May 19
Before Rob Bell went and wrote a book about heaven and hell, thereby ensuring his status as “lightning rod for criticism and heresy charges for the foreseeable future,” Brian McLaren was often the most frequent target of abuse for angry Christians. Ever since A New Kind of Christian was published in 2001, McLaren has been a polarizing figure in parts of the Christian world. Read more
Apr 19
This morning I came across an interesting lecture over at TED Talks by journalist, author, and “wrongologist” (apparently there is such a thing!) Kathryn Schulz called “On Being Wrong.” If you’ve got 18 minutes to spare, it’s well worth checking out. Read more
This morning, I noticed with interest that Holy Post, the National Post‘s religion blog, has decided to disable comments on their posts for a while due to the bad behaviour of commenters (curiously, comments are allowed on the post announcing that comments will no longer be allowed!). Read more
One of the benefits of having a blog is that, aside from feeding your ego through the ordinary rhythm of writing about whatever you want whenever you want and plastering it all over the internet, you can use it to draw attention to yourself at any and every other convenient opportunity as well :). Like, say, when an article of yours is published. Read more
Every Wednesday in my neck of the woods, a handful of guys get together to talk and pray about God, life, work, marriage, and whatever else happens to come up before breakfast. One member of our group is a lawyer, and today we got on to the topic of justice and the irregular and inconsistent nature of its application in the Canadian system. To cite just one example (among a handful we talked about), there were back to back court cases where hunting an animal out of season resulted in a (much) more severe punishment than a clear cut case of spousal abuse. Amazing. Read more
Every night, bedtime prayers with my kids conclude with some version of the same phrase: “And help ____ to have a good sleep with no bad dreams. Amen.” This is the non-negotiable conclusion to all bedtime prayers in our house. Should I omit or modify this peroration in any way, this transgression will be swiftly brought to my attention, and I will be enthusiastically exhorted to rectify the situation. The day is not complete, it seems, without entrusting our sleep and the subconscious cogitations it may or may not contain, to the care of God. Read more
Well, I finished Rob Bell’s Love Wins on an airplane this weekend. First reaction? It’s not bad. My suspicions that the storm this book has generated has a lot more to do with how it was marketed and the frantic and reactionary nature of the world of social media than with the content of the book itself were certainly justified. I may write more about Love Wins in the next little while. Or I may not. We’ll see. My sense is that the internet is getting tired of this whole thing. Read more
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 13
This morning, I began teaching a kind of “Apologetics 101” mini-course at church. On the agenda today was the question of how it is possible to believe that Jesus is the way, truth, and life when there are so many other religious options out there. In other words, how do we affirm one perspective as true in a pluralistic context? Perhaps more importantly, how do we do so in an intelligent, curious, and sensitive manner that does not alienate and annoy people unnecessarily? It was a thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking class. Read more
I had breakfast yesterday with a couple of friends, one of whom happens to be the interim editor of our denominational magazine, the Mennonite Brethren Herald. Not surprisingly, the conversation eventually touched on the January issue of the Herald which was devoted to the doctrine of creation. Perhaps less surprisingly, given the nature of the issue’s content, my editor friend has been getting a bit of heat—both directly, via email, and indirectly via the blogosphere—from those on the “young earth” end of the spectrum. Even less surprisingly, the rhetoric can (and does) quickly turn fairly nasty when it comes to topics like these (I’ve reflected on this before here). Apparently, we still have much work to do when it comes to learning how to disagree Christianly. Read more
Four years ago, as I was nearing the completion of my coursework at Regent College, I somewhat naively signed up for a seminar on the life and thought of German pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. My only exposure to him to that point had been his famous book The Cost of Discipleship (a book whose title in German, I would soon discover was simply Nachfolge, or Discipleship. The change has been made in Augsburg Fortress’s republishing of the definitive collection of Bonhoeffer’s works). I had read this book in my early twenties, but my recollection of its themes was unimpressive, to put it mildly. Read more
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 23
Our text for the sermon in church this morning was Luke 12:13-21 (“The Parable of the Rich Fool”). One of the verses in this passage has me thinking this evening. In verse 21, after condemning as folly a life of hoarding possessions, Jesus offers a typically elusive phrase: “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” So what does it mean to be “rich toward God?” Read more
Last Thursday afternoon was an afternoon like many others, for me. The workday was winding down; I was cleaning up a few loose ends before heading home to take my daughter to the pool for swim club. In many ways, it had been a good afternoon—nice and quiet, mostly uninterrupted, and ideal for sermon writing and reflection. Read more
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
An interesting article from last week’s National Post… Apparently, youngsters in Quebec daycare centres will henceforth be allowed to see religious imagery and symbols but not to have them explained: Read more
One of the things WordPress’s comprehensive stats page gives navel-gazing blogger-types like myself the opportunity to do is observe as certain “milestones” come and go in the life of their blog. Recently, the 4000th comment came through here, and I am coming up on 400 posts in the nearly four years I have spent in the blogging world. This may be a testimony to my stubbornness and persistence (or egotism!) more than anything else, but it’s still kind of neat to track how this forum has evolved over its lifespan. Read more
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
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