Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Hope’ Category

Mar 4

2 Comments

Wishful Thinking

“Hope” and “change” are words that are being slung around quite regularly lately. From Obama, Clinton and McCain south of the border to Ed Stelmach in my home province of Alberta to the eminently hopeful Oprah Winfrey, everybody’s selling something revolutionary—something which will offer us a brighter future, one in which things will, finally, change for the better. Hope might not be very realistic, and it may be historically unjustified, but it certainly does sell, as politicians (and Christopher Hitchens) know as well as anyone. Read more

Feb 29

1 Comment

Googling Eschatology

This article from today’s Globe and Mail caught my attention if only because I had a conversation with a friend after hockey on Saturday night where he described a virtually identical situation. He was tucking his daughter in at night and she asked him “dad, when does the world end?” Like the author of this article, who recounts how she dealt with her four-year-old’s “where do we go when we die?” question, he was dumbfounded and didn’t quite know how to respond. The guy beside him said “just do what I do whenever my son asks me a question I don’t know the answer to—tell her you’ll look it up on the internet later”—an option also considered by the boy with the existential crisis in the article. Read more

Feb 22

3 Comments

“Belief” in God

One of the things I find interesting, whether in the course of my thesis research or just ordinary conversations, is the matter of what inclines people to belief or unbelief in God. How is that person A, when presented with the raw data of the natural world, will incline toward atheism while person B will look at the identical data and choose belief? Is faith simply an arbitrary “gift” given by God to some and withheld from others? Or, as fundamentalists on either side of the atheism/theism divide would have us believe, is belief/unbelief simply a matter of who is intelligent (or spiritually perceptive) enough to see the “obvious” truth? All of us, as twenty-first century “modern” people, live in what Charles Taylor has called “the immanent frame”—a set of social, technological, scientific, and political structures which can be understood on its own terms without reference to the supernatural. Why do some choose to see this frame as “open” to the possibility of the transcendent while others see it as “closed?” Read more

Feb 16

Two Ways of Waiting

Lent is a time of waiting—something we are all, in various ways and to varying degrees, familiar with. During Lent our waiting is oriented towards Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the high points of the Christian calendar. But “waiting” is a theme that extends far beyond the period of Lent. Read more

Feb 12

Religion as “Playing Kingdom”

A large part of my thesis work involves exploring the historical impact of religion. Does it really “poison everything” or might its influence upon history be a little more nuanced than that? Religion has, obviously, had a massive impact on the development of western culture, some of it—imagine!—even positive in nature, but it’s also proven to be a gift that is easily abused and distorted. For a whole host of reasons, “religion” is a world that seems more likely to invoke negative reactions than positive ones today. Read more

Jan 24

4 Comments

The Real Thing

I’m rather loathe to hop on two horses that have been ridden as promiscuously and enthusiastically within some Christian circles as U2 and C.S. Lewis, but coming across both in the same week is bound to be at least somewhat thought-provoking, right? I’ve been a U2 fan for quite a while now—at least since The Joshua Tree was immortalized as my first “secular” music purchase in 1987 (by “secular music purchase” I mean the first cassette tape (!) that was not selected from among the six meager offerings at the local Christian bookstore). While I’m not one of these rabid fans who think that life as we know it began with U2, or that Bono is going to save the world, I do enjoy their music immensely (and I’m not quite as cynical as some re: the perceived endless moralizing of Bono). Read more

Jan 21

3 Comments

Truth and Beauty

A couple of interesting conversations over the last couple of days have got me thinking about the relationship between truth and beauty. First, I had the chance to talk over a couple of ideas related to my thesis with my brother during a rare visit out to Saskatchewan this past weekend. We spent some time last night on the nature of the new atheism’s protest against God/religion, and how as human beings we simply do not and cannot know as much as we might like prior to making decisions about ultimate matters such as these. The “what if we’re wrong about all this?” question still comes to mind now and then (at least my mind) and I suspect that this is a normal part of life for most people, whichever side of the atheist/theist divide they find themselves on. Read more

Jan 10

3 Comments

Living Under Hope’s “Roof”

Mike, over at Waving or Drowning, has posted a thought-provoking and challenging quote from Barbara Kingsolver regarding the power of hope and the effect it ought to have on those who embrace it. Often hope—at least of the Christian variety—is presented or conceived as some vague, incorporeal utopic state which has very little, if any, connection to the lives we live on this planet. It’s for whatever comes after this life, and has very little to say about what takes place between now and then. Read more

Jan 7

1 Comment

New Possibilities

Well, the combination of a bout with the Christmas flu, a trip back to Alberta for the holidays, and a general lack of reading and reflection over the past couple of weeks have conspired to make this a rather barren forum lately. We’ve just arrived back in Vancouver over the weekend and are slowly settling back into our regular routines. For me, this means writing. A lot of writing. I aim to finish my thesis by April at which time we will begin the process of discerning what comes next for us as a family. Read more

