Most religions address the challenge of death with some concept of an afterlife. Islam presents the goal as paradise. Eastern religions speak of reincarnation, then escape into the great universal spirit. Most Materialists say, “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” with hope being in the next generations. Christians sometimes talk of life after death as “heaven,”…
We are living through some challenging, “unprecedented,” and even discouraging times. I recently watched the Oscar-nominated film “Don’t Look Up”, featuring an astronomy grad student and her professor who make the shocking discovery of a planet-killing comet on a collision course with Earth. When they share the urgent news with the United States president, the…
Hamilton, Ontario poet John Terpstra is also a cabinet maker. Correspondingly, his writing hovers over themes of spirit and place. In Wild Hope Terpstra offers a sequel to In the Company of All: Prayers from Sunday Mornings at St. Cuthbert’s. There Terpstra concisely expressed that small congregation’s embodied spiritual desires, praises and hopes. With personal…
We’re crouched in the dark, gently bending over the antique incubator. I hear a faint chirping, and my husband lifts the metal lid. There’s a bowl of water inside to keep the eggs soft, and the air smells like warm, wet grass. Inside, a newly hatched chick bravely stands, singing his baby victory songs. And…
Lately, I keep hearing trumpets. Did you hear them at Prince Philip’s funeral? “Taps” was played at my father-in-law’s military interment ceremony last month. I read trumpet texts at the funeral. “Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed – in a flash, in the twinkling…
“Return to Normal” and “Build Back Better” are the two dominant mindsets for COVID-recovery. Any suggestion of more disruption would invite stone-throwing, but that may be our future. High levels of present anxiety and fear for the future lead to equating hope with more tranquility. Is there another kind of hope? Is hope possible in…
“If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain” (1 Cor. 15:13-14). I’ve often wondered why Easter celebrations are not nearly such a big deal in our culture (or even in…
I met her at the swimming pool. We would chat together in the shower (and later joked that we probably wouldn’t recognize each other “with clothes on”). A few times we arranged to walk together in downtown Edmonton’s river valley during lunch breaks. I eventually left my job, and we lost touch. Then, one day,…
Throughout the world many Christians recite or chant on a weekly basis the ancient Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, with these familiar closing lines: “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” When repeated so frequently, it is easy to neglect their inner meaning. Yet the words nevertheless enter our…
In 2020, the year of improbable hope, my sister told us she was pregnant and then the doctors told her that her baby boy would not live. A few months later I quit my jobs and flew to Florida.
Consider the strange case of the International Peace Mission Movement, an American cult founded by one Reverend Major Jealous Divine (aka “Father Divine”) in the 1930s.
One consequence of a paradigm shift in science is that whole fields are revisited and need to be re-understood. This can be true both for the fields at the centre of the paradigm shift but also for other related disciplines.
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