Rumblings

Who Can Discern Their Own Errors?

Richard Beck offered a few reflections on prayer this morning that resonate with my own experience and practice. Prayer doesn’t come naturally to me either. I, too, have been “saved” by the discipline of a regular practice. I, too need a morning routine to reroute me from less productive ways of starting my days, whether it’s uncritically beginning to feed at the trough of the entertainment news cycle or engaging in fruitless online discourse or whatever. I like what Beck says about how the way we “imprint” our day matters. If the first thing I reach for in the morning is my phone or my laptop, my heart and mind begin to be shaped in ways that are deeply unhealthy. Read more

On Big Churches (And Those Who Love to See Them Fall)

Yesterday, I posted a link on Facebook to an article by Jonathan Aigner called, “Farewell, Willow Creek: Where the ‘Regular’ Churches Can Go From Here.” It was ostensibly a kind of “where now after Willow Creek” piece. It was snarky in tone and read, at times, like an elaborate exercise in schadenfreude from an angry guy who seemed a little too happy to see a megachurch fall. But I thought the article raised a few important questions, even if I tried to distance myself from its bitterness and make it clear that I wasn’t expressing my approval for all that it contained. 

As it happens, if my inbox is to be believed, not everyone appreciated the link or my attempts to endlessly qualify my reasons for posting it. Which is fine—I didn’t expect everyone to like the piece. Indeed, I tried to make clear that I didn’t like everything about the piece. But I fear that whatever interesting points I might have been hoping the post might draw out were mostly lost due to the article’s tone. Those inclined to be supportive of the Willow Creek model of church felt attacked; those inclined to be critical of the Willow Creek model happily piled on.

So, I decided to do what I often do when I fear that I may have been misunderstood or when I have misgivings about whether or not I should have posted something: I wrote a long, tortuous blog post to make everything luminously clear. Ahem. Well, perhaps not. If nothing else, I tried to isolate what I found interesting and potentially worth discussing in the piece. In what follows, some of the key claims made by Aigner are highlighted, followed my own reflections on what these statements twigged in my own brain. Perhaps it will be interesting to others, perhaps it will only add to the frustration. If nothing else, at least the Internet has a few more words now, right? 😉 
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Friday Miscellany (On Race, Identity, What We Can Say, and How We Can Say It)

A few days ago, I was meandering through a museum in a small BC town on a lazy summer afternoon. I was lingering over a historical image (the image to the left) of several Ktunaxa men and an inscription about how the gold rush had affected their people. The image itself was fairly nondescript. Six faces staring blankly back at the camera in front of what looks like a bush of some sort. I forget what the inscription beneath the photo precisely said, but I won’t soon forget a passing comment made by one of my fellow museum-goers as she passed in front of my view. “Look at the one in the top left, eh? Pretty good evidence that we come from apes! Hey, I just call it like I see it!” [knowing chuckle] She said it all so quickly. I wasn’t even sure if her comment was directed at me or to someone else within earshot. She was gone before my indignation had time to properly register. I simply stood there dumbly, staring at the picture, my temperature steadily rising. Read more

On Reconnecting

In my (long) last post, I said that I was part way through Johann Hari’s Lost Connections and I thought that it was among the more powerful analyses of our cultural moment that I had come across in some time. This morning, I turned over the last page. I remain convinced that as an analysis of the root causes of the epidemic levels of depression and anxiety in (primarily) Western culture, Hari’s book is rock solid. But the book is far lighter on the cure than it is on the diagnosis. Much of what Hari prescribes to address the seven “lost connections” he diagnoses seem to be scratching around on the surface of a problem that is at its very core profoundly existential and—dare I say it?—religious in nature. Hari is an atheist, so of course a religious diagnosis will not do for him. But as I closed his book this morning I couldn’t help but think that each of Hari’s recommended reconnections could easily be anchored in a robust Christian anthropology. Read more

Being Human (Or, What I Learned on My Sabbatical)

It’s hard to believe, and bordering on painful to set out in declarative form, but my sabbatical comes to an end tomorrow. I’m not back at work tomorrow, I should hasten to add—like many, I have appended my holidays to the end of my sabbatical to stretch it out a bit further—but my three month sabbatical officially ends July 31. So in the interests of trying to begin the process of transitioning back into thinking and writing mode, I thought I would throw up some reflections upon what I have observed and learned over these past few months where I have been (mostly) silent in this space. I’m not sure how much blogging I’ll be doing throughout August, but I suppose you could say this post marks my re-entry into more normal writing routines. Read more