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Posts from the ‘Doubt’ Category

Apr 1

6 Comments

Death is an Affront

Today was an interesting day, characterized by a number of rewarding yet demanding conversations with passionate and intelligent people wrestling with some of the deepest and most painful questions of life.  Among these questions, was the question of death—how we are to understand it, certainly, but, more importantly, how we are to live with and despite it, especially when faced with the loss of someone close to us.  Words often seem like meagre tools indeed when faced with the monstrosity of death, but as I sit in a quiet house ushering another day out the door, reflecting upon what it held, and snooping around in some old books, these words about death from Peter Berger hit home: Read more

Mar 30

23 Comments

Silence

I couldn’t help but grimace as I read the headline from Douglas Todd’s recent article in the Vancouver Sun (“Evangelicals Mostly Alone in Believing God Punishes with Earthquakes“).  It highlighted, once again, the lengths we will go to to find (or manufacture) moral meaning in times of chaos and suffering. Combined with news of some painful things happening in the lives of various people in the various domains of my life and work, I have been thinking a lot about the silence of God these days, and how we are to live and think and speak about God as people of faith in a broken world. Read more

Mar 3

46 Comments

On Rob Bell and Reading the Bible

While I am increasingly growing bored, annoyed, alarmed, and bemused by the furor around Rob Bell’s new book and the universalism it may or may not betray, I did want to pass along an excellent post that a friend sent me this  morning. I think that Jason Boyett is identifying a very important point about the nature of Scripture and how it relates to the theological positions we hold, whatever they might be: Read more

Feb 7

15 Comments

Compensation and Promise

From the “interesting things I’ve come across over the last week or so but haven’t had time to post about” file, comes Vancouver Sun religion columnist Douglas Todd’s latest piece on the increasing polarization of religion in Canada. The sociological data is in, and apparently we Canadians (and West Coasters, in particular) are increasingly abandoning the “ambivalent middle” when it comes to questions of faith. Whether it’s the existence of God or the nature of religious observance, we’re either really for it or really against it. Read more

Jan 28

12 Comments

The Painfully Examined Life

A short article from The Economist has me thinking about thinking this morning. The article offers a brief review on James Miller’s Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche, and asks the question, “Can philosophy inspire a way of life?” The answer, at least in the book, seems to be, “not really.” Read more

Jan 11

13 Comments

The Church, It is a-Changing

At any given time, I have between 25-30 unpublished, half/barely-started posts or links to interesting articles occupying space in my “drafts” folder. Needless to say, things can get buried pretty easily, so I try to periodically root through this folder to see what I once thought was interesting/worth posting on, and to determine what might need to see the light of day (or be consigned to the cyber-scrap heap!). Read more

Jan 5

15 Comments

A Personal Response

While I’m still in the reflection mode occasioned by a new year and a trip through my journals, I’ve been thumbing through a few of the books that I was reading and reflecting upon in my younger years.  Lesslie Newbigin was a writer and a thinker that was immensely helpful to me as I was beginning to negotiate such themes as the uniqueness of Christianity, the nature and limits of reason and faith, and the shape of discipleship.  Newbigin’s books were a gift then, and they remain so today. Read more

Dec 27

8 Comments

Faith is Patience

So Advent has come and gone and with it, the liturgical theme of “waiting” for God. Every year, we rehearse the story, we light the candles, we read the Scriptures, and we wait for the Christ child. Every year, we are told, Jesus comes to us anew. Every year, our waiting ends on Christmas day only to begin again next year. Waiting, it sometimes seems, is endless. Read more

Dec 24

2 Comments

Hope Goes On

I came across this image today and couldn’t resist posting it.

