While I walked through Holy Week, considering the cross and Christ’s sacrifice, I was also reading The Hunger Games. With the recent cinematic splash of the movie version, I figured I better get up to speed and dove into the first book (I’m hooked so I’m reading through the whole trilogy). As I finished it… Continue reading The Hunger Games in Holy Week
Hello again - I've been absent for a while, dealing with a major life transition (same wife and kids - thank God - but new job, new location, and what feels like a new life). But enough dust has settled and boxes unpacked to make writing possible. So here we go: **************************************************** http://youtu.be/jdpQir1sqiQ I’m moving… Continue reading Will my smartphone make me stupid?
(Today I’m adding to a series of posts on the ancient Christian practice of praying the daily office - here are links to part I, part II, part III, and part IV). The ancient practice of praying the daily office was radically ahead of its time, anticipating the transient, mobile world we now inhabit. The… Continue reading Saying our prayers, part V – praying in community
This week I began work again after a time of sabbatical. And it is good to be working again. The structure for the week, the purposefulness of a place to go where your skills are engaged, the craft of it, the mind/body engagement. It’s good. I missed my work; I was itching to get back… Continue reading For the love of work
If you were to build a perfect society, how would you build it? What you would include in it would be telling. But perhaps more revealing would be what you might exclude from your perfect world. McGill ethicist Margaret Somerville wrote this week in a Globe and Mail column about a move in Denmark to… Continue reading The mysterious mirror of disability
Bedtime reading with our kids is one of my favourite things to do. I love the quiet bodies and whisper breathing of our children as they listen, but also I love getting to read great books (like the great labour relations drama of Click, clack, moo, the wonderfully egalitarian Everyone poops, or anything from the… Continue reading Uncle Andrew and me
The curtains sway shut. Exit stage left. We're going to miss you, Mr. Potter. With the final Harry Potter film out, I'm resurrecting an editorial I wrote exactly 6 years ago for the Calgary Herald (then marking the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince), which still echoes some of why I love the… Continue reading Farewell Harry Potter
I remember the first time I heard about a new Irish band. It was 1985, I was at college in the U.S. and my friend Ann told me I had to check out this band called U2 (previously known as Feedback and The Hype, they formally became U2 during a show in a Presbyterian Church near Dublin -… Continue reading Take this soul and make it sing
We're all faced with defining moments, times when our responses to the circumstances of life prophetically outline the shape of who we are becoming. This past week Vancouver had one of those defining moments - and I don't mean the riots. It was the day after the bedlam. There was an immediate groundswell of disgust… Continue reading The thread of civility, part 2
A few months ago James K.A. Smith (you need that many initials when your last name is Smith), Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, posted on my book at his blog fors clavigera. There's a nice symmetry in this because I'm just now reading his important book Desiring The Kingdom. What I find so lovely is… Continue reading James K.A. Smith on Seeking God’s Face
Squinch 