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Dec 15

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A Soul’s Worth

Last year around this time, I wrote a short piece on my first Christmas at the jail, about how Christmas carols sound different surrounded by plastic and concrete than they do in candle-lit church sanctuaries, about how lines like “And you, beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low” or “For sinners here, the silent Word is pleading” seem somehow more urgent or pressing or something here. The familiar words come crashing into the ugliness of the human condition from out there in “abstract theology land” with startling force. Read more

Dec 13

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The Mysterians

Last night, I spoke with a friend about prayer. A mutual acquaintance had received bad news. What do we pray for? Peace? Healing? Comfort? Strength to endure? “Thy will be done” (those four words we pray when we run out of ideas, the last best expression of hope and resignation whereby we collapse into the words of Christ himself)? What does prayer even do? Are we trying to get God to get busy with what he would otherwise be disinclined to do without our entreaties? Does God require arm-twisting? Is there a critical mass of prayer required to move the divine needle? When it comes to the nature of prayer, it doesn’t take too long before we’re in head-scratching territory. It sort of defies airtight explanation. “I pray because Jesus prayed and because he told his followers to pray” can sound like a cop-out. Or it can sound like the deepest, truest thing one could say. Depending on the day. Read more

Dec 5

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What if There Isn’t Room in My Heart?

I clicked on the headline somewhat unthinkingly (as I too often do). “The forgotten war in Syria.” It’s a place and a people that has a unique place in my heart given our church’s efforts to sponsor refugees during the Syrian refugee crisis, given the number of words that I wrote and spoke around that time advocating for a compassionate response, given the Syrian men, women, and children that I have come to know in our city over the last eight years or so. I had done a recent presentation on our church’s response to the Syrian crisis at a conference a few weeks ago, so I suppose that contributed to my reasons for clicking the link. But mostly I clicked because the war in Syria had receded into the shadows of my heart and mind and I probably felt like it shouldn’t have. Read more

Dec 1

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A House with Many Entrances

It’s been fascinating to observe the ongoing parsing of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion to Christianity. I’ve reflected on it briefly (here and here). This conversion been the subject of conversation with friends and acquaintances. It’s led down all kinds of interesting little trails. What counts as a “legitimate” conversion? It is even right or proper to speak of such a thing? Is the language of conversion simply a way to speak about subjective preference? Can we actually make the argument that some belief systems are “better” or “truer” or “more useful” in the context of pluralism in all its forms? Is “conversion” the right word to use for being persuaded by a cultural or civilizational argument? Should there not be some kind of emotional, spiritual, or affective component to things? How does what we’re converting from affect what we end up converting to? So many questions… Read more

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

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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

4 Comments

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

8 Comments

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

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