Religion

Church Meetings Matter

Ray Pennings

June 13, 2012

The very existence of churches and the witness of how they conduct their business provide a living example of an alternative way of dealing with the challenges of life. Church meetings begin not with bold affirmations of "we the people" but rather with times of worship. Those gathered are created beings acknowledging the authority of the God who made them.

Just because something may not be newsworthy does not mean it isn't of public importance. Last week I carried out responsibilities of the church office I hold, by attending our denominational synod. The lens through which that activity is viewed is usually ...

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Tipped hands and missed opportunities

Dani Shaw

June 11, 2012

The recent debate between the Ontario government and concerned Catholic parents and educators (over the McGuinty government's anti-bullying bill, discussed in this space last week) highlights the need for a more robust understanding and public discourse about the interplay between freedom of conscience and religion, advancing public policy, and the role of government in a diverse society. Whatever the merits of Bill 13, it is lamentable that the reported public debate has been reduced to a putative clash between religion and "fundamental values" such as respect and tolerance, and to a dispute about the name of clubs designed to promote understanding between students of different sexual orientations. Freedom of conscience and religion is itself a fundamental value, one that legislators tend to ignore or curtail when there is an apparent clash with other fundamental values. A more robust understanding of the value of freedom of conscience and religion in a highly diverse society is long overdue.

...

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Religious rights are not human rights?

Peter Stockland

June 5, 2012

The key to the video is not the demonstrators protesting legislation that will use the State's monopoly on deadly force to tell Catholic schools how to name their anti-bullying clubs. It is not even just the presence of a lone counter-demonstrator who heckles the main group of protestors as she holds a juvenile sign announcing "Jesus had two dads and he turned out fine".

As Bill 13 was being passed in the Ontario legislature today, a parent's rights group was circulating the following video: "You Deserve to be Bullied".

The key to the video is not the demonstrators protesting legislation that will use ...

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The Loudest Exclamation: Humility

Ray Pennings

May 30, 2012

Regent College historian Dr. Bruce Hindmarsh opened on Monday the National Forum for Christian Higher Education Canada (CHEC) by speaking to this topic. As befits a historian, Dr. Hindmarsh sketched where we are in our cultural moment. Most recently, we've been through a "battle for the Bible" in the earlier half of the twentieth century, as Christian "fundamentalists" responded to liberal theology. We then engaged a "battle for the mind," as the subsequent generation grew tired of the fundamentalist generation's neglect of intellect in favour of absolute pronouncements of biblical truth. Citing Mark Noll's famous 1994 book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind ("the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind"), Hindmarsh suggested that the past few decades have come a long way in addressing that scandal. There is much good work that is taking place today of first-rate Christian scholarship—and, I might add, also in public theology. Hindmarsh warned that with measured success comes danger. Has our focus on cultivating the Christian mind eclipsed our call to cultivate the Christian spirit?

Surely by now we realize scholarship and devotion belong together. In "heads, hearts, and hands" Christianity, this is a given. The only things that remain are proportions, and posture.

Regent College historian ...

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Life Lessons in Cultural Engagement

John Sikkema

May 25, 2012

At least in Canada, this is how I sometimes feel about Christians in this post-Christian or, perhaps more truthfully, pagan society. Most are like salamanders, wanting to be left undiscovered and alone, as long as their quiet, secure space under a rock remains undisturbed. Few Christians are like the zoologists and cinematographers, at least making the effort to see that a survivable habitat is maintained for their salamander friends.

Think of a nature special you come across on TV featuring an endangered species of which you know nothing, and about which you care little—the Hellbender salamander, say. I learned of it recently in just this way. Z...

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Responding to the Wreckage Around Me

Peter Stockland

May 16, 2012

Not, I must quickly add, the sophomoric, pseudo-theological questions of our era's anti-theists who witlessly insist that corrosive doubt can paradoxically fill the existential void in their lives. Nor, for that matter, the sincere questions of the serious faithful who labour under the misconception that a finite amount of Scriptural textual explication is the key to unlocking the eternal Word. In the words of Father Julian Carron, who led our exercises: "There will be no faithfulness unless there is the question to which Christ is the answer. We can repeat Christ's name over and over for the rest of our lives, but the experience we will have is not Christ."

At the annual spiritual exercises of the Catholic fraternity to which I belong, we spent the weekend oscillating between questions and Christ.

Not, I must quickly add, the sophomoric, pseudo-theological questions of our era's anti-theists who witless...

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Beware of the Cross Police . . . or, Let's Make Crosses Mandatory for Christians

Richelle Wiseman

May 14, 2012

In particular, it is the symbol of choice for the "Goth" movement, adherents of which wear jet black hair and clothing, chains, tattoos, and sport crosses, skulls, insects, and dragons. They also carry purses and backpacks in the shapes of coffins with crosses on the lids.

