Aug 18
Summer sermons in our community have been focused on the parables and sayings of Jesus. I’ve not been present for the whole series, but have enjoyed the challenge of preaching from these bracing, disorienting, reorienting stories over the last few weeks.
This week, my text is Matthew 18:21-35—the famous passage where Jesus instructs Peter on the new math of forgiveness. Read more
In the summer of 2006, I had just completed my first year at Regent College, and was looking for a few interesting summer courses to accelerate my degree. When I sat down to my first class with Prof. Alister McGrath on Christian Apologetics—a course that spent a lot of time on the ideas of Richard Dawkins—I had no idea that a few months later The God Delusion would hit the shelves, kick starting a half decade or so of fairly lively debate in the Western world on questions about the existence of God, the role of religion in public life, and the nature of belief.
I also had no idea that a year later I would be getting very well-acquainted with Messrs. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett, during my Masters thesis attempting to locate the phenomenon of the new atheism as a response to the problem of evil. Read more
“The more scientifically literate, intellectually honest, and objectively sceptical a person is, the more likely they are to disbelieve in anything supernatural, including god.”
So begins a video compilation sent by a friend yesterday, assembled by British medical doctor Jonathan Pararajasingham, and consisting of clips of 50 academics talking about their views on God, religion, and the afterlife. One suspects, from the quote at the outset, that there will be little diversity of opinion forthcoming and—34 minutes or so later—this suspicion is certainly validated. The smart people have unanimously spoken: Religion is for the weak and the uninformed. God is a myth. This world is all there is. Get used to it. Read more
Well, the lazy days of summer just roll on... After a great few days camping in BC with my brother and his family, yesterday afternoon was spent participating in a local golf tournament/fundraiser for the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. My father is one of the coordinators for the local growing project here, and when he asked my brother and I if we wanted to go golfing to support a good cause, we could hardly say no (despite the fact that we are both truly abysmal golfers!).
I just returned from a glorious five days spent motorcycling through Washington and Oregon. We crossed the border into the United States last Sunday and then headed over the Cascade Mountains, wound our way down to northern Oregon, then meandered through the central part of the state, before heading back north up the Oregon Coast, and catching a ferry back to Vancouver Island from Port Angeles, WA last night. All in all, a fantastic trip. Read more
During my sermon yesterday, I made some remark about how such and such a way of looking at the Christian life was “in our theological DNA” as Anabaptists. I suppose the comment was meant to communicate that the stream of the Christian tradition from which we emerged has had a specific take on what discipleship looks like and that those of us who trace our lineage to the Anabaptist tradition are theologically hard-wired to embrace certain things. It’s almost as if we can’t help ourselves. Or can we? Read more
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
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