Show and tell a different world
The gospel is good news. It is not therapy, opium or merely a good idea among many good ideas. The gospel is a journey into a foreign land. It is power. It is surprise. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once reflected, “I have noticed that the most effective sermons were those in which I spoke enticingly of the…
Who is to blame?
The Vancouver Canucks’ inability to score and some people’s penchant for blowing things up has caused me to agree with a zealous atheist. “Religion poisons everything,” contends Christopher Hitchens. He may be on to something—at least to the degree “Hockeyanity” has become Canada’s de facto religion. In British Columbia we observed two months of Stanley…
Touch for the good
I recently visited with my mother in the small room that is now her home. After travelling hours by airplane and car, my foot was swollen and sore. Having few options for relief, I lifted it and placed it beside her. She reached out, softly touched it, and asked how my foot, which had…
Nothing interesting ever seems to happen . . . until now
The long grass in the field ahead of her hadn’t been mowed in months, maybe even years. Across the field was an old swing set, a boy swinging back and forth with a goofy grin on his face. Asia waved at him and he waved back. For a fleeting instant she wondered what kind of…
Interruptions
So Jesus was striding down the street one day when a kid in front of him turned around and asked for a bus ticket. Jesus had noticed the boy—a skinny teenager wearing a too-big T-shirt—aimlessly tapping a stick on a nearby fence. Jesus had wondered why the boy wasn’t in school, and if he was…
Behind Anglican lines
I have a hard time not thinking of myself as a Mennonite. I grew up in a Mennonite community, attended a Mennonite seminary and have worshipped predominantly in Mennonite churches. Yet it’s now been almost five years that my family and I have been camped out in evangelical territory. I teach at an evangelical college,…
‘Be on our side’
Acknowledging that “the church has been awakened and reawakened to racial injustice in our midst after the death of George Floyd,” MennoMedia, an agency of Mennonite Church Canada and MC U.S.A., dedicated one of its ‘adaptive church webinars’ to addressing racism in churches. The July 9 webinar, entitled “Expanding our witness: Equipping ministry for anti-racist…
Watch: Conrad Grebel’s viral video
Over the last two years, Conrad Grebel University College’s YouTube channel has become a go-to source for quality gamelan videos. This moderate internet fame is spurred on by one performance in particular—a piece called “Hujan Mas” performed by the University of Waterloo Balinese Gamelan at their end-of-term concert in March 2017. Watch it now: This…
A new view of nature
I am so glad that summer is on the horizon. Spending time outdoors was a huge part of my childhood. My family shared many weekends at a small one-room cabin on a river, fishing, swimming, canoeing and just enjoying the beauty around us. We would watch the beavers make their way up and down the…
Hollywood feminism and the decline of cinema
Star Wars (the original by George Lucas) arrived in Winnipeg in the early summer of 1977. I went to the first screening of the day (around noon) and was so blown away by what I saw and heard (the score, not the banal dialogue) that I stayed in the theatre for four successive viewings, something…
