Doug Sikkema
Doug Sikkema is a part-time associate editor of Comment in addition to being an assistant professor of Core Humanities and English at Redeemer University. He holds a PhD from the University of Waterloo in English literature, with a research focus on contemporary American fiction, theology, and ecology. Doug is a founding member and board chair for Oak Hill Academy, a classical Christian school that serves the greater Hamilton area. He and his wife Vanessa, their four children, two dogs, and cat all live very happily in the "surrounding area" of Binbrook, Ontario.
Bio last updated October 11th, 2022.
Articles by Doug Sikkema
Love in the Digital Age
By Doug Sikkema
January 17, 2014
Theodore and Samantha are like Adam and Eve 2.0, a first couple meant to usher in a transhuman future Leah Reich's anecdotes about Tofu are part of her larger discussion of the recent Spike Jonze film, Her, a film that traces the story of lonely Theodore Twombly who recovers from a broken marriage through his budding relationship with Samantha
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Walking Away From Omelas
Doug Sikkema
January 10, 2014
Take the story of Akhshtyr, a small town situated between Sochi and many of the Olympic venues Stories of shoddy workmanship, corruption, and busloads of illegal labourers who remain unpaid for months are all real parts of the story of Sochi 2014 ...
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Give Me All The Flickering Lights
Doug Sikkema
December 23, 2013
Doug Sikkema reviews Joseph Gordon-Levitt's beautiful short film, Flickering Lights, which invites viewers to become participants in a collage of moments where the subtle play of light both arrests and moves the viewer.
In Gordon-Levitt's film, the poet Wirrow's description of light as "bits of foil in the distance / blowing kisses from the sun to me" reminded me of Gerard Manley Hopkins' lines: "The world is charged with the grandeur of God Yet how did (and does) such a profound penetration of the transcendent lig...
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Patronage: Of Visions and Revisions
Doug Sikkema
December 13, 2013
Eliot and Ezra Pound—makes for an interesting case study in the relationship between an editor-patron and a poet, since the fair copy drafts with Pound's edits have been preserved What is remarkable is that Eliot, at this point quite a capable and recognized poet in avante circles, allows Pound to e...
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Let Me Fall
Doug Sikkema
November 22, 2013
Separate our actions from our consequences, and we're safe and sound—but not really living ...
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The Democracy of the Dead
Doug Sikkema
November 13, 2013
Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," a landmark of modernist thought, conceived of our "historical sense" in spatial terms In fact, it's usually during this time of year that I'm reminded that many students' historical consciousness begins and ends with World War Two, that unforgettable p...
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Standing by Words at Home and Abroad
Doug Sikkema
November 7, 2013
When asked if Ford's private affairs inhibited his ability to run a public office, many of the Ford Nation rallied to their leader's defense If there is a great divorce between private and public, we shouldn't be surprised that Ford's public language serves a very pragmatic end (staying in public of...
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Transcendent Humans
Doug Sikkema
November 1, 2013
Less than a hundred years ago, infant mortality rates were higher, life expectancy was lower, and the reality of world wars and influenza epidemics rarely left a family untouched from the gluttonous maw of Death—and for such developments we can thank the developers of biomedical technology In a rece...
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No School Is an Island
Doug Sikkema
October 24, 2013
In garrisons such as private Christian schools, the bonded social capital is quite high, and this is a good thing At the time, I was sure that the data would work to confirm what many of us already assumed to be true: private Christian education was performing quite well in this competition ...
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Wendell Berry: A New Language of Place
Doug Sikkema
October 16, 2013
Yet if we are interested in our place, economics and resources might be the very new language we need Yet language is important, and if we were to look back at the older meanings of certain words being tossed around, it might shape how we interact with our places today and change the landscape we pa...
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Wendell Berry: Seeing the Earth as Sacrament
Doug Sikkema
October 11, 2013
If religion, then, is concerned with unifying actions as well as unifying beliefs, it coincides nicely with Berry's notion of caritas, a love that extends to creatures and the land ...
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A Culture Breaking Bad?
Doug Sikkema
October 4, 2013
And with the final demise of Walter White, the heroic centre of AMC's Breaking Bad, there is something more than a little troubling about the type of hero for whom we find ourselves cheering I wonder what Dostoyevsky might have thought of a culture that produced Walter White as hero ...
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Persecution and the Stories We Tell
Doug Sikkema
September 27, 2013
The news is somewhat jarring, but it immediately made me think of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, a project intended to capture the stories of the men, women, and children who founded their lives upon a story that would ultimately mean their death The "dry, yeastless factuality" undergirding the atheis...
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Dispensing in "Unsuperfluous Even Proportion"
Doug Sikkema
September 20, 2013
Since, Comus goes on, "[b]eauty is nature's coin, [it] must not be hoarded / But must be current" (739-740), the wealth of the natural world is a wealth of resources and commodities which must be consumed Intriguingly, when the Lady and Comus enter into a battle of words, they rely upon two complete...
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Be Not Afraid: Prophecy in War-Time
Doug Sikkema
September 13, 2013
While fear may seem the only option, Doug Sikkema reflects on the work and life of Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who used his last words to urge against being afraid.
The poet who "set the darkness echoing" used his last words to remind his wife (and us) of the hope-filled entrance of the Word into the world (the logos into the cosmos) And one of the tragedies of the loss of Seamus Heaney is that the world lost a man who liked to remind us of basic truths in a be...
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Tread Lightly and Carry a Big Dream
Doug Sikkema
August 27, 2013
Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer and man of letters whose work focuses upon a call to meaningful and loving action on the earth, repeatedly argues that an abstract love for the whole must give way to action in the particular; he writes that our love for the world cannot be "any kind of abstract love...