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Feb 2

14 Comments

If Functional… Well, What?

I’ve been reading books/articles related to science, faith, and philosophy over the last few weeks as I finished off an article on the (increasingly not so) new atheism for Direction Journal. One article I came across this week was Jesse Bering’s “Are You There God?  It’s Me, Brain” over at Slate. The article is not terribly original or new in the approach it takes—the basic idea is that our evolved psychological capacity to imaginatively reconstruct the mental states of others is thought to lead to the conclusion that our idea of God is just the biggest and most elaborate version of this process—but I think it provides an opportunity to identify a common error in discussions around this topic: the idea that if this or that feature of human thought and behaviour can be shown to have been evolutionarily useful at some point in human development, it is therefore explained without remainder by its function. I believe it was Holmes Rolston III who called this the “if functional, false” fallacy. Read more

Jan 31

51 Comments

Bonhoeffer: Book Review

Four years ago, as I was nearing the completion of my coursework at Regent College, I somewhat naively signed up for a seminar on the life and thought of German pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. My only exposure to him to that point had been his famous book The Cost of Discipleship (a book whose title in German, I would soon discover was simply Nachfolge, or Discipleship. The change has been made in Augsburg Fortress’s republishing of the definitive collection of Bonhoeffer’s works). I had read this book in my early twenties, but my recollection of its themes was unimpressive, to put it mildly. Read more

Jan 28

12 Comments

The Painfully Examined Life

A short article from The Economist has me thinking about thinking this morning. The article offers a brief review on James Miller’s Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche, and asks the question, “Can philosophy inspire a way of life?” The answer, at least in the book, seems to be, “not really.” Read more

Jan 24

41 Comments

On “Relevance”

Over at Faith and Leadership, Timothy Larsen has posted a withering critique of the church’s never-ending pursuit of the Holy Grail of “relevance.” It’s a pretty short article, and well worth the read. If you are at all involved in church leadership and recognize some of your own experience here, perhaps you will be emboldened and spurred on to determined new heights of (appropriate) irrelevance. If nothing else, perhaps it will evoke a kind of grim laughter for those who have spent any time at all in and around certain expressions of North American church life. Here are a few memorable quotes from what I found to be an insightful (if disturbing) article. Read more

Jan 23

6 Comments

Rich Toward God

Our text for the sermon in church this morning was Luke 12:13-21 (“The Parable of the Rich Fool”). One of the verses in this passage has me thinking this evening. In verse 21, after condemning as folly a life of hoarding possessions, Jesus offers a typically elusive phrase: “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” So what does it mean to be “rich toward God?” Read more

Jan 19

32 Comments

Thank God for the Light

Last Thursday afternoon was an afternoon like many others, for me. The workday was winding down; I was cleaning up a few loose ends before heading home to take my daughter to the pool for swim club. In many ways, it had been a good afternoon—nice and quiet, mostly uninterrupted, and ideal for sermon writing and reflection. Read more

Jan 18

10 Comments

The God We Have

I am in the midst of a fairly busy stretch of sermon preparation, worship scheduling, article writing, class planning, etc, etc, not to mention the ordinary demands of life with a young family, so apologies for the lack of substantive and/or original posting around here over the last little while. I hope to rectify this deficiency shortly, but in the meantime, here’s another arresting quote from William Willimon’s Why Jesus?: Read more

Jan 14

4 Comments

Why Jesus?

Yesterday was one of those happy days when a little brown box full of books shows up on my doorstep, and I had just enough time to grab one of them as I ran out the door with my daughter to swimming lessons.  Twenty minutes later, after collapsing poolside nearing the end of what felt like a long day, I read these words that open William Willimon’s Why Jesus?: Read more

Jan 11

13 Comments

The Church, It is a-Changing

At any given time, I have between 25-30 unpublished, half/barely-started posts or links to interesting articles occupying space in my “drafts” folder. Needless to say, things can get buried pretty easily, so I try to periodically root through this folder to see what I once thought was interesting/worth posting on, and to determine what might need to see the light of day (or be consigned to the cyber-scrap heap!). Read more

Jan 6

3 Comments

A Link… and a Quote

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my post “Pockets” has been featured this month over at High Calling’s “Around the Network.”  It’s always nice to be recognized—especially in the context of writers and thinkers whose work you respect and admire.  Be sure to check out some of the other posts that are highlighted as well.  I’ve only made it through a few so far this morning, but I have thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated each contribution I have read. Read more

Jan 5

15 Comments

A Personal Response

While I’m still in the reflection mode occasioned by a new year and a trip through my journals, I’ve been thumbing through a few of the books that I was reading and reflecting upon in my younger years.  Lesslie Newbigin was a writer and a thinker that was immensely helpful to me as I was beginning to negotiate such themes as the uniqueness of Christianity, the nature and limits of reason and faith, and the shape of discipleship.  Newbigin’s books were a gift then, and they remain so today. Read more

Jan 2

6 Comments

A Subtle Mercy

Yesterday was a quiet day at home and my wife was doing some sorting and cleaning around the house.  Around mid-afternoon, she emerged from one room with a large stack of papers and presented them to me with a little smile on her face.  I looked at the first page on the stack and knew why she was smiling.  The pile of paper was a prayer journal that I had kept during my mid twenties.  During this apparently pious (and prolific!) period of my life, I journaled nearly every day, filling a number of thick notebooks with my religious musings, longings, entreaties, and expressions of thanks. Read more

Dec 27

8 Comments

Faith is Patience

So Advent has come and gone and with it, the liturgical theme of “waiting” for God. Every year, we rehearse the story, we light the candles, we read the Scriptures, and we wait for the Christ child. Every year, we are told, Jesus comes to us anew. Every year, our waiting ends on Christmas day only to begin again next year. Waiting, it sometimes seems, is endless. Read more

Dec 24

2 Comments

Hope Goes On

I came across this image today and couldn’t resist posting it.

There are probably a number of ways of interpreting it on this Christmas Eve, 2010. Does it portray the decreasing relevance of Christmas in a mostly secular culture? The slow demise of the hope and faith of the season into a sea of nihilistic postmodern despair? The long overdue demise of  the confused mixture of pagan and Christian imagery so prominent in our culture this time of year? Some combination of the above? Read more

Dec 20

24 Comments

Indifference in Disguise

An interesting article from last week’s National Post… Apparently, youngsters in Quebec daycare centres will henceforth be allowed to see religious imagery and symbols but not to have them explained: Read more

Dec 18

38 Comments

Christmas Confusion

I couldn’t help but chuckle at the conclusion of tonight’s edition of Coach’s Corner on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada. Cherry’s shtick was his usual combination of lightly-informed, opinionated bravado and Canadian hockey machismo, but as is increasingly often the case, it was also the opportunity for him to step up his soap box. Read more

Dec 17

1 Comment

The Risk of Birth

This poem came through the inbox today and I thought it was too good not to share. In a season where the words that fill our days are so often kitschy and sales-pitchy, it is refreshing to come across better ones—words that are simple, beautiful, and true. Read more

Dec 14

17 Comments

Confession

A post by Andrew Stephens-Rennie over at Empire Remixed has got me thinking about confession.  My sense is that confession is seen as something of a dirty word in our culture, conjuring up all kinds of unpleasant images of nosy priests and slavish religious rituals meant to assuage unnecessary guilt.  Confession isn’t a popular concept in a self-obsessed culture suspicious of religious power and those who wield it and where we seem to almost instinctively think of ourselves as victims of the myriad forces that act upon us rather than active and willful contributors to the brokenness of our world. Read more

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