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Nov 28

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Disneyland

I had barely walked through the door of my office at the jail when a guard showed up. “There’s an inmate who’s been trying to get a hold of a chaplain since Saturday. His kid is in on life support at the hospital. He wants to talk to someone. We suggested “Health Care,” but he wasn’t interested, so…” I gulped. Said I would “take care of it,” whatever that could possibly mean. I leafed quickly through some of the requests that had trickled in over the weekend and noticed two from this poor guy. I’ll call him Terry. Could someone please come see me… pray for me… pray for my son? My heart heaved a little. Read more

Nov 21

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All Are Welcome?

“So, I’m getting out tomorrow… and, well, I think I’d like to stay connected, or, you know, kinda figure I need to stay with church and stuff… I dunno, do you have any advice or suggestions?” The guy sitting across from me in bleak, concrete interview room at the jail struggled to make eye contact, shifted around constantly. He had a cut over his eye and had limped noticeably as he walked into the room. He had been semi-regular in my bible studies over the last year or so. He rarely said much, but when he did it was measured and thoughtful. I told him I was happy to hear that he was getting out. He didn’t seem as happy for himself as I was for him. Read more

Nov 16

8 Comments

Tell Me About Your Relationship with Jesus

This was the surprising invitation put to Australian musician Nick Cave on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast recently. Not exactly the sort of thing one expects to hear in a forum typically devoted to the nuts and bolts of music production. But Cave does talk about God rather a lot, so I guess fair game. There was some knowing chuckling and qualifying and maybe a bit of embarrassed hedging. It’s such a retrograde, naïve, provincial question, after all. Who talks about their “relationship with Jesus” anymore, other than perhaps a few benighted yokels from the Bible belt? Right? Read more

Nov 14

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Tuesday Miscellany: Wars and Rumours

I sat down in my study this morning in a bit of a state, a bunch of things belligerently crashing around in my head. So, I decided to try to give them some shape. Or at least to let them out. It gets crowded and unruly in there.

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Paul Kingsnorth is quickly taking up residence in my category of “people who I’ll read anything they write and listen to anything they say.” I’m sure he’ll be delighted to learn this—it’s a very exclusive category. His 2021 article “The Cross and the Machine” is one of my favourite conversion stories ever. His path has wound through the bored religious apathy of childhood, a more determined atheism in young adulthood, a deep love of ecology and environmental activism, Zen Buddhism, Wiccan paganism, and pretty much anything else he could take for a spin. Read more

Oct 31

5 Comments

Eye Contact

I’ve mentioned before that I’m watching The Chosen with the guys in the jail. When I first started as chaplain I sort of resisted “just watching TV” during chapel. We should read and talk and share instead, surely (don’t we all watch more than enough TV?!). Maybe there was some curriculum we could get through. Maybe I could, with great humility and luminous, penetrating insight, lead them through my favourite Jesus stories. And The Chosen was a bit too American evangelical-ish. It’s surely not very respectable for (self-styled) theological sophisticates to associate themselves with any of the products of a bloated and crassly consumeristic Christian media industry, right? Read more

Oct 25

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On Polarization

I have always been a peacemaker of sorts. Whenever I take one of those Enneagram or Myers Briggs or DISC tests (which I find to be of dubious value, truth be told), I usually land in whatever category they have for peacemaker-ish people. The positive spin on this is that I genuinely do long for peace — between people, families, churches, nations, etc. The less positive spin is that I just hate conflict, like to be liked, and prefer being comfortable to wading into the discomfort of generative conflict. It’s not particularly flattering to admit this, but, well, the truth isn’t always flattering. Read more

Oct 13

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On the Failures of Words

Like so many, I have spent large portions of this week marinating in media about the events that have transpired in Israel and Gaza over the last six days. What does one even say at the sight of such scenes, such images, such abject evil and depravity? Perhaps the best thing would be to say nothing. Especially those of us so far removed from things, historically and politically. What need does the world have for so many opinions incubated mostly in ignorance or even of empathy divorced from any kind of experiential connection to the land, its history, its suffering, its people? And yet, silence, too, speaks. I have written about Palestinian suffering in the past. Symmetry, if nothing else, would seem to demand a few words about Israeli suffering. Read more

Oct 10

2 Comments

Our Soul Has Had More Than Its Fill

Christians have an odd relationship with the Hebrew Bible. We call it the “Old Testament” (which is vaguely condescending), and we embrace the sacred texts of the Jewish people as our own. We transpose words originally written by and for a specific people into more a more personal key. We call their Psalms the “prayerbook of the church” and we use them as such. We claim so many of their words as our own because we are convinced that Jesus is the fulfillment of their promise. This is an audacious claim and we should never forget this. Read more