In 1984, British rock star Madonna took to the stage to perform "Like a Virgin" sporting a very large cross on a chain around her neck. The song was a major hit. So was the cross. Suddenly everyone was wearing large crosses on chains, and the cross has rema...

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An Offense Against Charity

Peter Stockland

May 10, 2012

Within a month, we've had two cringe-inducing high-profile examples of the syndrome. The first was during the recent Alberta election campaign. It involved a candidate for the Wildrose Party, a Christian pastor who infamously felt the need to tell the world via his blog that gays would spend eternity in a lake of fire.

It always amazes me how Christians clamouring to be heard in the public square are so often convinced they are best understood with both feet in their mouth.

Within a month, we've had two cringe-inducing high-profile examples of the syndrome. The fir...

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Wiebo's War

Robert Joustra

May 3, 2012

Wiebo Ludwig, a Christian Reformed minister from Ontario, may not have shared MacIntyre's nascent Aristotelian-Thomism, but he more than shared his feelings of unease. Unlike MacIntyre, more in fact like Wendell Berry, Wiebo retreated with his family and others to the remote tundra of northern Alberta. There they forestalled the powers of a modern age, clinging to their blue Psalters, and to a more rural, agrarian way of life. "Our true religion" writes Wendell Berry, "is a sort of autistic industrialism." Wiebo's work was the recovery of another, true religion.

At the end of After Virtue, after a long argument about the cultural state of modern society, Alisdair MacIntyre says we are waiting for a new—albeit very different—kind of St. Benedict. Modernity and its institutions have ushered in a new dark age f...

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I Heard Some Horrible Things Today

Dan Postma

April 16, 2012

The terrified "I think I may have just lost our baby," and the clinical "This is Mother Nature's way of making sure only healthy babies are born." Bookends of breathless agony on a day of dull waiting, dull memories.

I heard some horrible things today. "Mothers have a sense for these things, you know. They just know." And she was right, the sonographer. As I asked, "What? What does that mean?", my wife already had her hands over her face.

The terrified "I think I...

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The NY Times on Chapter and Verse

Ray Pennings

April 13, 2012

But the desire of classical liberals to think of themselves as above the fray, as facilitating inquiry rather than steering it in a favored direction, makes them unable to be content with just saying, You guys are wrong, we're right, and we're not going to listen to you or give you an even break. Instead they labor mightily to ground their judgments in impersonal standards and impartial procedures (there are none) so that they can pronounce their excommunications with clean hands and pure—non-partisan, and non-tribal—hearts. It's quite a performance and it is on display every day in our most enlightened newspapers and on our most progressive political talk shows, including the ones I'm addicted to. "observed that when we accept the conclusions of scientific investigation we necessarily do so on trust (how many of us have done or could replicate the experiments?) and are thus not so different from religious believers, Dawkins and Pinker asserted that the trust we place in scientific researchers, as opposed to religious pronouncements, has been earned by their record of achievement and by the public rigor of their procedures. In short, our trust is justified, theirs is blind."

The March 26th edition of the New York Times included a column by Stanley Fish which cogently captured a core issue which makes...

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Holy Week and Public Theology

Ray Pennings

April 5, 2012

Those of us involved in public life, when explicitly appealing to our Christian motivation for these actions, are often quick to cite the Christian obligation of love for neighbour as an animating force. In fact, sometimes this emphasis can cause a perceived tension between believers who make social engagement a priority and others who fear this emphasis leads to a neglect of the vertical relationship between believers and God.

Today is Maundy Thursday, the day in which some Christian traditions engage in feet-washing rituals, as a commemoration of the events surrounding the Last Supper. There Jesus instructed his disciples both through the object lesson of humbly washing their fe...

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Truly, God never abandons

Brian Dijkema

March 29, 2012

So was Benedict's visit a failure?

Pope Benedict left Cuba yesterday and nothing changed. The state is still run by a communist gerontocracy; it remains an officially atheist state; Good Friday is still not a public holiday; hundreds of political prisoners remain in jail or under close surve...

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Religion Can Make You Worse: GCB and Media Bias

John Seel

March 20, 2012

The most recent incident of bullying by a Christian came from the blustering presidential candidate Newt Gingrich last week. He accused ABC's new sitcom GCB of "bias elite media." The show is based on Kim Gatlin's book Good Christian Bitches. Gingrich, a professing Christian, said of the show's title, "I want you to take the exact name, drop out 'Christian' and put in 'Muslim.' And ask yourself is there any network that would have dared to run a show like that, and you know the answer is not a one, because anti-Christian bigotry is just fine in the entertainment industry but they have to be very protective of Islam."

