Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Quotes’ Category

Jan 13

7 Comments

Tuesday Miscellany (On Weakness and Strength)

Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files are always a welcome sight when they show up in my inbox. I don’t always agree or resonate with his responses to queries from his fans, but they are almost invariably interesting. Today, for example, Cave responds briefly (often only a word or a sentence) to a wide range of questions from around the world. Naturally, I am always drawn to the ones that have to do with faith. Two fans were fairly disgusted with Cave’s, for lack of a better term, “religious turn” in the latter part of his career. One American fan wondered how anyone with “half a brain would believe in God.” Another, JL from Canada, queried, “Is religion not the refuge of the weak?” Cave responded thus:

Yes, JL, it is precisely that. Christianity in particular.

Read more

Dec 23

3 Comments

“We Cannot Wait Till the World is Sane”

We read the Christmas story out at the jail yesterday. Matthew’s version, all the way through. We read about Mary and Joseph angelic visitations and prophecies fulfilled and Magi from the east bearing strange gifts. We read about a mad king’s maniacal decree, about the slaughter of innocent baby boys, about the Holy Child of Bethlehem being hunted from the day he was born. I had taped images from William Kurelek’s A Northern Nativity on the wall throughout the chapel and invited the guys wander around looking at them while I read. I wanted the Nativity to somehow migrate from words on a page or sanitized religious images to their world, to them, to us. Read more

Dec 18

4 Comments

God is Born

Christmas at the jail is invariably a night of brutal dissonances. Kitschy decorations (Santas, elves, cardboard fireplaces, candy canes) labouring to add a bit of colour to drab concrete and plastic. Christmas carols competing for auditory space with the squawk and buzz of intercoms and the clanging of heavy doors. Ornate words about hope and joy in a place where despair and cynicism come more naturally. In the Christian life, there is always a gap between the hope we proclaim and the reality we experience. This is life in between Christ’s advents. At the jail, the gap just seems exponentially wider. Read more

Dec 11

Love’s Great Blessing

Speaking of Gen Z… I’ve referred to the work of Freya India here before. She is a Gen Z voice worth paying attention to for so many reasons. She seems unusually insightful for someone so young, on matters ranging from the dangers of therapeutic culture to living perpetually online to the risk aversion of so many in her generation. She recently interviewed Rusty Reno on this last one in a post called “Training Ourselves to Be Loveless,” a sad and sobering title if ever there was one. Read more

Dec 5

1 Comment

On Friction

I’m not particularly proud of the story I’m about to tell but here goes. I recently asked ChatGPT to create an image for me. I provided what I thought were clear instructions, but the image that came back was nothing like what I had in mind. After a few more back and forths, the image did not improve. I began to get exasperated. I recalled someone telling me that one of the most annoying things about these chatbots is how unfailingly nice and affirming they are. Every question you ask, no matter how dumb, is a “great question.” They’re always “delighted” to help and eager to provide far more than what you asked. It’s like having an obsequious butler following you around. Read more

Dec 1

Love is Smiling Through All Things

A friend recently told me that one of her goals in this middle stage of life is to learn how to live with an “undefended heart.” That struck me as an interesting and somehow essential way of putting it. It was term that I resolved to ponder more deeply. An undefended heart. What a thing to be able to say one has amid all the pain we endure and inflict upon each other. What a ballast for a world so riven by division and chaos, deceit and manipulation. Read more

Nov 25

1 Comment

Climbing Toward Love

Today, incredibly, my wife Naomi and I have been married for thirty years. This is a number that fits awkwardly with my subjective experience of myself and our relationship. In my mind, we are still love-struck twenty-somethings with our whole future in front of us. The odometer, weirdly, tells a different tale. Read more

Nov 19

3 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany: On Sex and Transcendence

Whenever a topic or cluster of topics keep showing up in different areas of my life and ministry, I eventually decide it’s worth paying attention to and, if possible, try to write something about it. When I can’t quite seem to come up with a solid piece of unified writing, I default to a “Miscellany” post. So, what follows is not necessarily a coherent argument, just a few short reflections and observations picked up over the last little while. Read more

Nov 4

Forty Chickens

Hope builds a bridge across the abyss into which reason cannot look. It can hear an undertone to which reason is deaf. Reason does not recognize the signs of what is coming, what is not yet born.

