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Posts from the ‘Current Events’ Category

Apr 3

8 Comments

The Scourge that Lays Waste

There are times when it seems like the Psalms are trying to talk themselves into something. Into a certain view of the world and how it works. Into a formula for avoiding suffering and attaining blessing. I know the right answer on the theology test is that the Psalms are the prayer book of the church and that they give us a language of prayer for the life of faith, but sometimes the Psalms just sound tone-deaf, at best, and utterly false and misleading at worst. Read more

Mar 31

8 Comments

COVID Conversations Over Breakfast

A few field notes from a conversation with my wife over breakfast this morning…

“I think I might be able to get used to this social distancing thing,” my wife says. I think she might be kidding, but perhaps only slightly. One thing this virus has forced many of us to do is to fairly drastically alter the pace of our lives. We’re not running around to endless meetings and the gym and yoga class and chasing the kids’ sporting calendar and the social obligations that so easily clog up our calendars. We’re being forced to sit. At home. Often without anything pressing to do. Read more

Mar 28

23 Comments

I Don’t Think I Want to Get Better at This

Sometime earlier this week, I read the post of some pastor of a small church somewhere out there in Internet-land who said his modest goal for the week was to “record a sermon that didn’t resemble a grainy Taliban capture video.” That made me laugh. And it was a sentiment that obviously resonated for many of us who pastor small churches and for whom the idea of recording or livestreaming services would have seemed absurd even a few weeks ago, whether for philosophical or technological reasons. Or both. Read more

Mar 20

1 Comment

Memento Mori (Or, a Few Thoughts while Social Distancing Through the Rocky Mountains)

I spent two of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic practicing social distancing in my van. My daughter was attending college in British Columbia this year and late last week the directive came that dorms would be emptying, and students would have to return home. So, twenty-five hours in a forty hour period were spent bombing over the Rocky Mountains and back. Read more

Feb 28

17 Comments

Dispatches from the Breaking Point

Last Saturday morning, I, like many others, gasped as I read Ian Brown’s Globe and Mail article describing how L’Arche founder Jean Vanier had sexually abused six women over a period of several decades and known of abuses committed by his former mentor and spiritual director, Père Thomas Philippe. I had received a heads-up from local L’Arche leaders that “something about Vanier might be coming” (our church has close ties with the L’Arche community in our city), but most seemed to think that it might have to do with what and when Vanier knew about Père Thomas’s abuses. I certainly wasn’t expecting anything like what I read in the Globe last weekend. Read more

Feb 26

7 Comments

Fix the System, Fix the Problem?

I spent Monday morning in a packed hotel conference room full of community leaders who had been summoned to hear a presentation on a plan initiated by our city called the “Community Wellbeing and Safety Strategy.” Like many cities, ours is facing significant challenges. Poverty, homelessness, crime, lack of affordable housing, and, of course, the scourges of addiction, mental health issues, and racism that bleed into all of the others. The opioid crisis is hitting our city hard. It is hitting the indigenous population particularly hard. And this spins out into all kinds of social realities that heighten suspicions and diminish good will in our community. The picture of the reality on the ground we were presented with was bleak. “We can’t fix these problems on our own,” the city representatives said. “We need your help.” Read more

Feb 3

6 Comments

A Tour of the Temple

Ok, I watched the Super Bowl yesterday. And, like most Monday mornings after the big game each year, I find myself wondering why, exactly, I do this. I am a casual fan at best. I prefer European football where they at least run around for a full ninety minutes, instead of producing about twelve minutes of actual action surrounded by hours of advertising and people plotting the next move through headsets. And there are certainly no shortage of reasons not to support the NFL (this piece from the New York Times highlights a few). It is not even remotely difficult to make a good case for refusing to support the violence, the misogyny, the hyperbole, the indecent expense of it all. Read more

Nov 12

2 Comments

On “Weather Events” and Other Absurdities of the Digital Age

On Friday afternoon, as I was spinning my wheels on a sermon that just wasn’t coming, I did what I tend to do when the inspiration tap seems to have run dry. I began to click aimlessly around the internet. It’s an inspirational strategy, I know. Feel free to take notes. At any rate, I checked a few soccer scores. I scrolled half-heartedly through Facebook and Instagram. I visited an inbox that somehow, frustratingly, wasn’t magically whittling itself down. And I checked the weather. Read more

Nov 6

4 Comments

The Crowd

On Saturday afternoon, I was gloriously lost in the crowd. The scene was the Commerzbank Arena in Frankfurt, Germany, where I was watching the match between the home team, Eintracht Frankfurt, and German and European powerhouse FC Bayern München. I was there with a group of lifelong friends who had convened in Europe to reconnect and watch a few soccer games.

