headline somewhat unthinkingly (as I too often do). “The forgotten war in Syria.” It’s a place and a people that has a unique place in my heart given our church’s efforts to sponsor refugees during the Syrian refugee crisis, given the number of words that I wrote and spoke around that time advocating for a compassionate response, given the Syrian men, women, and children that I have come to know in our city over the last eight years or so. I had done a recent presentation on our church’s response to the Syrian crisis at a conference a few weeks ago, so I suppose that contributed to my reasons for clicking the link. But mostly I clicked because the war in Syria had receded into the shadows of my heart and mind and I probably felt like it shouldn’t have. Read more

Dec 1

7 Comments

A House with Many Entrances

It’s been fascinating to observe the ongoing parsing of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion to Christianity. I’ve reflected on it briefly (here and here). This conversion been the subject of conversation with friends and acquaintances. It’s led down all kinds of interesting little trails. What counts as a “legitimate” conversion? It is even right or proper to speak of such a thing? Is the language of conversion simply a way to speak about subjective preference? Can we actually make the argument that some belief systems are “better” or “truer” or “more useful” in the context of pluralism in all its forms? Is “conversion” the right word to use for being persuaded by a cultural or civilizational argument? Should there not be some kind of emotional, spiritual, or affective component to things? How does what we’re converting from affect what we end up converting to? So many questions… Read more

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