We know that mental anguish is part of the human condition, as this verse from Lamentations 3 testifies (CEV translation). To be human is to be fragile. Calvin Seerveld wrote in On Being Human that we are “perishable goods” that “walk around in our underwear, so to speak, tenting, exposed to harm.” The naked human being is a soft, vulnerable creature, as humble as the humus from which we were derived. Physically and mentally.
As the nights get darker, and the afternoons get shorter, and the icicles form on the windows, I slip into a sort of winter melancholy. Darkness can be warm, and even cozy if you’re tucked in your bed, your belly full, and surrounded by sleeping family members. Darkness can also be just black, bleak and blah. I think of people we know who struggle with disease, broken relationships, the challenges of aging, and others whose names and tragedies come with the news every day. The blah can sink into a hollow despair.
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This book has been many years in the making, stemming from lectures Nicholas Wolterstorff presented at Yale in 2001. It is an apologetic for religion in the public university that is not apologetic about the matter. In fact, he challenges those who who think religiosity carries some chronic “rationality deficit” to which other orientations are immune, and calls the academy to be truly pluralistic, if it is indeed part of a liberal democracy. The book is short and succinct, and it comes neatly in four chapters that establish four basic points.
“Remember when the front grill of your car was plastered with insects? No more. We live in the midst of an insect apocalypse.” My three children and I were listening to a presentation at a Conservation Area by an expert on pollinators, and I wonder how my kids hear these words. They have grown up in a world where terms like “environmental collapse” and “end of the human race” feature quite regularly. This is darker than the nuclear scare I grew up with during the Cold War. Will my kids have hope for the future or will they be tempted to despair?
Two families – one British Canadian and one Japanese Canadian – are brought together although their ethnic communities are at war with each other. This book is more a memoir than a novel, as it recounts the true story of Sakamoto’s grandparents’ lives. On one hand, his British Canadian maternal grandfather Ralph MacLean – a Canadian soldier in the Pacific during World War II – was brutally treated by the Japanese, both in a horrendous battle and then in a frighteningly cruel concentration camp during World War II.
A friend told me he and his wife have a habit of sitting out on the front porch on Fridays after work and just having sweet conversation about the week. His teenage daughter approached them last week and innocently asked, “Why do you sit here and talk?”
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Michael Wagenman, the Christian Reformed campus minister at Western University in London, Ontario, has written a wonderful, accessible introduction not just to the Dutch public intellectual and statesman Abraham Kuyper, but to a Christianity oriented to the betterment of cultural life, demonstrating that “the gospel is utterly comprehensive in its scope and application.”
How To Think is not about finding truth as much as it is about preventing us from shooting people with whom we disagree. The subtitle gives it away: a survival guide for a world at odds. It’s a short, punchy book not intended just for professors.
Frank McCourt won the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir of an impoverished childhood in Angela’s Ashes. If they gave awards to a writer who took a newspaper on the brink of folding, and with a shoestring budget, turned it into a beautiful and respectable journalistic community, I would nominate our own CC editor Angela Reitsma Bick.
The word “righteous” has slipped out of our vocabulary. It appears around 500 times in our Bibles, and we will sing the word in a hymn, but we don’t talk about aspiring to become righteous people. We will eschew becoming “self-righteous” and some theologically informed friend will warn us against “works righteousness,” but becoming truly righteous is not on the Christmas list of anyone I know. Being righteous isn’t cool.
In our post-Christendom Canada, we need to imagine a new way of being – for the church, for migrants, for Muslims and for the planet – thinking in terms of neighbourhoods or networks rather than just centralized church buildings. This is more than “thinking Christianly”; it’s a new attitude, a different lifestyle, and more flexible structures for a flourishing church and planet.
To find out more personally the role a pastor’s library played in his or her ministry, I sent out 10 questions to 36 pastors for whom I had email addresses. I got 10 responses back. There was a wide range in the size of their libraries – from 300 to 3,000 books. Some mentioned they have a considerable number of digital books that ought to be included. Some were quick to add they read a lot of fiction, too. But does the pastor’s bookshelf lean towards people or away from them?
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