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Posts from the ‘Quotes’ Category

Aug 13

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Ring a Bell and I’ll Pontificate

Do we do the things we do (at our best) because they are true or because they are useful? This question has been lurking in shadows of pretty much everything I have studied or written about or preached or sought to practice in my own life for much of my adult life. Do our deepest moral intuitions, our most intense yearnings, our fiercest protests, our most soulful longings correspond, on some level, to what is actually true about ourselves, the world, and God, or do they all simply reduce to evolutionarily adaptive strategies that we (for some reason) have a need to transpose into a metaphysical register in the stories we tell ourselves? Read more

Jul 22

6 Comments

On Passive Nihilism

I was sitting on my front porch reading the other day. It was late afternoon/early evening. A nondescript car buzzed past, did quick u-turn and came to an abrupt stop in front of a house across the street. A young man ran out of his car, dropped a small parcel on the door, took a photo, then buzzed off. Ten minutes later, another unmarked vehicle did the same. Package, photo, gone. Half an hour later an Amazon van screeched and lurched down our street stopping first at one side then the other. No fewer than three stops in one small town block. Including the house across the street which was now up to three deliveries in less than one hour. Read more

Jul 18

2 Comments

Plans

I’ve been a pretty big fan of The Killers and their frontman Brandon Flowers for at least the last two decades or so. I love all their albums (if in different ways) and I’m a big fan of both of Flowers’ solo projects. I’ve seen The Killers live once and it would rank near the top of all the concerts I’ve ever attended. I grew up in the era of big stadium rock bands and in many ways I’ve never really left it. A nostalgic middle-aged cliche in so many ways, I know. Although the other day while watching a World Cup match I couldn’t help but chuckle at the sight of a couple of kids who couldn’t have been much older than ten gleefully belting out the lyrics to Mr. Brightside. My heart was happy.

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Jul 8

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Wednesday Miscellany (World Cup Edition)

So, the World Cup is steadily moving toward its conclusion. Forty-eight teams (sixteen too many!) have been whittled down to eight. The three host teams are out (in my unbiased opinion, Canada and Mexico both went out with more of a fight than the USA). Donald Trump and FIFA® president Gianni Infantino have tripped over themselves in a clumsy and pathetic attempt to give the USA a boost (it didn’t work). And the games have been mostly great with plenty of memorable moments. In eleven days, a winner will be crowned and we’ll all move on with summer. Read more

Jul 2

6 Comments

On Being Forgotten

Someone recently asked me why I haven’t sought to be more influential, as a pastor, a writer, a leader. Don’t you want to lead a larger church or write a book or build a following online? There’s a ministry trajectory, I suppose, at least according to some. Pastoring a small church and writing in a relatively small corner of the internet for the better part of two decades isn’t it. I instantly clicked into self-defence mode, reaching for justifications explanations ranging from the biblical (Jesus’ words about mustard seeds, etc) to the dispositional (I’m not a natural leader or social catalyst, don’t crave the mic, etc) with a bunch of other stops in between. The words felt limp coming out of my mouth.

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Jun 11

3 Comments

Give Praise

One of the last chapters in Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild is called “On Praise Making.” In many ways, the book is about how we become spiritually mature human beings, and it’s interesting to me where he situates the ability and willingness to give praise. Near the end. In other words, a spiritually mature person can praise in an unguarded way, without always factoring in how the elevation of others reflects on them, their own deficiencies, their own lack, all the things they wish they could be or do or experience. Genuine praise sets the self aside and focuses on the other. It’s not a calculation, not a downpayment on an expected future return, not a performance, not something to be doled out cautiously. It is, in the end, an expression of love. Read more

Jun 5

8 Comments

Joy on the Line

AI seems to be on everyone’s mind these days. How could it not be? The Pope released his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which has generated a bit of buzz not least because AI factors prominently in his reflections (spoiler alert: Leo’s not a fan). But even before the pontiff weighed in on the matter, it seems like every second headline I’ve come across for a while now to be either singing AI’s praises or bemoaning the many and varied ways it is hastening the end of all things. It affects so many things, from our kids’ job prospects to how we work to pretty much all the media we consume. AI has created and is daily creating a word where we increasingly do not and cannot know what is real. A world where trust (in what we read, see, hear) is being rapidly obliterated. This concerns me. To put it mildly. Read more

May 21

3 Comments

Mud People

In his new book Liturgies of the Wild, Martin Shaw writes of growing up with a preacher for a father and of a house that “reverberated with whatever sermon he was currently coaxing into life.” I liked that phrase, “coaxing into life.” Boy, does it resonate most weeks for me. Shaw also talks about being fascinated by the opening pages of the big book his dad was always preaching about, in particular this sentence: “The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” “I liked it,” Shaw says. “It was weird.” Read more

May 7

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Stand at the Crossroads

Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.

— Jeremiah 6:16

***

A few days ago, I attended the funeral of a young Christian man who took his own life. A few days from now, I will attend the funeral of another young Christian man who took his own life. These sentences feel grotesque and offensive even as I type them. These things should not be. Mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and spouses and friends should not have to stagger to the front of church sanctuaries to read tear-stained eulogies, to bear witness to, to lament the unfairness of, to rage against, to somehow attempt to drag bewildered meaning from these cruel endings.

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Apr 7

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Sectored to Grace

On Saturday night, I attended The Great Vigil of Easter at an Anglican church in our city. It was a beautiful liturgy, leading worshipers through the broad sweep of Scripture, from creation to new creation. There were candles and holy water, Dante and Herbert, a baptism and the renewal of baptismal vows, the gradual physical transformation of the sanctuary from the bleak deathly tones of Good Friday to the light and the life of resurrection. And there was the celebration of the Eucharist, of course. We remembered Christ’s death, proclaimed his resurrection, and strengthened our resolve to await his coming in glory. Read more

Mar 26

14 Comments

Can a Bot Long for its Maker?

It seems that scarcely a day goes by without encountering some troubling headline about the encroachment of AI into every corner of our lives. Today’s entry was an article by a novelist named Andrea Bartz in The New York Times called “The ‘Shy Girl’ Fiasco Shows Why Trust in Writers Is Plummeting.” I knew nothing about Shy Girl, and what little I learned from the article made me long to return to my state of unknowing. Apparently, it is a horror novel that readers and journalists flagged as “having prose that sounded like AI slop.” What doesn’t, these days? At any rate, what piqued my curiosity was the bit about the plummeting of trust in writers. As one who writes for a living (essays, sermons, blog posts) I obviously have a skin in the game. Read more

Mar 19

6 Comments

Anatomy of a Hug

It’s difficult to avoid clicking on an article with a title like “The Six-Second Hug.” At least it was for me. Perhaps I’m not quite as immune to click-bait as I flatter myself to imagine. Maybe it was that I had read the author before (Julian Baggini) and found him to be at least somewhat insightful. Perhaps I just needed a hug. At any rate, it was the subtitle that reeled me in: “From art to religion to sex, instrumentalisation has drained away intrinsic value.” Read more

Feb 24

6 Comments

Haunted (Whispers in a Ruined House)

He looks at me warily as he approaches the guard’s station at the jail. He’s thirty-something, huge beard, menacing tattoos snaking up and around his neck and bald head. I stand there, inoffensively, with my clipboard and my death notification. “I’m a chaplain here, just wondering if you’d like to talk to someone about losing your dad?” I motion over to the interview room over in the corner of the unit and start to walk in that direction. His expression doesn’t change. “Not really,” says. He follows me anyway. Read more

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.

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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

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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

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