I’ve always had a certain fascination for monastic life. A couple of my favourite movies (Of Gods and Men & The Mission) are all about monks, and I recently visited the monastic home of the inspiring Thomas Merton. So when I had the chance to review Brother John: A Monk, […]
The title for this post might seem naively optimistic, but if that’s true, that’s precisely my point. We no longer seem to expect maturity. A whole generation of millennials are frequently (and unfairly) criticized as immature and not necessarily maturing. We don’t seem to expect maturity from politicians or even […]
I would like to suggest a simple proposal: let’s never give any authority to anyone who dehumanizes others. Recently I was reading a collection of survivor accounts from the residential schools that Canadians forced upon Indigenous children until as late as 1996. Once again, I had to face the hard […]
I have come to hate the word “disruption.” I used to like it, thinking it might point toward some positive social revolution – echoes of Jesus or Gandhi or Marx (depending on one’s leaning) might come to mind – but it seems to me that all that is being disrupted […]
It is not being conservative to honour and respect the traditions and wisdom of the past, it is mature. It is not being liberal to question those traditions and that wisdom, it is mature. It is not being fundamentalist to have deep commitments that you honour, it is mature. It […]
[Apologies for the dormancy of my blog – I hope to give it a kickstart later in summer. But for now a book review]: As someone who has, for years, taught human sexuality at a university with many students who grew up with Kiss Dating Goodbye and virginity pledges, I […]
Tapping into the right kind of energy to motivate and encourage our engagement with the world is crucial. If we’re to avoid the “dark energy” that I wrote about last week, without running out of steam all together, we’ll need to tap into something life-giving and energizing. There was a […]
For better or worse, I’ve been congratulating myself for waiting a couple of months to write this. Waiting has felt necessary in the same way that some of us have learned that it’s better to wait overnight before hitting send on that email response to something emotional. As someone who […]
It is so tempting to give up on religion. When faced with the frustrating, if not horrific, ways in which religions are exploited in order to dehumanize others, maintain power and control, and repress our own inner chaos, it’s no surprise that many have tossed their faith on the rubbish […]
The main reason I call myself a humanist* is because I believe God is too. Humanists put a high value on the freedom, beauty and experience of humanity, and this was true long before religious violence and oppression (especially in Europe after the Reformation) drove such a huge wedge between […]