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Posts from the ‘Quotes’ Category

Aug 24

4 Comments

The Church, the Pub, and the Coming Backlash

One of the things on my to-do list over the next little while is to get cracking on editing/rewriting the history of our church. This year marks our forty-fifth year in existence, and it’s been a few decades since the “official” story was modified in any way. So, a few of us have been tasked with a refresh of sorts. Yesterday, in an email exchange with one of my co-labourers on this project, the topic turned to what we might highlight from the last twenty years or so. Suggestions included some usual suspects: programs, initiatives, projects supported, pastoral transitions, etc. And then one line in a list of bullet point suggestions whose theme always makes my heart sink a little: “Change in demographics of our church (decrease in membership, fewer children and young families).” Ah, yes. Decline. Read more

Aug 15

6 Comments

We Might Need God to be Less Awful People

I talk to people nearly every day who find our cultural moment simultaneously bewildering and terrifying. The crumbling of institutions and moral norms. The shattering of public trust (accelerated by, but not limited to the pandemic and its discontents). The rising cost of housing and the fear that children and grandchildren will never be able to attain something even approximating their own. The hyper-polarization and politicization of nearly everything. The “slobification” of society. Increasing rates of crime and poverty. And, of course, the endlessly analyzed and oft-discussed skyrocketing rates of addiction, anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide. The overall picture is not a pretty one. Read more

Aug 11

2 Comments

Friday Miscellany

A few stray threads to pick at as another week winds down…

***

I spent the August long weekend with a few long-time friends in Seattle. Guys always need a reason beyond just getting together to get together, and in this case, it was a concert. Greta Van Fleet was in town and this seemed like a pretty good excuse to make the trek. I’m likely a bigger fan than a few of the other guys, but I think everyone enjoyed the spectacle. Read more

Aug 9

5 Comments

Trigger Warning

The state of the world came up over breakfast this morning. The consensus was that it wasn’t great. There was a general sense of lament over how people seem more prone to spending time alone or in digital spaces, how people seem less able (or willing) to understand or read social cues (I’m thinking of you, Mr. Leave-your-phone-on-speaker-and-loudly-have-a-conversation-in-public), how on demand culture has turned us into docile automatons who expect everything to show up in a brown box on our doorstep, how we don’t get out and move our bodies, how we’ve lost the ability to communicate well. The list went grimly on. Read more

Jun 20

6 Comments

Our Sense of Self

I recently received an email from someone who had concerns about various SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) initiatives being implemented in the school system where they worked. This person had strong convictions on the matter but expressed something bordering on helplessness when it comes to how to wade into an arena where it seems like there are landmines all around, where it seems virtually impossible to have a sane and respectful conversation that does not immediately descend into polarized tribalism and overheated rhetoric. “Well, join the club” I felt like saying. Read more

Jun 6

1 Comment

The Hawk is an Omen of War

There was a hawk perched on top of the church sign when I drove up early Sunday morning to prepare for worship. My first thought was, “oh, cool, a hawk.” And I dutifully took out my phone to take a picture. A closer inspection, however, yielded a less photogenic image than I had hoped. There was a long stringy thread of entrails—maybe a quarter meter or so?—hanging from the hawk’s talons, swinging in front of the sign, perilously close to the words “Pastor Ryan Dueck.” I pondered the potential trauma of that sight for an unsuspecting churchgoer as they rounded the corner looking for some Sunday morning inspiration. Read more

May 3

21 Comments

Sad Dads

The National’s new album has been getting some fairly regular play in my headphones lately. It’s a great album, in my view, but then I suppose I would say that. I gather that over time the band has picked up a reputation as appealing to a certain sort of brooding, melancholy, bookish, middle-aged audience. It’s mildly embarrassing to admit that one likes precisely the sort of music that one is supposed to like, but what can one do? We can’t all be sui generis, however diligently we labour to prove otherwise. Read more

Apr 21

14 Comments

An Act of (Active) Love

Something I’ve learned over a decade and a half of pastoral ministry, is that people interpret and cope with their suffering in very different and very personal ways. Some cannot tolerate the idea that God could play any causal role whatsoever in their pain. God is their co-sufferer, labouring to bring goodness out evil, redemption out of brokenness. God is the salve, not the source. Others, take refuge in a highly specific and highly personal conception of God’s role in orchestrating the events of this world. Their torments come directly from the hand of a meticulously sovereign God whose will, while sometimes inscrutable, is always done. And then there are others—most of us, I suspect—who find ourselves somewhere between these two poles. Read more

Apr 11

8 Comments

The Price of Purity

I’ve expressed admiration for the writing of Nick Cave over the last few months. His book Faith, Hope, and Carnage was among my favourites of 2022. A few people recently asked if I had listened to the interview with him on the UnHerd podcast. I had not. So, on a lovely spring-like Easter Monday morning I threw it on my phone and went for a long walk. Read more

Mar 28

37 Comments

On the Banishing of Shadows

I have had a number of conversations recently about the deep sadness that seems to have settled over many in the West, particularly the young. These conversations have been with people who would represent the full breadth of the racial, socioeconomic, political and ideological spectrum. Often, they are parents of teenagers and/or young adults. It’s a familiar litany by now. Anxiety, depression, addiction, mental illness, suicidal ideation and self-harm, deaths of despair. A general rootlessness and purposeless drifting. Listless scrolling and binging on junk entertainment rather than engaging with the world. It’s a well-worn road by now. Read more