There are probably a number of ways of interpreting it on this Christmas Eve, 2010. Does it portray the decreasing relevance of Christmas in a mostly secular culture? The slow demise of the hope and faith of the season into a sea of nihilistic postmodern despair? The long overdue demise of  the confused mixture of pagan and Christian imagery so prominent in our culture this time of year? Some combination of the above? Read more

Nov 29

39 Comments

Something to Say

I preached my thirty-sixth sermon yesterday, which, in and of itself, is not a particularly momentous number or occasion, but which nonetheless, was an experience that provoked a bit of reflection. Preaching is a practice that has taken some time for me to grow into. I still find it incredibly odd that people actually entrust me with twenty minutes of their precious time on Sunday morning. And I often think that God has an incredible (or incredibly weird?) sense of humour in sticking the introverted kid who talks too fast and stutters too much in front of a microphone every Sunday. Read more

Nov 16

12 Comments

Fragile Truth

Well, I just returned from a wonderful week away and am spending a good chunk of today slowly wading through a very clogged in-box! One of the more humourous discoveries I have made thus far in my wading is this cartoon sent by a friend last week.

As is so often the case, it is funny because it is true… Read more

Oct 26

16 Comments

Commending the Faith

This past Saturday, I attended John Stackhouse’s lectures on faith, reason, and the new atheism down at the Vancouver Island Conference Centre. Evidently, there is still some interest in this topic as the event sold out—even in hyper-secular Nanaimo! Around twenty people from our church attended which was fantastic to see! I was in and out of the sessions throughout the day due to carting kids to hockey, friends’ houses, etc, but a couple of things struck me about his presentations: Read more

Oct 20

12 Comments

The Goodness of Good

It’s a busy week around here, so apologies for the lack of original posts. In the meantime, I continue to come across interesting articles and posts discussing the justification for/origins of our moral intuitions (which has been the subject of conversation around here for the last little while). Here are a few quotes on these matters from the eminently quotable David Bentley Hart who last week wrote this essay for First Things’ On the Square: Read more

Oct 12

27 Comments

Good For Us

Later this month Prof. John Stackhouse from Regent College will be here in Nanaimo to talk about the New Atheists (can we still call them “new?”) and whether or not it is crazy to be a person of faith.  Those who have been long-time readers of this blog will know that this is an event that has special interest for me because a) I wrote about the New Atheists for my masters thesis a few years back; and b) John Stackhouse was my supervisor for this project.  So I’ll be there with bells on.  And if you are on Vancouver Island on Saturday, October 23, I would encourage you to attend this event (you can register here).  I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say. Read more

Sep 15

8 Comments

Who Is This God?

Richard Dawkins famously opens chapter two of The God Delusion with the following oft-quoted, adjectivally promiscuous salvo:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Read more

Sep 14

A Thousand Glad Answers

It’s been a while since Walter Brueggemann made an appearance around here, so I thought I would share another one of his prayers as I sit down to begin another work week.  I came across this prayer from Prayers for a Privileged People during last week’s service preparations.  Among other things, it seems to me a good reminder of the continual process of disorientation and reorientation that is inherent in the life of faith: Read more

Aug 30

Jesus is the Answer

There is a sign at a local church that I pass by regularly that says this: Jesus is right for what is wrong in your life. For whatever reason, I almost always have a negative response to these kinds of church signs. They strike me as theologically naive and simplistic. I instantly think of a number of smart-alecky type responses that I could supply, thus demonstrating my obvious theological acumen and sophistication. Even though if pressed and given the opportunity to explain and qualify sufficiently, I would affirm the message of the sign, my initial reaction to “Jesus is the answer” type signs is almost always negative. Read more

Aug 12

1 Comment

Notes to Self

Some of the bigger blogs I subscribe to typically have something like a weekend round-up type post which serves as an aggregator of the miscellaneous articles, video clips, and other assorted cyber-scraps that the author(s) happen to have come across over the course of the past week.  I don’t usually spend much time on these posts because there are just too many links and rabbit trails and I can’t be bothered.  I have occasionally found the odd gem in these laundry lists of links, but I’m increasingly finding that I just don’t have the patience for the random nature of these posts. Read more

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