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Sep 15

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A Pastorally Adequate Theodicy

Way back in my first year as a philosophy student at the University of Lethbridge, I took a class which dealt with the various philosophical responses the problem of evil (free will defense, best-of-all-possible-worlds defense, process-theology defense, etc). The class was taught by a flamboyant, bombastic, atheistic Jew who claimed, nonetheless, to be angry at God and to be determined to personally offend each one of us and force us to abandon our simplistic understandings of important questions like the problem of evil. I think he liked the idea of taking the first class to try to terrify and overwhelm a bunch of 18-19 year old kids (many of whom were “religious” in some form or another) who had never seriously thought about some of these questions. Maybe it made him feel important or smart or irreverent or superior. I don’t know. But at least initially, I wasn’t very impressed. It seemed like a rather adolescent and petulant display and I wasn’t much looking forward to the class. Read more

Sep 8

1 Comment

Faith Waits

 Faith is a way of waiting—never quite knowing, never quite hearing or seeing, because in the darkness we are all but a little lost.  There is doubt hard on the heels of every belief, fear hard on the heels of every hope, and many holy things lie in ruins because the world has ruined them and we have ruined them.  But faith waits, even so, delivered at least from that final despair which gives up waiting altogether because it sees nothing left worth waiting for.  Faith waits—for the opening of a door, the sound of footsteps in the hall, that beloved voice delayed, delayed so long that there are times when you all but give up hope of ever hearing it.  And when at moments you think you do hear it (if only faintly, from far away) the question is: Can it possibly be, impossibly be, that one voice of all voices?

Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark

Sep 7

14 Comments

On Fish Wars and a “Drive-By Culture”

Vancouver Island is not a place known for being a hotbed of some of the “culture wars” that take place south of the border. As far as I’ve been able to tell in one year, it is a very post-Christian environment with a whole bunch of eclectic spiritualities from quasi-paganism to charismatic Christianity to the garden variety unreflective secularism that you see anywhere else in the modern west. Having said all that, I’ve been surprised to notice that the “fish wars” seem to have a small but noticeable presence over here. Read more

Sep 4

23 Comments

Tribes and Translations

Scot McKnight has been blogging about the controversy generated by the TNIV  announcement (see here and here for Scot’s thoughts; see also here for discussion on this blog) this week as well and offers the following humorous synopsis of the “tribalism” that accompanies the varied and sundry English translations. I suspect these resonate a bit more deeply south of the border, but they’re recognizable in the Great White North as well (and pretty funny, in my opinion): Read more

Sep 2

32 Comments

It’s 1989 All Over Again!

From the “it’s about time” file comes today’s news that my beloved Calgary Flames have decided to rewind the clock and wear retro jerseys from the 1980’s for five home games this year in order to commemorate their 30th anniversary.  These jerseys will always have a special place in my heart.  The Flames wore these the night they became the only visiting team ever to hoist the Stanley Cup in the hallowed Montreal Forum (and made a 14 year old boy very happy!).  The return of the jerseys are just the first step.  I can see it all now… The glory of 1989 is returning! Read more

Sep 1

11 Comments

Lost in Translation

This morning’s tour through the blogosphere led to the discovery that Biblica (formerly the International Bible Society) is giving up on the 2002 revision of the New International Version of the Bible (the TNIV) because of the “mistakes” of this translation. As someone who actually likes the TNIV and uses it somewhat regularly, I was surprised and a little disappointed to learn about this.  I realize that the TNIV is not a perfect translation and that, like every translation, there are biases and interpretations that come through, but it’s one that I’ve come to appreciate over the years—not least because of its commitment to render the original text in more gender inclusive language.  It’s a translation that I don’t hesitate to recommend to others, whether they are long-time Christians or they’ve never cracked open a Bible in their lives and are just curious about what they might find.  Consequently, I was interested to discover which “mistakes” the publishers were talking about. Read more

Aug 31

3 Comments

The Good Life

Those who have been following the previous two discussions about what our response to suffering ought to be, what resources we draw from, and what kinds of ethical paradigms inform how/where we locate suffering might want to check out Gil’s latest post. He’s been reflecting on Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self where Taylor contrasts something like “traditional” ethics, where our vision of goodness and human dignity is grounded in a transcendent God (or Good), and a modern naturalist approach which sees the “good life in terms of a heroic determination to face a meaningless existence with courage.” Read more

Aug 28

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What Do We Do With Pain?

I was thinking about the conversation taking place around my previous post as I continued to get acquainted with William Willimon this morning. The conversation is around the proper Christian approach to suffering. How should we suffer? How should we view it? Is it an unwelcome intruder into the very essence of reality? The divinely appointed means through which Christians demonstrate their allegiance to Jesus? A strategy for effective Christian leadership? I think most of us who have been touched by the Suffering Servant have some sense that suffering ought to somehow be different for us even if we’re not sure what that looks like. I don’t know many people who actually desire or welcome pain but I think we intuitively sense that Jesus somehow changes how we look at (or ought to look at) suffering even if we aren’t always very good at articulating how. Read more

Aug 26

15 Comments

“I Know What God Does With Pain”

From the “sobering quotes” file, comes this morning’s offering from Richard Rohr: Read more

Aug 24

11 Comments

A Grand Thing that Ought to Be True

Most of us who have been Christians for a little while or a long while have moments where we wonder if we really are right about this whole God business.  Some days it seems like nothing could be more obvious than that there is God out there guiding and sustaining the cosmos; on others, it seems like the remotest of possibilities.

Near the end of Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner quotes a character from a George MacDonald novel who has this to say about this question of questions: Read more

Aug 20

24 Comments

God’s Angry Again…

Yesterday a tornado unexpectedly touched down in Minneapolis. Apparently, according to pastor John Piper—a champion and defender of God’s specific sovereignty over all things—the reason for this ordinary (and, relatively minor—no loss of life or even injury) event has to do with God’s anger at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ECLA) for considering the ordination of homosexuals at their annual convention in the same city that the tornado touched down in. Here is Piper’s conclusion about the “meaning” of this event: Read more

Aug 19

The Whole Vast Drama of Things

Apologies for the lack of posting over the last little while—I find myself going through one of those stretches where I have very little that seems worth saying. Of course one of the benefits of times when words and ideas seem to desert us is that we can lean on and be nourished by the words of others. The writings of Frederick Buechner have often been a source of such words for me. Sometimes I feel that posting long quotes from the work of others is just a way of avoiding the sometimes painful process of writing myself; other times, I just feel grateful to have stumbled across something wise and glad to be able to share it. Read more

Aug 12

19 Comments

The Weeping Mode

As a parent of young children, I often wonder about how much of the pain and brutality of the world we ought to expose our kids to—which conversations do they need to be absent from, which books and films could they do without exposure to, and when it is appropriate to let them in on the secret that the world can sometimes be kind of a nasty place (I suspect it’s quite often not as much of a “secret” to them as we might like to think).  There can be a fine line between helping your children see that the world is a safe enough place to love and learn and grow and not shielding from the reality of a messed-up world in desperate need of compassionate, committed, and resourceful people to make it better. Read more

Aug 10

8 Comments

Personal Relationships

One of the things that I have found frustrating at various points throughout my life is how the language of “personal relationship” is used in (usually evangelical) Christian contexts. Often times, the end goal of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection was (and is) described as some variation of providing a way for human beings to have a “personal relationship” with God. What is needed, we are often told, is to invite Jesus into our “heart” to be our “personal saviour” and then begin cultivating our “personal relationship” with him via an amalgam of pious-sounding, mostly solitary activities. Of course this isn’t true across the board, but it’s true in enough contexts to have fairly broad traction in many denominational and cultural contexts. Read more

Aug 7

8 Comments

Fidelity

This is henceforth going to be required reading for any and all pre-marital sessions I am a part of.

I don’t necessarily agree with every aspect of how the author diagnoses the problem, and I might have some questions about her “decision” not to suffer, but what a breath of fresh-air in the divorce-happy, narcissistic culture we live in!

Aug 3

24 Comments

Sad Stories

Yesterday I was reading Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes while my son sat across the table munching away on a late breakfast. It’s a magnificent book that tracks the journey of an African girl who gets taken from her home, sold into slavery, and spends the bulk of her lifetime in conditions of appalling cruelty and inhumanity a world away from her home. It is a beautifully told tale of an incredibly strong, courageous, and good woman, but it is also a story of unspeakable suffering, depravity, and loss. It is a story that does not shrink from laying bare the evil of which human beings are capable. Read more

Jul 26

3 Comments

God Has No Grandchildren

From Richard Rohr’s Radical Grace:

Every generation has to be converted anew. Each generation has to know for itself the fidelity of God. Each generation has to do its own homework and walk its own journey of search and surrender. No person, ritual, or institution can finally do that for you. There are no spiritual coat tails on which to ride, they just give us a good head start.

It’s not enough to say that my mother was Catholic, my father was Christian, or “I am a son of Abraham” as Jesus put it. Until you come to that time in your life when you choose that you have been chosen, when you accept that you have been totally accepted, the real process of personal transformation has not begun. God has no grandchildren, it seems. Only children! And mercifully, many, many of them, because there are as many and varied journeys as there are people.

Jul 21

13 Comments

Thinking your Way to Faith

A while back, I had a conversation with a young couple who had differing religious perspectives about how they anticipated raising future children. One of the options floated about was something like this: “We’ll just raise them ‘neutral’; we’ll expose them to as many religious and irreligious options as possible and let them make up their own minds.” Well, that sure sounds admirable enough. Give them the choice. Don’t stuff anything down their throats. No indoctrination or coercion whatsoever. What could be more honouring of the individuality and freedom of our children than that? Read more

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