Occasional Essays
The Good, the True, the Beautiful
For the ancients’ baptism was the hallmark of the Christian faith. And, what does it tell us both about our being as bearers of the divine image and about our vocation in service to the life of the world?
Cultivating the Excellent Life: The Task of Religious Culture and Civilization
How may we cultivate our capacity for hospitality around difference?
The School of Joseph: Prisons as a Place of Transformation
The incarcerated men I have been privileged to teach over the last few years …have experienced a duel failure. Their religious formation was without the depth needed in modern society and their understanding of the gifts of our civil life—its genius and its limitations—was never taught to them.
Book Review of The Slow Professor, Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy
Reading Berg and Seeber’s book prompted me to think again about several long-standing concerns. The first is the corporatization of the public university central to the thesis of the book. From 1975 through 2005 university faculties have increased by about 50%, a similar increase to the growth of students population. During this same period university administration has increased by 85% and administrative staff by 240%.
Spiritual Friendship & Caring for the Soul of the City
Several years ago one of Canada’s foremost ethical thinkers commented to a gathering of largely left-leaning Christian activists that he sometimes thought they had done the job of translating religious language into a public language so well that their children no longer had even a feel for why the church, as local parish, should exist—much less why their parents continued to participate in the life of a congregation.
Deep Religion, the Antidote for the Diseases of Modernity
How does it come about in a country like Canada that some 200+ young men and a few women will leave their homes and loved ones and travel to Syria and Iraq and join Daesch?
Toward a Paradigm for Teaching Religion in a Pluralistic Age
This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declared the Lord: I will put my law on their hearts, and write it on their minds.
-Jeremiah 31
The Good, the True, the Beautiful
Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in
Him were all things created, the things in the heavens and the things upon the earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or authorities. All things.
The Stance of Fear, the Stance of Faith
Earlier this year the monks of St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery in Arizona published The Departure of the Soul According to the Teachings of the Orthodox Church. They flag it as a “patristic anthology” and amass an enormous amount of material to make a simple argument. Chapter seven is titled, “On the Falsifications, Misrepresentations, and Errors of Those Who Oppose the Teaching of the Orthodox Church” and provides a fore-piece from Psalm 25:1, “Judge me, O Lord.”
Place, Displacement, “Home blindness” and the Gift of Memory
In this conversation we will roam from the local and what is happening in our neighbourhood to large issues that have unfolded both here in Canada and in many parts of the world riven by war and systematic displacement. Are we blind to the removal of the memory in our midst, the ground we walk on and the places we pass by? Why do we see an appetite for “clear cutting” the built memory of local and regional communities? What is the cost? Do local communities, governments, universities, and international agencies have any responsibility for the spread of cultural amnesia? At a gathering of Church of England prelates just prior to his death, Henry Chadwick, the great English church historian, was heard to murmur, “the saddest thing in the world is a person who has lost their memory. Sadder still is an institution that has lost its memory.” And, what of a community that has lost its memory?
Norton Mezvinsky
In Memoriam
Our fine colleague, Norton Mezvinsky, left this fragile world on the 16th of September, 2022. I met him through my colleague and friend Ibrahim Abu-Rabi (2nd of July 2011), Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta. While director of the Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life I invited Professor Mezvinsky to give lectures in Edmonton and Camrose on several occasions. He also joined Ibrahim and me in some of our work in Turkey.