Bullies don't know their own strength. Because of their insecurities, they beat up on kids half their size. Christians often do the same thing. Ignorant of the strength of the faith, they act like bullies, bemoaning when Christianity gets a bad rap in media...

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Understanding the Fringe

Ray Pennings

March 14, 2012

I wasn't quite sure what she meant, wondering if by "fringe" she had in mind extraterrestrial Raelism, only the most fundamentalist expressions of religion, or orthodoxy of the more mainstream variety. So I asked her directly. "What do you consider fringe?" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Last week I gave a public speech in which I argued for a greater public understanding and discussion of the role that religion plays in providing social capital on which society relies. After the presentation, I had a short conversation with an audience mem...

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God for Artists and Artists for God: Part 3

Kyle David Bennett

March 5, 2012

We mustn't understand art simply as expression. This is how it becomes instrumental or utilitarian. Indeed, expression, it seems to me, is too restrictive and inappropriate a category to ground art from a Christian standpoint. Not to mention, too whimsical a characteristic to ascribe to art in general.

(Parts one and two of this series can be found here and here, respectively.)...

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Christian Labour as Competitive Advantage

Robert Joustra

March 2, 2012

Think about religion: God is back, say the pundits, and there is more than enough evidence to prove it. But three questions immediately follow: 1) how? 2) where?, and 3) is it a good thing?

There are a lot of good reasons to be a Christian labour union, none of which are tied to being competitive or being efficient. But I think two overlapping trends in the next decade(s) will actually turn what has been a liability—a religious designation—int...

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Contesting the Defence of Liberal Hegemony

Brian Dijkema

March 1, 2012

Here's a snippet of the Supreme Court's ruling on parental requests to remove their children from state-mandated religious education, which prompted the discussion: Stackhouse criticizes the EFC and Cardus for "arguing quite wrongly" about the case. Putting aside the fact that Cardus has, to date, not published anything official on this case, I want to query John on two matters in his argument which I think will help the discussion along.

Dr. John Stackhouse thinks Catholics and Protestants are overreacting in their response to the Supreme Cou...

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Why One God Matters

Diane Weber Bederman

March 1, 2012

Looking to ethical monotheism to challenge our feelings-based culture.

Somewhere along the way to po litical correctness nirvana, God and religion became four-letter words. Western philosophy has developed a bad odour. So in the name of authenticity, we are being directed to "more authentic" locations. Religious fundamentalist...

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Taking the Wide(r) Angle

Christophe Potworowski

March 1, 2012

Theologian photographer, Christophe Potworowski makes the church newly visible in the world.

Photography sounds easy. You see something you like, you click, and there you go. Yet most of the time, we end up photographing not what is in front of us but what is in our minds. We make reality fit our preconceptions: "This would make a great picture, it...

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Standing Up To Power

John Zucchi

March 1, 2012

When Quebec politicians are assaulting religious freedom in private schools, daycares and even private assemblies it's time to get off our knees.

One Saturday evening in March 1988, I was sitting at a table in the restaurant atop the World Trade Center with about 20 other people. The occasion was a dinner with Monsignor Luigi Giussani, the Italian theologian best known for the movement he founded, Co...

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Quebec's Religious State

Douglas Farrow

March 1, 2012

If the Quebec government is compelling school kids to invent fantasy religions, is the endgame to have us all worshipping the state and nothing but the state?

My son, 11, came home from his Quebec public school the other day with the news that one of his assignments in the State-mandated Ethics and Religious Culture (ERC) program would be to invent a new religion. I was delighted, of course, and offered to help, ...

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The Crown and the Rabbi's Hat

Hugh Segal

March 1, 2012

In the 60th year of Queen Elizabeth II's reign, there is value in reflecting on the importance of dynamic symbols in societies where freedom of religion, cultural diversity and civility still matter. While I have written books and articles that engaged issues such as civility and its underpinnings, one of my most significant exposures to its instrumental worth occurred during Her Majesty's visit to Canada in 1959.

In the 60th year of Queen Elizabeth II's reign, there is value in reflecting on the importance of dynamic symbols in societies where freedom of religion, cultural diversity and civility still matter. While I have written books and articles that engaged issu...

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Publisher's Letter: Will Christopher Hitchens Matter?

Peter Stockland

March 1, 2012

Even on his death bed, the anti-theist crusader could not see the power that being changed can give.

Novelist Ian McEwan's requiem for his friend Christopher Hitchens is the most revealing of the published farewells to the anglo-American controversialist who died of cancer in December.

Its revelation lies in McEwan's perspective next to Hitchens as ...

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