Dec 19

Death, the Enemy

Sitting here in the library on a dreary, rainy December day, I find myself thinking about death—which is ironic, and perhaps a little morbid considering the fact that we’re in a season of the year which is focused on the birth of Christ, who came to give us new life. Nevertheless, I’ve been mulling over a conversation I had with a student on the last day of the class I taught at CBC this past semester—a conversation in which she wondered why I had presented death as the ultimate “enemy” of humanity in my final lecture. “Why do we need to see death as an enemy?” she asked. “Why not just look at it as a normal part of life and make the most of the time we have?” Read more

Dec 11

7 Comments

A Two-Pronged Hope

A lot of the reading I am doing for my thesis is related to the idea of hope—how it provides an account both of the “unfinished” or “unsatisfactory” state of the natural world and the existence of human beings who expect and long for better from the world. I recently came across this quote from Nicholas Wolterstorff, from a chapter in The Future of Hope, which I feel captures these two themes well: Read more

Nov 29

20 Comments

Which Story?

One of the things we’ve talked about in the course I’m teaching out at Columbia Bible College this semester is the importance of understanding how all world-views—whether they consider themselves to be “religious” or not—offer their own set of explanations to questions about the nature of the world, the nature of human beings and the problems that plague us, and the potential remedies that are available. The nature of the story one accepts about the world will determine both the kinds of questions one will be inclined to ask and the nature of answers that will be deemed acceptable in response to those questions. Read more

Nov 13

2 Comments

Telling our Story Well

My parents came down for a visit last weekend and left me with some listening material for the frequent drives out to Abbotsford that I am making these days. The Massey Lectures are an annual Canadian event in which a noted scholar gives a series of addresses on some topic of current interest. Among the many notable past Massey lecturers are Noam Chomsky, Jean Vanier, Margaret Visser, John Ralston Saul, and Stephen Lewis. Read more

Oct 29

15 Comments

Who’s Afraid to Face Reality?

Over the course of the last half a year or so I’ve slogged through pretty much the entire catalogue of atheist writings that have come out in the last four years. Not surprisingly, this hasn’t been the most edifying experience I’ve ever gone through, but at the very least it does force one to think carefully about the claims these authors make about religious folks. One of the consistent refrains found in Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, Onfray, Stenger and, before them, Freud, Feuerbach, and Marx is that religion is for people who are afraid to face reality as it is. The inability of religious people to deal with the harsh realities of life is claimed to lead them to wild flights of fantasy and delusion in order to provide comfort and security in a universe that, at rock bottom, is characterized by nothing but “blind pitiless indifference.” Read more

Oct 24

5 Comments

Theodicy for the “Onlookers”

I have spent and continue to spend a good chunk of time thinking and writing about the problem of evil in some form or another. I’ve been told on occasion that this is unhealthy, unproductive, or just plain weird. My thinking about evil has ranged from the purely abstract (the “logical” problem of evil) to the more pastoral (what do you do/say when someone close to you is suffering?) to the theological/philosophical (what is it about human beings and the world that leads us to expect better?) to the sociological (What role does theodicy play in the adoption of and adherence to this or that worldview?). What is notable about all of this thinking/writing is that it has, thus far, been undertaken by one who has remained virtually untouched by suffering. Read more

Oct 18

2 Comments

A Determined Hope

As always, reading Jürgen Moltmann is proving to be an illuminating and challenging experience. The following three quotes from In the End—The Beginning: The Life of Hope struck me on the bus ride home today. First, on the nature of Christian hope: Read more

Oct 1

1 Comment

The Rich Self

A rich self has a distinct attitude towards the past, the present, and the future. It surveys the past with gratitude for what it has received, not with annoyance about what it hasn’t achieved or about how little it has been given. A rich self lives in the present with contentment. Rather than never having enough of anything except for the burdens others place on it, it is “always having enough of everything” (2 Corinthians 9:8). It still strives, but it strives out of a satisfied fullness, not out of the emptiness of craving. A rich self looks toward the future with trust. It gives rather than holding things back in fear of coming out too short, because it believes God’s promise that God will take care of it. Finite and endangered, a rich self still gives, because its life is “hidden with Christ” in the infinite, unassailable, and utterly generous God, the Lord of the present, the past, and the future.

Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge

Gratitude, contentment, trust; past, present, future. A good and necessary reminder.


Aug 30

7 Comments

Everything Will Be All Right?

I’ve been reading a lot of Peter Berger lately. His approach to theology, not to mention his honesty regarding doubt and certainty are aspects of his thinking that I am finding deeply resonant. He calls his approach to theology “inductive” in that it starts from human experience in the world, and then proceeds to ask what might account for it. While he certainly doesn’t claim that this provides us with proof of God’s existence, he does think there are enough “signals of transcendence” to take seriously the idea of a personal God who is in the process of redeeming a damaged world. Read more

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »