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Jul 18

9 Comments

Why Wouldn’t I Forgive You?

Moving to and setting up in a new place can be a stressful time. There is lots of assembling things, moving them around, running around buying this or that miscellaneous item, returning said item when it doesn’t fit or work as you expected it to, etc. Several consecutive days of this can leave one feeling a bit tired and, well, short-tempered. When you combine parents who are preoccupied with setting up a house with kids who are getting less attention than they are normally accustomed to, you have a recipe for frustration. Read more

Jul 10

5 Comments

Time and Reliability—Reflecting on “A Fine Balance”

I’ve just finished Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance this week and thought I would post a few thoughts provoked along the way (the book was highly recommended independently by two trusted friends so I was able to overcome my customary aversion to reading anything from “Oprah’s Book Club”).  The book is brilliantly written—a really well told story in every way, one that presents you with the full spectrum human experience from the most abject misery and suffering to the heights of joy. Read more

Jul 7

2 Comments

I Give Up (Bathroom Rant Redux)

Well, the combination of summer holidays, finishing the thesis, moving to another city to start a new chapter in our lives, and traveling back to Alberta to see family have combined to render this a rather barren forum over the last few weeks. My own lack of ideas, a few comments from others about last summer’s rant against bathroom technology, and exposure to similar frustrations on my travels so far this summer convinced me that it might be fun to re-post this entry for those who didn’t get the chance to share in my misery last year. Enjoy. Read more

Jun 27

6 Comments

Done!

Well, sixteen months of toil came to an end today as I finally submitted my thesis for grading. I can’t tell you how good it felt to plunk that big stack of paper down at the Regent front office today. I am very relieved to have this completed—it’s a huge load off my mind. For those who might (still) be wondering about what, exactly, I’ve been beavering away at for so long, I’ve reproduced the abstract below. If you’re interested enough to read more, drop me an email and I’ll send you a copy. Read more

Jun 27

In Praise of Mennonites

As one who was raised in, continues to be nourished by, and will be working within the Mennonite tradition, I couldn’t resist posting a link to Greg Boyd’s latest post. I think Boyd is just a bit too breathless in his praise of Mennonites (two friends are currently writing theses about Mennonites—one examining just how consistently they have historically applied their ethic of nonviolence with each other, and another on Mennonites’ contribution to an overly individualistic approach to faith), but I think that he does point to some genuinely admirable features of the tradition that the rest of the Christian world would profit from paying attention to.

God knows Mennonites aren’t perfect, but I do think that we understand some things well, and, at our best, embody a way of being in the world that seeks to reflect the means by which God has accomplished his redemption of the world.

h/t: Waving or Drowning

Jun 24

Scientists Have Discovered…

It seems like every week or two I come across an article bemoaning how distracted we’ve become with our over-reliance on technological gadgetry, our inability to turn our devices off, and our constant foraging for information, checking email, etc. Usually this is framed as a negative thing primarily because of its detrimental effect on the economy—too many work hours down the drain due to our inability to focus on a single task and our proclivity for allowing our minds (and mouses) to get distracted and wander off into cyberspace or BlackBerry land. Read more

Jun 19

5 Comments

Goodbyes

Goodbyes are never easy. We’re being reminded of this as we begin the process of moving (again) to start a new phase of our lives. We just returned from a wonderful evening spent with a great group of friends from our church family. The drive home was a quiet one. Just as it was three years ago, it’s hard to think about picking up and leaving friends and family again, and starting over somewhere new. Every get-together with friends now carries with it a tinge of regret – the knowledge that this may be the last time we get together this way with this group of people for this reason. There is a sense of loss that comes with goodbyes, a sense that something good is slipping away. Read more

Jun 12

6 Comments

A Shared Moral Universe

Well my thesis is mercifully coming closer to completion—I submitted the final chapter to my supervisor’s scalpel yesterday. After a year or so spent on the same topic, not to mention the ordinary frustrations of thesis-writing, the question of why I ever started this project sometimes occurs to me (apart from my requiring these credits to graduate). Atheism and the problem of evil. Not exactly the most inspiring or uplifting topics to immerse oneself in for a sustained period of time. Read more

Jun 7

Imagination and Explanation

We have a pair of mental operations, Imagination and Explanation, designed to work in tandem. When the gospel is given robust and healthy expression, the two work in graceful synchronicity. Explanation pins things down so that we can handle and use them—obey and teach, help and guide. Imagination opens things up so that we can grow into maturity – worship and adore, exclaim and honor, follow and trust. Explanation restricts, defines, and holds down; Imagination expands and lets loose. Explanation keeps our feet on the ground; imagination lifts our heads into the clouds. Explanation puts us in harness; Imagination catapults us into mystery. Explanation reduces life to what can be used; Imagination enlarges life into what can be adored.