The previous weekend we had been at a game in Madrid, which was fantastic, but the atmosphere in Frankfurt was electric. At times, the entire stadium seemed to be shaking and roaring in lusty approval as Eintracht demolished the hated rivals from Bavaria 5-1 (for non-soccer fans, Bayern would be kind of like the New York Yankees of German football—the phenomenally wealthy team that poaches everyone else’s best players and who everyone loves to hate). Even though we were ostensibly there to see Bayern (they are our German friend’s team and they have a kid from Alberta with a fascinating and inspiring story playing for them), it was a riotously good time and an experience to remember. Read more

Oct 22

5 Comments

On Division and Negativity

Like many Canadians, I had an eye on the national election last night. Election results and commentary provided the background noise throughout the evening, as I had dinner with my son, as I went to the gym, as I watched a bit of soccer and talked with my wife, and as my head eventually hit the pillow. To the surprise of probably no one, the end result of a nasty campaign characterized by polarizing rhetoric, majoring on minors and minoring on majors, name calling, fearmongering, avoiding issues, peddling partial truths or simply outright lying, was a minority Liberal government. This was what many pundits and pollsters predicted and for a change they got things pretty much exactly right. Read more

Sep 25

8 Comments

Fearfully Religious, Religiously Fearful

Like many, I’ve been following with interest the story of Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist whose words and actions have been galvanizing young people (and beyond) and dominating the news in recent days. Hers is a voice that speaks clearly and forcefully for a generation that is sick of platitudes and political inactivity when it comes to the looming climate crisis on the horizon. She is unafraid to speak fearlessly to the rich and the powerful—to demand action for the sake of future generations who will pay the price of the reckless and wasteful inattentiveness of we who preceded them. Read more

Sep 24

5 Comments

Emotional Days

It’s been an emotional morning. No, not in that way—nothing bad has happened to me, nothing special is tugging at my heartstrings or causing me elation, sorrow, or confusion (at least no more than usual). Nothing like that. But it’s been a morning where the theme of “emotions” and how they operate in our thinking, our self-understandings, our politics, and our collective discourse has popped up a few times in my quick tour of the news and social media over breakfast. Read more

Sep 19

13 Comments

Our Poisonous Purity

The big news this week here in Canada is that a nearly-two-decades old photo has surfaced of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—heroic champion of diversity and inclusion and tolerance and fierce critic of their opposites—in brownface at a costume party. For scandal-hungry media covering an election campaign grinding along in a rather pedestrian and uninspiring fashion, with candidates trying desperately to make voters’ choices seem like something more sensational than they are (do we prefer a center-left or center-right government this time around?), this is of course pure gold. It was front page news on every major news media site this morning and I expect the commentary will continue for days.  Read more

Aug 6

It’s This, But It’s Also That

Last weekend, I read a remarkable piece of journalism. It was about an issue that I knew little about and it described a reality with which I have no personal experience. It was about a city I have never visited in a country not my own whose social conditions are difficult for me to personally imagine. It discussed a material reality has very little bearing on my everyday life in a small city on the Canadian prairies. And yet, the article modeled a way of approaching a difficult issue that I think we can (must) all learn from if we are going to inhabit our cultural moment in honest and hopeful ways. Read more

Apr 24

3 Comments

The Weirdest of Animals

Human beings are by far the weirdest of all God’s creatures. I say this with all due respect to the wild and extravagant diversity of the animal kingdom, much of which, regrettably, I remain woefully ignorant. The species of our world are truly bewildering both in number and variety, and their capacity to astonish and confound seems virtually limitless. But we are by far the strangest of the bunch. Read more

Apr 16

16 Comments

On Elections and Empathy

After a volatile and rancorous six weeks or so of campaigning (both by the candidates themselves and by their devoted and faithful supporters), it’s election day here in Alberta. There has been seemingly endless mud-slinging and accusations and labelling and self-serving platitudes. The UCP has mostly tried to frame this election as an overdue corrective for a staggering economy. The NDP has mostly tried to cast it as a referendum on progressive social policies. A friend commented this morning that this election might simply reveal what’s more sacred to us, sex or money. Probably not far from the truth. At any rate, I did my duty on the way to work this morning. I sighed, and I voted. Read more

Mar 26

5 Comments

On Payback

On Friday night, I attended a vigil outside our local Islamic Centre that was held in response to the March 15 massacre of Muslim worshipers at Friday prayers in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was an eclectic mixture of Muslims and Christians and conservatives and liberals and believers and unbelievers that gathered in a parking lot on a warmish early spring evening, and it was good to come together, to… well, to do what, exactly? Read more

Feb 6

2 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany

Just sweeping out the corners and gathering up a few scraps of my reading and reflecting over the past little while…

***

I’ve been reading about dirty words and dirty secrets. Julia Scheeres writes in the New York Times about raising her daughter without the concept of sin. She was raised by fundamentalists and the cloud of sin and the threat of its punishment hovered menacingly over her formative years. There will be none of that for her girl. Moral performance will not be tied to the threat of punishment. She will be taught to resist injustice and inequality because this is the right thing to do, not because some angry imaginary God in the sky demands it. She will go on marches with her parents because of their collective desire to make the world a better place. Scheeres’ is certainly a common enough “I once was blind but now I (and my kids) see” narrative. All well and good, as far as it goes. But how far does it actually go? Read more

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