Oct 15
This past weekend was spent at a study conference entitled “Culture, Gospel, and Church” held in Abbotsford which was put on by the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren churches. Among the highlights of the conference, from my perspective, was Bruce Guenther’s lecture on how Anabaptists in general, and Mennonite Brethren (MB) in particular have historically engaged or, more often, failed to engage the broader culture. Read more
A couple of weeks ago I posted about an article by Columbia professor Mark Lilla which addressed, among other things, the persistence of religion in a post-Enlightenment age and what might account for it. For those who are interested, his book—The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West—is now available, as noted in this morning’s review in the New York Times. In an age where religion is frequently portrayed as the enemy of all that is good and true, any effort to provide clarity on the subject of the historical interaction between religion and politics seems (to me) to be a welcome one indeed. Read more
I’ve been meaning to write a few (!) words about this article since I came across it in The Globe and Mail several days ago. It’s a review of a book called The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, and while I’ve not read the book yet, I find the premise of the book to be a curious one—one that I’m not sure is best suited for what it is trying to accomplish. Read more
Well, I apologize for the lack of activity here over the last couple of weeks. The infrequency of my posting is due to the fact that we are out in Alberta and Saskatchewan visiting family and friends. We’ve been out here for just over a week now, and so far we’ve been having a very enjoyable time. Read more
I came across these powerful lines, which conclude Moltmann’s Theology of Hope, this morning and thought they would be worth sharing in light of my previous post on the inappropriateness of perpetual happiness in a world plagued by sin and evil. I think that this is a much better (and much more realistic) way of understanding the state of the world and what we ought to do and expect in it:
This means, however, that the hope of resurrection must bring about a new understanding of the world. This world is not the heaven of self-realization, as it was said to be in Idealism. This world is not the hell of self-estrangement, as it is said to be in romanticist and existentialist writing. The world is not yet finished, but is understood as engaged in history. It is therefore the world of possibilities, the world in which we can serve the future, promised truth and righteousness and peace. This is an age of diaspora, or sowing in hope, of self-surrender and sacrifice, for it is an age which stands within the horizon of a new future. Thus self-expenditure in this world, day-to-day love in hope, becomes possible and becomes human within that horizon of expectation which transcends the world. The glory of self-realization and the misery of self-estrangement alike arise from hopelessness in a world of lost horizons. To disclose to it the horizon of the future of the crucified Christ is the task of the Christian Church.
A few days ago, I came across this piece on the nature of altruism from John Tierney in the New York Times. Apparently brain scans conducted at the University of Oregon found that “pleasure areas” of the brain are activated in experiments where participants performed a charitable act, thus demonstrating that there is a biological basis for altruism. Typically results such as this are thought to bolster arguments against theistic belief—if some human behaviour can be shown to produce pleasure its origins must clearly be explained without remainder by evolutionary biology. Read more
It seems like every second author I’ve come across lately is full of references to some book or other by Jürgen Moltmann. So, this week I decided to start reading him for myself. Suffice it to say that I think I’m starting to see why many find him to be such a compelling voice. This quote, in the middle of a reflection on the nature of Christian hope, stopped me in my tracks: Read more
I suspect that many do not share my interest in topics such as the problem of evil, the rise of neo-atheism, and whatever else I tend to post on ad nauseum. So if any are exasperated or wondering why I keep referring to the same topics and the same authors over and over again I can only plead, in my defense, that in the middle of researching a cluster of subjects one tends to filter almost all of what one sees and hears through that grid. I anticipate that someday—some glorious, eschatological, post-thesis day—my horizons will broaden; but until that day… Read more
Some thoughts arising from my thesis research this week…
Reading people like Dawkins and Dennett, with their heavy emphasis on evolutionary theory and our obligation to dispense with religion now that we have “arrived” at our current levels of knowledge and understanding leads, at least for me, to the question of how we are to think about the past. The sense I get from these guys is that the past is to be seen as little more than a tragic curiosity from which we ought to be grateful to be liberated from. Human history is portrayed as a sequence of unrelenting progression, and the sooner we realize this, the sooner we can rid ourselves of relics of the past (like religion) that stand in our way. The blood-soaked and tear-stained path that led to the present can be nothing but a lamentable footnote in a curious tale that is going nowhere. Read more