Oct 4

9 Comments

“The Data Present Some Uncomfortable Realities”

My wife and I recently found ourselves at a function where we were seated with a young couple from Zimbabwe. They had met in Canada where they both came to study. They had completed their studies and were now young professionals in a large Canadian city. My wife is relentlessly curious and a good asker of questions. And she asked plenty throughout the dinner. This young couple’s story was a fascinating one in many ways, not least because it was told with such evident joy. Read more

Sep 29

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It’s OK to Say the Word

Speaking of restless hearts and God-shaped holes, I spent my commute yesterday listening to an interview with Tara Isabella Burton, whose 2020 book Strange Rites offered an interesting, and I think mostly accurate diagnosis of our time. Burton’s basic thesis is that in the exodus from Christianity and organized religion has resulted in people turning everything from Harry Potter fandom to “woke” social justice culture to alt-right atavism to Silicon Valley tech-utopianism to wellness culture to polyamory into a kind of “religion.” According to Burton, religions provide their flocks with four crucial things: meaning, purpose, community, and ritual. People may be fleeing more traditional sources of these things in droves, but they’re still scratching that itch somewhere, she says. I think she’s right. Read more

Sep 27

5 Comments

Forgive Me, For I Have Sinned

So, a struggling young actor and a middle-aged pastor walk into a bar… What sounds like a setup for a lame joke was in fact how I spent part of an afternoon a few weekends ago in the Rocky Mountains. My wife was attending some meetings for a board she sits on, and I was tagging along for a few days before we continued further west for a holiday on the BC coast. The actor was there with his fiancé who was also attending the meetings. As we both had nothing to do one afternoon, we found ourselves meandering around town before parking ourselves in the glorious autumn sunshine on a patio pub. Read more

Sep 12

22 Comments

Men Without Fingers

I’ll never forget the first time it happened. One of my tasks at the jail is to connect with inmates seeking one-on-one meetings. Sometimes these are people who won’t (or can’t) come to the regular chapels, so I’ve never met them before. When I introduce myself, I always try to very deliberately make eye contact, refer to them by name, and shake their hands. So much of life in jail is impersonal and dehumanizing. Any little gesture to counter this feels worth it to me. And so, I was very consciously looking this man in the eye when we shook hands. But something felt off. I looked down and was shocked to discover that he only had two out of ten fingers. I was shaking a palm and a few stumps. Read more

Sep 6

6 Comments

Never to Return?

This morning, I read the latest analysis of the “dechurching” of America in The Atlantic (yes, it’s about America, but, as always, the trends are applicable throughout much of the West). “What happens when Americans stop going to church?” Daniel Williams asks. Well, broadly speaking, they become more polarized and politicized. But they also don’t tend to become atheists, agnostics, or even necessarily “nones” (although this last category is indeed growing). They tend to hang on to at least some version of Christian belief, but often a politically distorted version. And, absent the church, a largely self-referential one that reinforces their own views. Read more

Aug 31

4 Comments

On Bad Behaviour

Last week, I sat through my first diversity training session. My part time chaplaincy role at the provincial jail locates me under the purview of the Government of Alberta, evidently, and the government wanted to ensure that I was diversity certified. My expectations were, well, low (see here). I was expecting ninety-minutes of condescending lectures combined with contrived vignettes, simplistic question-and-answers, and sombre warnings of the importance of morally policing the behaviour of others, all informed by a woefully naïve anthropology. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised. Just kidding. It was pretty much exactly what I expected. Read more

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 22

6 Comments

Yay, I Love That Guy!

Should the world love and admire Christians? In a recent blog post, Richard Beck, professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University in Texas, shared something that he said to his students in a lecture last semester:

I hope for the day where, when the world sees Christians coming, they say, ‘The Christians are here! Yay! I love those people!’

Read more

Aug 17

2 Comments

On Moral Inarticulacy

A brief follow-up to Tuesday’s post about how we are living in “morally inarticulate” times. In today’s New York Times, Pamela Paul compellingly and persuasively argues that we should not abandon the term “prostitution” for the supposedly more dignified and dignifying term “sex worker.” Calling a whole toxic ecosystem that feeds on poverty, addiction, violence, lust, and predation “sex work,” Paul argues, does not change the reality. This is not a job like any other and we shouldn’t describe it as such. 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

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