Mar 7

5 Comments

The Rubble

Once there was a great building. Mighty with towers, spiky with spires, a-bubble with domes. Inside it opened into gallery after gallery, vault after echoing vault, so high that human beings who set off across its marble pavements sometimes mistook its roof for the sky and the building for the world itself. And though it showed signs of many styles, and had been built by many different architects over many centuries, it had been standing so long than no one could remember when it wasn’t there, or suspected that it could ever fall. But it did…

Some of the rubble was gathered up by those who had particularly loved the building and assembled back into a much smaller structure—somewhere in size, say, between a cottage and a garden shed. The rest, however, lay where it had fallen; and the grass grew over it, and creepers disguised the biggest pieces of the ruin till they looked almost like outcrops of rock; and with a speed just as astonishing as the collapse had been, those who walked there forgot there had ever been a building, and took the bumpy hill beneath them for the plain and natural ground.

Read more

Jan 25

Wednesday Miscellany (Nick Cave Edition)

I have a few books on my shelf that I return to often, books that I’ve read and reread and underlined and highlighted and stuck a bunch of colourful sticky notes in to draw my attention easily to memorable passages. I usually quote these people endlessly on my blog because, well, because why not? Good words need to be shared. Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss is one of these. Some of Marilynne Robinson’s novels would fall into this category. And now Nick Cave’s Faith, Hope and Carnage has become another. I promise I’ll give it a rest for a while after this, but a few of his quotes anchor today’s miscellany. Read more

Jan 20

14 Comments

Data Doesn’t Suffer

Apparently, ChatGPT is coming for us all.  You’ve heard of ChatGPT, yes? The artificially “intelligent” content creator that can spit out essays and website content and legal briefs and who knows what else based on a simple prompt. It’s changed how universities teach (I have several professorial type friends who say it’s become a massive problem on campus in the few short months it’s been out). And, apparently, it’s also going to do to white collar work what automation did to things like manufacturing. Robots have been able to put cars together for a while. Now, it seems, they can also churn out the content that those of us who sit behind desks buzzing importantly around on our computers produce. Who knows, perhaps, in the end the only jobs left will be to manage the intelligence that is managing us. Read more

Jan 17

8 Comments

The Question the Whole World Revolves Around

“You know that bible verse that talks about the greatest three things, or whatever… you know, the three things that remain and how the best one is love?” The question comes from a young man at the jail. He has this wild look about him, hair everywhere, restless movements, a frantic, searching gaze, cuts on his hands. One is still bleeding. He gets up now and then to go tear a few strips off the toilet paper roll on the bookshelf to slow the flow. He follows this up by spraying disinfectant on his hands (there’s a bottle in the corner by the overhead projector, a lingering remnant of early pandemic days, I suppose). “Yeah, that’s 1 Corinthians 13,” I say, trying to keep tabs on his movements. “It’s one of my favourites.” “Yeah, I read it last night,” he responds. “I like it, too. But he’s missing one. There’s a fourth one that should be in there.” Read more

Jan 11

2 Comments

Our Loneliness Has a Secular Shape

The topic of loneliness came up at a breakfast meeting this morning. This is the devastating norm for Western cultures these days. Anxiety, depression, addiction, bitter cynicism, yes, all these things are rampant. But loneliness and social isolation seem to be the common thread that runs through the despair of our cultural moment. I see this nearly every day in my work as a pastor and as a prison chaplain. Read more

Jan 5

5 Comments

On “Jesus Smuggling,” Impatience with Window Shopping, and a World That Can’t Help Being Beautiful

I’ve started reading Nick Cave’s Faith, Hope, and Carnage, which is basically a memoir-ish extended interview with journalist Seán O’Hagan. I have to say that so far, it’s pretty awesome. Nearly every other page, I’m thinking, “Oh, that’s good, I need to use that in a sermon or an essay or something.” You may have to tolerate a bunch of quotes around here for a while. Read more

Jan 3

3 Comments

God is Love. And We Must Love Each Other

A month or so ago, I became aware (I forget how) of Nick Cave. I had never heard of the Australian singer, songwriter, poet, and author before this, nor had I ever listened to his band (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). Actually, scratch that. His song Red Right Hand is the theme song for Peaky Blinders. And apparently a song called O Children made an appearance in a Harry Potter movie. So, I guess I’ve heard him before, but only accidentally. It wasn’t his music that grabbed my attention a month ago, but the title of his new book: Faith, Hope, and Carnage. Quite a title, that one. The kind of title that might incline someone to do a bit of digging around. Read more

Nov 16

2 Comments

On Packing Too Heavy

What hasty preparations we make for our future. Think of it: it seems almost tragic, the things we’re sure we ought to bring along. We pack too heavy with what we hope we’ll use, and too light of what we must. We thus go forth misladen, ill equipped for the dawn.

— Chang Rae Lee, My Year Abroad

There’s a weird and ill-defined stage of the parenting journey where your influence wanes and you become less of anything resembling an “authority” and more of a cheerleader or casual consultant (or vague irritant!). There’s no precise moment where this happens in your kids’ lives—they could probably be anywhere between 15-30!—but one day you wake up and sense that something has changed. They don’t need you in the same way, don’t want your input in the same way, don’t necessarily choose the things that you would have chosen, do not necessarily turn out to be carbon copies of their parents (go figure!)!. It’s the most natural thing in the world and yet it still somehow manages to come as something of a surprise. Read more

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