— Byung-Chul Han, The Spirit of Hope

*** 

We were talking about hope out at the jail yesterday. A few guys had shared about how they desperately needed hope, to believe that there could be something different in their future, something besides the same old habits, the endless tired returning to the same endlessly tired dead-ends. One guy looked up with a half-grin that was somewhere between cynical, mischievous, and dejected. “I don’t got no hope anymore. I stole forty chickens and there’s no future for me.” Read more

Oct 21

2 Comments

On Slop, Sadness, and Shared Humanity

Any given Monday at the jail contains no small number of sadnesses. I feel sad when I see grown men and women who can barely read. Sad when I see inmates being yelled at. Sad when I hear loud crude conversations out the door as the inmates make their way to chapel. Sad when I read incident reports. Sad when I hear stories of the damage inflicted by damaged people. Sad when I see inmates whose birth years are earlier than my kids’. Sad when I hear people tell me that jail is the only place where they feel safe from themselves and their addictions. Sad when I hear about the casual chaos and violence in which so many lives are (mal)formed. Read more

Sep 17

The Shape of Our Hearts

I’ve lost track of the number of articles, podcasts, video clips, etc. I’ve seen over the last few days bearing a headline or title something along the lines of, “Will Charlie Kirk’s death be a turning point for America?” American media, Canadian media, international media (because of course, American culture wars are among their many exports to the rest of the world). I haven’t clicked on many of these links mostly because I think the answer to the question is a rather obvious, “almost certainly not.” Read more

Sep 2

2 Comments

On Mental and Spiritual Health

For at least the last few decades, I have regularly encountered a shift in how Christians employ the categories of mental health and spiritual health. I can’t remember precisely when this shift started, sometime in my twenties or thirties probably. Often someone would share some story of a clumsy pastoral interaction where they came to the church with a problem—say trouble in a marriage or a difficult child or abuse of some kind or some traumatic experience that was proving debilitating—and the pastor left the impression that all you really had to do was pray the problem away. Read more

Jul 8

1 Comment

All Things to All People

I couldn’t help but cringe along this morning as I read an article by Giles Fraser on the search for a replacement for Justin Welby as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the head of the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion. The piece is ominously titled “Anglicanism’s Poisoned Chalice.” According to Fraser, it’s a job that nobody with any sense would want.

Read more

Jun 3

21 Comments

On Punk Rock Advice

A middle-aged dude recently wrote in to the advice columnist for The Atlantic. The columnist is James Parker who is, I imagine, some kind of therapist? A secular wellness guru? I actually have no idea who James is or the nature of his credentials. Maybe he’s just the staff writer who drew the short straw at the team meeting. Nonetheless, James was asked the following question from the aforementioned middle-aged dude (I guess I don’t know for sure that the writer is male… for the purposes of this post, I’m sticking with “dude” because it seems like a vaguely dude-ish question and because, well, I, too, am middle-aged and would occasionally like to feel more rock and roll than I do!): Read more

Apr 16

Here We Are Now, Entertain (or Train) Us!

Apparently, the kids are turning back to Jesus. That’s a bit of an overstatement, perhaps. We’re not talking about Jesus People 2.0 or mass waves of feverish Pentecostal revivalism (at least not yet). But the data does seem to point to a significant trend. According to a recent Barna survey, Gen Z and Millennials are driving a significant return to Christianity in America (around 10-15 percentage points from 2019 to 2025). A British study pointed to a similar trend, noting that “the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds who attend church at least monthly has risen from 4% in 2018 to 16% in 2024.” No, the overall numbers are not huge and, yes, statistics and surveys are malleable, but still. Something does seem to be afoot.

Read more

Apr 10

“It’s Been a While Since I’ve Done the Church Thing”

I had a conversation this morning with a young woman in a bad place. Abusive boyfriend, unstable living arrangements, struggling to afford groceries. I offered her a grocery card, my best wishes. Prayer. She looked at me sheepishly at the mention of prayer, meeting my gaze for almost the first time since our conversation began. “Thanks… You know, it’s been a while since I’ve really done the church thing.” “Well, no time like the present,” I said. “You’re always welcome.” She said she’d think about it. A lot of people say they’ll think about it. Read more

Feb 25

5 Comments

The Monsters

Over the last few days, my commutes have been spent listening to a series on The Rest is History called “Horror in the Congo.” It’s grim stuff, to put it mildly. In my last post I talked about how words like “Nazi” or “Hitler” are often used to refer to a special incontrovertible category of evil. After listening to this series, I wonder if we ought to use “Leopold” (as in the king of Belgium) in a similar way. The savage butchery and myriad cruel hypocrisies, not to mention naked greed and overt racism that defined his ownership of the (ironically named) Congo Free State from 1885-1908 boggles the mind. One is tempted to wonder if Leopold would have ranked up there with Hitler and Stalin in our cultural imaginations were his victims white and literate. But I digress. Read more

Feb 19

4 Comments

“We Are Each a Disaster in Our Own Right”

Words like “Nazi” or “Hitler” are regularly invoked as a kind of test case for any number of things. Claim that God will forgive even the worst offenders? Well, what about Hitler? Argue for some form of universalism (everyone gets saved in the end)? Surely not a Nazi? Talk about how every human being bears the image of God and contains something of a “divine spark” within them? Well, you know. Nazis are the worst of the worst. They’re on the very top of the shelf marked “morally reprehensible”—they’re the category we reach for when we want to argue that there are some people who are beyond the pale. Read more

« Older Entries