Eugene Peterson Under the Unpredictable Plant:

Jun 4

Something New Under the Sun

Over the last couple of days the daily readings from the lectionary I’m following have been from the first three chapters of Ecclesiastes. This morning’s reading was the famous “a time for everything” passage in Ecclesiastes 3:1-15, popularized by The Byrds, and no doubt resonant with the experience of many. The seasons come and go, and life looks pretty much the same. Ecclesiastes is, I suppose, considered to be a bit of a bleak book (although I’ve always rather liked it), one that gives expression to how the world is experienced by human beings. We’re born, we struggle, we seize what fleeting pleasures are on offer, we die, and around and around it goes. Nothing new. Read more

Jun 1

6 Comments

What’s in a Name?

Every Saturday night over the last year or so, from 10:45-12:00, I play hockey with a group of guys I connected with through one of the dads at the kids’ school. After the game last night, amidst the usual mélange of sweat, beer, colourful language, and conversation about what this or that guy has “under the hood,” one guy came over to me and said (loudly) “So, I hear you’re leaving us in a month.” “That’s right,” I said. He continued, “and I hear that you’re a minister?” Hmmm, well how to respond to that. “Well, I will be,” I said. “What denomination?” came the reply. Hmmm…. Read more

May 27

3 Comments

For and Against God?

The last chapter of my thesis is where I try to make the move from the existence of a strong element of moral protest in the new atheism, to the claim that the whole enterprise can profitably be understood as an attempt at theodicy. As such, I’ve been brushing up on some responses to the problem of evil in Encountering Evil. I came across these passages in John Roth’s chapter on “protest theodicy” this morning, and I’ve been mulling them over since: Read more

May 23

Religion and Violence: An Interesting Conversation

Some friends are visiting from Alberta and we spent part of yesterday over at a market in North Vancouver. After a bit of shopping our friends’ kids were getting a little restless so we camped out in the play area for a while and let them run off some steam with the other kids. As we were sitting around watching the kids play, we struck up a conversation with a gentleman who was there taking care of his granddaughter. After a bit of pleasant small-talk, the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, to where everyone’s from and what they do. Read more

May 17

2 Comments

Rippling

Richard Handler is, as far as I can gather, the resident philosopher at the CBC, and I’ve come to enjoy reading his articles since I first came across him several months ago (officially, he’s the producer of the CBC radio program Ideas). This week’s article deals with the subject of death—our omnipresent fear of it and one way of dealing with it from an unbeliever’s perspective. Read more

May 12

3 Comments

The World According to lululemon

Like the dutiful Vancouver husband/father that I am, I marched off to lululemon on Saturday to see if I could find my wife a gift worthy of both her maternal skills and her status as an emerging distance runner. lululemon is a Vancouver company famous mainly (I think) for its yoga-wear (although I couldn’t help but notice that their tags say “designed in Vancouver, made in Cambodia”). At any rate, it is, apparently, where all the cool moms get their workout gear so off I went to see what I could find. Read more

May 9

12 Comments

The Peculiar Human Organism

One of the central components of my thesis (which is, mercifully, coming closer to completion) is that the new atheist account of reality is not “deep” enough—it does not provide a rich or satisfying enough account of the phenomenology of being human. Huge swaths of human existential concerns are relegated to the realm of evolutionary peculiarities or “misfirings” in the attempt to squeeze everything into what John Haught has called an “explanatory monism” which assumes that one mode of explanation—the scientific one—is all we need. This reductive approach to human beings is then held alongside (awkwardly and incoherently, in my view) an arrogated moral authority in the attempt to discredit the very religious traditions which it is unwittingly borrowing from. Read more

May 5

2 Comments

A Circuitous Path to Environmentalism

When I was a kid I distinctly remember feeling, at times, somewhat resentful of my “Mennonite-ness.” It wasn’t anything distinctly theological (although like many kids, I suppose, there were moments when I didn’t like being “the Christian” amongst a group of friends who mostly were not) or cultural (I don’t recall particularly liking borscht at the time, but ours was not a family that clung to any of the typical cultural identifiers of German “Mennonite-ness” too fiercely). I knew enough Christians to mitigate the unpleasantness produced by my status as a “cognitive minority,” and there were enough sweet German pastries to offset those Mennonite dishes that happened to offend my palate. No, the source of my resentment lay elsewhere. Read more

Apr 25

9 Comments

Ehrman and Wright on the Problem of Suffering

The following exchange on beliefnet is worth checking out for those interested in the problem of suffering and evil, and how the biblical narrative addresses (or fails to address) it. Bart Ehrman is a former Christian and professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina who has recently authored God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer. N.T. Wright is a biblical theologian, the Bishop of Durham, and the author of numerous books on the the historical Jesus and the early church, as well as, more relevant to this discussion, Evil and the Justice of God. Read more

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