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Posts from the ‘Hope’ Category

Nov 7

51 Comments

An Ironic Dominion

Over the last week or so I have been making my way through an article from last month’s issue of The Walrus which discusses the imminent demise of the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia. The article talks about the rising acidity levels of oceans around the world by virtue of increased CO2 emissions and the warmer water temperatures this produces. It predicts that some of our most magnificent ecosystems (like the Great Barrier Reef) are living on borrowed time because of human-induced climate change. In some ways, the article reads like many others: it is a tale of human beings wantonly wreaking havoc with nature and a plea to do something about it. Read more

Nov 3

42 Comments

A Disjunctive Prayer

On Sunday I preached from Revelation 21:1-6—a passage that I would guess is among the more well-known and well-loved in all of Scripture. It  speaks of a new heaven and a new earth where the old order of things has passed away. No more tears, no more death, no more pain… It is a world that seems too good to be true. It is a world that scarcely resembles the reality that Revelation’s first hearers/readers were familiar with. Or that we are familiar with. For as long as it has been around, there has been a disjunction between this text and the lived reality of those who read it, hear it, and hope for what it promises. Read more

Oct 22

17 Comments

Sparks and Roses

I’m currently going through the book of Job with a young adults group and tonight we’re going to be looking at the dialogue between Job and his “friends” in Job 4-7. The book of Job is, of course, famous for being “about” the problem of evil and God’s justice (or lack thereof) in the face of unmerited human suffering. We are drawn to the book of Job for a variety of reasons. It is a masterpiece of literature, certainly, but I think the story also probes some of our deepest hopes and fears as limited human beings who rarely see or know as much—about suffering or anything else—as we might like. Read more

Oct 8

22 Comments

A Prayer on Theodicy

Another day dawns and it whispers of bad news. Another person dying of cancer, another marriage falling apart, another family whose money has run out, another person’s faith reeling and staggering, another hate-fuelled bomb goes off around the world, another storm strikes killing hundreds… Read more

Oct 5

30 Comments

Parasitic Religion

Yesterday as I was driving around town, I listened to parts of a CBC Radio interview with outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins who was in Canada promoting his new book. Based on what I heard, it was fairly predictable fare—Dawkins delighting in cataloging and heaping scorn upon the exploits of fundamentalist young earth creationists, the program host knowingly mm-hmming and piling on the ridicule. Nothing demonstrates one’s intellectual and moral superiority more ably than making fun of the ignorance and dogmatism of fundamentalists, after all. Read more

Sep 15

27 Comments

A Pastorally Adequate Theodicy

Way back in my first year as a philosophy student at the University of Lethbridge, I took a class which dealt with the various philosophical responses the problem of evil (free will defense, best-of-all-possible-worlds defense, process-theology defense, etc). The class was taught by a flamboyant, bombastic, atheistic Jew who claimed, nonetheless, to be angry at God and to be determined to personally offend each one of us and force us to abandon our simplistic understandings of important questions like the problem of evil. I think he liked the idea of taking the first class to try to terrify and overwhelm a bunch of 18-19 year old kids (many of whom were “religious” in some form or another) who had never seriously thought about some of these questions. Maybe it made him feel important or smart or irreverent or superior. I don’t know. But at least initially, I wasn’t very impressed. It seemed like a rather adolescent and petulant display and I wasn’t much looking forward to the class. Read more

Sep 8

1 Comment

Faith Waits

 Faith is a way of waiting—never quite knowing, never quite hearing or seeing, because in the darkness we are all but a little lost.  There is doubt hard on the heels of every belief, fear hard on the heels of every hope, and many holy things lie in ruins because the world has ruined them and we have ruined them.  But faith waits, even so, delivered at least from that final despair which gives up waiting altogether because it sees nothing left worth waiting for.  Faith waits—for the opening of a door, the sound of footsteps in the hall, that beloved voice delayed, delayed so long that there are times when you all but give up hope of ever hearing it.  And when at moments you think you do hear it (if only faintly, from far away) the question is: Can it possibly be, impossibly be, that one voice of all voices?

Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark

Aug 31

3 Comments

The Good Life

Those who have been following the previous two discussions about what our response to suffering ought to be, what resources we draw from, and what kinds of ethical paradigms inform how/where we locate suffering might want to check out Gil’s latest post. He’s been reflecting on Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self where Taylor contrasts something like “traditional” ethics, where our vision of goodness and human dignity is grounded in a transcendent God (or Good), and a modern naturalist approach which sees the “good life in terms of a heroic determination to face a meaningless existence with courage.” Read more

Aug 24

11 Comments

A Grand Thing that Ought to Be True

Most of us who have been Christians for a little while or a long while have moments where we wonder if we really are right about this whole God business.  Some days it seems like nothing could be more obvious than that there is God out there guiding and sustaining the cosmos; on others, it seems like the remotest of possibilities.

