Culture

• 

  What it means to remember

  Peter Stockland

  November 22, 2011

  Yet its very treatment spoke volumes about the robotic mindlessness of modern media bigotry toward Christian faith and Holy Scripture. The winner, a nine-year-old from Salem, Oregon, took home $100,000 in prize money. It was the second year in a row that Olivia Davis has won the competition. According to her mother, quoted in the story, the youngster spends four hours a day in the summer on Scriptural memory work.

  It was handled as an oddball newspaper wire story to be played as filler back behind the truss ads, as we used to say.

  Yet its very treatment spoke volumes about the robotic mindlessness of modern media bigotry toward Christian faith and Holy Scriptu...

  Read more...

• 

  Longing and restraint

  Alissa Wilkinson

  November 21, 2011

  Though I grew up in a church that did light the candles in the Advent wreath on the Sundays leading up to Christmas, I didn't really understand the significance of the season until a few years ago. And so I've grown into the season since then. A few years ago, I posted this on another blog, and I think it merits repeating: .

  This Thursday is Thanksgiving down here in the U.S., and that signals the start of Christmas season—and the season of Advent, the beginning of the church calendar.

  Though I grew up in a church that did light the candles in the Advent wreath on the Su...

  Read more...

• 

  Hockey and Politics Don't Mix

  Ray Pennings

  October 26, 2011

  I'll grant him his basic premise: the Canadian brand is changing. The Pan-Canadian consensus—that set of values the media brands as mainstream—is declining. Arguably, we used to see our identity in multiculturalism, our preference for international peacekeeping rather than taking sides, the Charter of Rights, and government social programs as expressions of our kindness and tolerance. While Mr. Martin blames Mr. Harper for this change, we publicly argued at the time of Stephen Harper's election in 2006 that this decline had already been a decade or two in the making. In other words, Mr. Harper isn't changing Canadian values. Canadian values changed in the eighties and nineties, and the election of a Conservative government was a consequence of that change. It is taking others a bit longer to adjust to the changes that have already taken place.

  Lawrence Martin's recent Globe and Mail column talked about the change of the Canadian brand under t...

  Read more...

• 

  Shaming Us Into It

  Alissa Wilkinson

  October 24, 2011

  On Monday, though, I was riding home on the D train in my usual attitude (leaning lightly against the door, nose in a book, and earbuds in place) when I heard a different message. It startled me enough that I took my earbuds out and listened. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  I (understandably) spend a great deal of time in the New York subways. The truth about subways is that you stop hearing the announcements after a while. I moved here a month before the bombings in the London Tube in 2005, and after that the announcements st...

  Read more...

• 

  Some corrections from last week

  Robert Joustra

  October 21, 2011

  First, there was the smug elitist tone of the thing. It had that early morning pre-caffeinated quality of rant that is out of place in a written format. It was smug and rude, but I deny its elitism. Elitism gatekeeps; I begged for joiners, if not on the Hill at least at the polls.

  It seems a bit narcisstic to offer correction and commentary on something I've written, but a surprising number of people would probably find it cathartic to know I've given further corrective thought to ...

  Read more...

• 

  The New York Times' (and America's) Rejection of Faith

  Brian Dijkema

  October 20, 2011

  The article, written by Karl Giberson and Randall Stephens, covers much of the ground previously covered by Mark Noll in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The charges are familiar to many in the evangelical world: evangelicals reject science and are marked by "simplistic theology, cultural isolationism, and stubborn anti-intellectualism" and a sub-culture which is parasitic on the mainstream of American life. The only reason it's in the NYT is that it flatters the prejudices of the readersip. A more nuanced view of evangelicals, like the one Alan Wolfe wrote for The Atlantic some years ago, would never be run in the NYT.

  The New York Times published an article this week opining on the evangelical rejection of reason.

  The article, written by Karl Giberson and Randal...

  Read more...