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Sep 29

15 Comments

They Still Haven’t Found What They’re Looking For

It is not at all uncommon to hear some variation of the story that 18-30 year olds are one of the most under-represented groups in the church today.  It seems that young adults are fleeing the church as soon as they leave high school, and only starting to trickle back once they have their own children, if they make their way back at all.  While some of the reasons for this are undoubtedly related to the general transience of this age demographic, it’s a worrying trend that has been and continues to be the subject of exhaustive analysis. Read more

Sep 26

4 Comments

Life and Death

This past weekend was one of almost unbearably stark contrasts.

Friday and Saturday were spent with a few of our church’s young people at a high-octane youth conference put on by one of the larger churches in our area. Climbing walls, go-kart tracks, paintball, ear splitting rock concerts, dodge-ball, team games, sleepovers on a church floor, etc, all in the company of hundreds of screaming teenagers—this is how I spent a good deal of Friday and Saturday. Not the most natural of contexts for me, I suppose, but it was great to have some fun with the kids and get to know them better.

And then, as we were finishing up our breakfast on Saturday morning and getting ready to head back to the conference for round two, a phone call came. Read more

Sep 23

5 Comments

The Scandal of the Cross—Take Two

God’s self-giving goodness and his determined commitment to rescue and redeem his creation were demonstrated two thousand years ago on a Roman cross. This is the guiding conviction that animates Mark Baker and Joel Green’s exploration of the meaning and scope of the atonement in the second edition of Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts. Read more

Sep 21

8 Comments

“We Are Distracting Ourselves Into Spiritual Oblivion”

I’m in the midst of a very busy stretch right now, so there’s not a lot of time for original posts. This morning, however, in the midst of my busyness, I came across a few prescient quotes from Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing on the struggles we often have with paying attention to and nourishing our spiritual lives. Rolheiser identifies three main things that work against what he calls a sense of “interiority,” and all three seem to pretty  much hit the nail on the head: narcissism, pragmatism, and unbridled restlessness. Here’s a bit of what I read prior to heading out into another busy (!) day: Read more

Sep 16

22 Comments

This is Baptism?

There is much about how religion and Christianity are understood and publicly discussed in our post-Christian Canadian context that produces a mixture of bemusement and genuine puzzlement for me.  This week’s entry in the “head scratcher” category comes via an article from Wednesday’s Globe and Mail by Kate Soles that tells the story of her process of decision-making on the issue of whether or not to get her baby baptized. Read more

Sep 14

10 Comments

The Nature of Greatness

I was at a meeting with some pastors and other leaders in our community today, and one of the things that was on the agenda before lunch was “worship.” And so, as we waited for our lunch to appear, a guitar was pulled out, and a few songs were sung around a board room table with great enthusiasm. One of the songs we sang was one that I gather is a fairly popular one in evangelical churches these days—Chris Tomlin’s “Our God.” Read more

Sep 12

9 Comments

On Meaning and Tiddlywinks

One of the things that we most desperately crave as human beings is meaning. We want our own individual lives to be meaningful, and we want our lives to somehow fit into some larger narrative of drama and purpose. We want our brief moments on this cosmic rock to matter. Read more

Sep 11

6 Comments

Our Greatest Christological Defeat

There have been many words flying around this week leading up to today’s tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center attack, and there will undoubtedly be many more throughout the day today. I have not read many better than these, by Bishop William Willimon, from an article in Christianity Today about how evangelical leaders have changed since 9/11: Read more

Sep 8

2 Comments

Good Words

Blogging can be a bit of a strange animal in that you hurl your words out into the wide (and wild) world of the web, where they can be read (or not) by a virtually limitless variety of people who come to them from a virtually limitless assortment of links, searches, recommendations, “likes,” etc.  Of course, on one level this is no different from the publishing of books and articles.  But the sheer volume of words out there in cyberspace makes it easy to imagine one’s own words just getting lost in the noise and clutter of the online world. Read more

Sep 7

4 Comments

With: Book Review

Do we love God for who he is or for what he can do for us? This is one of the central themes that runs throughout Skye Jethani’s recent book, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God. The book examines some of the ways in which we tend to relate to God, diagnosing some problematic and unhelpful tendencies, and arguing for a mature commitment to live and walk with God for his own sake, rather than for the advantages we can secure or as a strategy for coping with the fear and unpredictability of life. Read more

Sep 2

6 Comments

Tolerance vs. The Demands of Love (Gil Dueck)