Near the end of Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner quotes a character from a George MacDonald novel who has this to say about this question of questions: Read more

Aug 19

The Whole Vast Drama of Things

Apologies for the lack of posting over the last little while—I find myself going through one of those stretches where I have very little that seems worth saying. Of course one of the benefits of times when words and ideas seem to desert us is that we can lean on and be nourished by the words of others. The writings of Frederick Buechner have often been a source of such words for me. Sometimes I feel that posting long quotes from the work of others is just a way of avoiding the sometimes painful process of writing myself; other times, I just feel grateful to have stumbled across something wise and glad to be able to share it. Read more

Aug 12

19 Comments

The Weeping Mode

As a parent of young children, I often wonder about how much of the pain and brutality of the world we ought to expose our kids to—which conversations do they need to be absent from, which books and films could they do without exposure to, and when it is appropriate to let them in on the secret that the world can sometimes be kind of a nasty place (I suspect it’s quite often not as much of a “secret” to them as we might like to think).  There can be a fine line between helping your children see that the world is a safe enough place to love and learn and grow and not shielding from the reality of a messed-up world in desperate need of compassionate, committed, and resourceful people to make it better. Read more

Aug 3

24 Comments

Sad Stories

Yesterday I was reading Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes while my son sat across the table munching away on a late breakfast. It’s a magnificent book that tracks the journey of an African girl who gets taken from her home, sold into slavery, and spends the bulk of her lifetime in conditions of appalling cruelty and inhumanity a world away from her home. It is a beautifully told tale of an incredibly strong, courageous, and good woman, but it is also a story of unspeakable suffering, depravity, and loss. It is a story that does not shrink from laying bare the evil of which human beings are capable. Read more

Jul 17

7 Comments

Christian Pluralism

I finished Dallas Willard’s Knowing Christ Today a few weeks ago, but I still find myself returning to it from time to time. It’s a thought-provoking book—one that I would highly recommend reading. Especially interesting was his chapter on “Christian pluralism.” Ever since I was a kid, I remember wondering how/if God could justly condemn those who didn’t make an explicit verbal profession of (the correct version of) faith in Jesus when so many throughout history have never even heard of Jesus (which is what I was told, by various people at various times). That sure seemed, well, immoral and for some time it was a significant stumbling block for me. Read more

Jun 13

13 Comments

Can Love Be Trusted?

Related to the previous post about what makes a life “full” or “good, I came across this fantastic (and sobering—be sure to read the last sentence at least twice!) quote from Dallas Willard’s Knowing Christ Today about love as a way of life: Read more

Jun 5

5 Comments

Willard on Faith, Myth Making, and the “Intellectual Slums”

I’ve been looking forward to Dallas Willard’s latest book for a while now, and was happy to see it arrive on my doorstep yesterday afternoon.  Willard is tackling the question of whether/how the claims of faith constitute genuine knowledge (as opposed to private beliefs, opinions, emotions, blind commitments, etc).  I’ve only had time to read the introduction thus far, but it looks like a very intriguing, not to mention timely, project.  Here’s a few quotes from Knowing Christ Today: Read more

Jun 1

22 Comments

Does Atonement Work?

Last week I finished Scot McKnight’s A Community Called Atonement and I’m nearly finished Mark Baker and Joel Green’s Recovering the Scandal of the Cross. Both of these books have been very helpful in articulating a view of the atonement that is broad and deep enough to address the depth of our need as human beings and as a planet. Both deal with the various theories of the atonement, both examine the limitations of human language and the role of metaphors, and both look at the relevant biblical texts. Both offer ways of thinking about and living into the atonement that are profoundly hopeful. Read more

May 29

2 Comments

The Maker

Last weekend I preached on Isaiah 2 and focused on the theme of exile—what it means, what it looks like in (post)modern life, and the shape of the hope that emerges out of it.  Today, a friend directed my attention to a song  called “The Maker” (written by Daniel Lanois, performed by Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds) that he felt reflected some of the themes of the sermon.  I’d never heard the song before, but I was blown away (you can have a listen here, with a bit of navigation—just select the “Live at Radio City” album and click on the song).  I think it beautifully expresses the great hope for all the estranged, alienated, lost and lonely inhabitants of postmodernity—we are not strangers in the hands of the Maker. Read more

May 22

17 Comments

YES!

I don’t often comment on sports here, but as a lifelong fan of the Calgary Flames, today is a happy day indeed. Mike Keenan’s tenure in Calgary was about two years too long, but all I can say to the powers that be in Flame-land is…

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THANK YOU!

(Actually, I could say a lot more… Like, why did you ever hire this guy? What were you thinking?  I knew this was a bad move right from the start… Nah,  I’ll just stick with thank you).

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