I usually resist the temptation to comment on silliness like this, but this morning’s article about a “Creation Museum” opening up in Petersburg, Kentucky does point to what I think is an important question: Are we, as human beings, defined by the mechanics of our origins or the nature of our ends? The very existence of an organization called “Answers in Genesis” seems troubling to me. I believe that there are some answers in Genesis, although they are different answers to different (less important) questions than the ones on display in Kentucky. Regardless of how God got all of this started, what I want to know is, How does the story end? Read more
The concept of redemption has occupied my mind for quite some time now, partly, I suspect, due to my interest in the problem of evil. The existence of evil forces serious reflection on what it means to be a human being—both in terms of what and how we think about evil, and what we do about it. Human beings have the capacity to both imagine and work towards improvement—to bring goodness out of evil, truth out of falsehood, beauty out of ugliness. From my perspective, this redemptive capacity is one of the most important and praiseworthy elements of human nature. Read more
So how does the future non-remembrance of wrongs suffered inform the way in which we live in the here and now? By showing how reconciliation reaches completion: a wrongdoing is both condemned and forgiven; the wrongdoer’s guilt is canceled; through the gift of non-remembrance, the wrongdoer is transposed to a state untainted by the wrongdoing; and bound in a communion of love, both the wronged and the wrongdoer rejoice in their renewed relationship. In the here and now this rarely happens—and for the most part should not happen. In a world marred by evil, the memory of wrongdoing is needed mainly as an instrument of justice and as s shield against injustice. Yet every act of reconciliation, incomplete as it mostly is in this world, stretches itself toward completion in that world of love. Similarly, remembering wrongdoing now lives in the hope of its own superfluity then. Even more, only those willing to let the memory of wrongdoing slip ultimately out of their minds will be able to remember wrongdoing rightly now. For we remember wrongs rightly when memory serves reconciliation.
Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory
I suppose at some point every student of theology has their own “pet theologian”—someone who they think just “gets it” in such a profound way, and who has such a knack for explaining things in a coherent, cogent, and compelling manner. Usually, of course, they also happen to share one’s own theological outlook, or to have proven instrumental in shaping it. While I typically find this kind of “groupie” mentality a little distasteful (“I’m a Barthian,” “I’m an Augustinian,” “I’m with N.T. Wright…”), I’m starting to think that if I were to pick one theologian who is currently exerting considerable influence upon the way that I think, it would be Miroslav Volf. Read more
Well, today is a big day for our kids—Nicky in particular. Today, their kindergarten class is putting on two performances of their play entitled “Celebrate You and Me.” Nicky is the emcee for this play, and has been working very hard on his lines for the past couple months. He has something like seven mini-paragraphs that he has to deliver in between each song in the play. Claire also has a speaking part, but it’s “just” the recitation of a tortured excerpt of existential poetry (I’m not kidding!) in the middle of a song about wanting to belong. Read more
The other day one of the moms from our kids’ kindergarten class asked me for some “pastoral” advice about how to deal with what was for her son, the traumatic discovery that everybody dies (this discovery came via the film Charlotte’s Web). I fumbled and mumbled my way through some explanation of how we try to teach our kids that God is ultimately going to reclaim and redeem the world of our present experience, validating all that is good and true etc. My response may or may not have been adequate, but I was reminded of some of the questions that arose when our kids recently encountered death. One of their preschool friends was tragically killed in a traffic accident last year, and I remember being surprised (and heartened) by their bewilderment—even outrage—that such a thing as death should occur. Read more
A few final thoughts about The Ethical Imagination…
Somerville concludes her reflections upon how and why we must find a well-grounded basis for a shared ethic with a plea for a return to “past virtues for a future world.” Our humanness ought to be held in trust for future generations—in other words, we have an obligation not to radically alter, through our various technologies, the essence of what it is to be human. Trust, courage, compassion, generosity, hope—these are all thought to be vital components of thinking and acting ethically in a context where human beings possess unprecedented capabilities to alter what it means to be human. Read more
More on Margaret Somerville’s The Ethical Imagination…
For those who remember, Somerville’s project is to argue for a shared ethic based on what she terms “the secular sacred” (a term that I continue to have reservations about). I read her take on “truth” a couple of days ago and while my initial reaction was somewhat negative, I now find myself wondering if there may be some pragmatic merit in what she says. Read more
Evil is in the news again. This week’s tragedy in Virginia, the seemingly endless stream of death and destruction that comes out of Iraq, the recent tsunami in the Solomon Islands… these things always force us to acknowledge, again, that our world is not as it ought to be. Read more
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Rumblings 