One of the unfortunate features of the blogging world is that many interesting posts/discussions disappear into cyber-oblivion as soon as new content replaces them on the front page.  To address this lamentable reality, I have thus decided that from time to time I will drag out the odd blog post from the basement (my own, or someone else’s) and give it the opportunity for another look, another round of conversation. Read more

Aug 31

5 Comments

We are Always Talking About Jesus

A fairly healthy number of my academic pursuits over the years have been devoted to some form or another of apologetics—a rational “defense” of the faith, whatever that might mean. Indeed, a quick glance at my blog archives yields a similar conclusion. So many words spent clarifying, unpacking, rephrasing, rehabilitating, or somehow defending God or belief in God or Christian practice in a post-Christian context. So many hours devoted to abstract ideas, theological constructs, “metanarratives,” worldviews, and “plausibility structures” within which to locate or give expression to Christian belief. So many pages about what I see to be the inadequacies of modern atheism. My attitude toward the general project of apologetics has undoubtedly changed and (hopefully) deepened over time, but I have always been inclined toward logic and reason and arguments and making some kind of rational sense of faith. Read more

Aug 30

7 Comments

Elvis and Me

I walk out of a downtown cafe and the usual sights present themselves: a group of tattooed teenagers with wild hair alternating attention between their smart phones and one another; a few black-clad Hutterites in town for the day to shop; a couple of businessmen rushing importantly off to their next meeting; a few university students out on the patio, enjoying the last few days before classes start.  It’s a beautiful day, and there’s life all around. Read more

Aug 30

2 Comments

Harvest Day

For the past five years, a number of people in our community have participated in a Canadian Foodgrains Bank growing project.  The way it works is a quarter section of land (160 acres) is set aside, seed, fertilizer, labour, machinery, and irrigation costs, etc are donated by a variety of people and organizations, and all of the proceeds from the harvest are given to the Foodgrains Bank for international relief (I’ve written a bit more about the good work that this organization does before here and here).  With the 4:1 matching grant from the Canadian government, this one project has been able to raise nearly $2 million over the last four years!

Well, yesterday was harvest day for the Coaldale-Lethbridge Growing Project, so I headed out to the field to join the festivities and snap some photos. Read more

Aug 29

3 Comments

Wondering at the Fair

I’ve been tracking the evolution of the blog Wondering Fair over the past year with great interest, not least because of the excellent writing and theological engagement with culture that it contains. I have appreciated the diversity of voices, the spectrums of issues raised, and the overall vision of a safe and interesting place to talk about the things that matter most to us.  René has really done a great job in articulating and implementing a vision for constructive and stimulating conversation about faith, God, and truth in a post-Christian world that is often suspicious about these very  things.

Not surprisingly, when I was asked to be a regular contributor to WF, I leaped at the opportunity. Read more

Aug 26

19 Comments

Something Has Happened… Now Listen to Me!!

Here in Canada, the news of the week has been dominated by the tragic death of NDP leader Jack Layton.  It’s been remarkable to see the outpouring of grief, the pages of commentary, the rapturous eulogizing, and, regrettably, the vicious politicizing that has come in the wake of Mr. Layton’s passing.  National Post columnist Christie Blatchford’s ill-timed and rather insensitive article in Monday’s issue, and the stream of vitriolic commets that followed it, stand as a rather embarrassing indictment of our inability to behave and converse civilly and sensitively online, even in the face of death.  Read more

Aug 23

7 Comments

A God Who Plays Dead

Now that I have started to jog periodically, I have done what all good joggers do: I have created a playlist on my iPod full of  bone-rattling, heart-pounding, anthemic rock songs to provide the requisite boost of adrenaline and inspiration once the legs start to feel like jelly, the breathing gets laboured, and the going starts to get pretty rough. For me, this takes place after about half a kilometre or so.

One of the tracks on my  playlist is a song called “Nietzsche” by The Dandy Warhols, which contains the following lyric:

I want a god who stays dead
not plays dead.

It’s a fascinating line—one that could allude to any number of points and experiences on the psychological/spiritual/philosophical landscape in postmodernity. God is dead, but God won’t away. We want nothing to do with God, but we can’t live without meaning and the hope of redemption. We cannot escape the shadow God casts. Read more

Aug 21

Back in Time

Part of yesterday was spent at a local agricultural/historical museum put together by the The Prairie Tractor & Engine Museum Society.  While I wouldn’t say that antique tractors and machinery, farming demonstrations, and “parades of power” are exactly my cup of tea, it was neat to see the way they had put together a kind of old prairie town circa the early 1900s. Read more

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