Back to the Garden

This is now, beloved, the second letter I am writing to you; in them I am trying to arouse your sincere intention by reminding you that you should remember the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets, and the commandment of the Lord and Savior spoken through your apostles. First of all you must understand this, that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and indulging their own lusts and saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!” They deliberately ignore this fact, that by the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water, through which the world of that time was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the godless. (2 Peter 3:1-7) Remembering, this is the practice that produces a people tha

On November 24, Providence will host its annual Provf Talks which are a series of short lectures put on by the faculty of Providence UC modeled after the popular TED talks. One of the lectures, delivered by a member of the Business Faculty is entitled "The Christian Case for Capitalism." This appears as nothing less than a theological exegesis and rationale for the current "strategic moves" Providence has recently made with the launch of their Buller Business School and Impact 2020. If the literature is to believed, this new addition to the academic offerings of Providence UC will amount to nothing less than the securing of the future success of the school as it moves to a position of pre-eminence on the Canadian academic landscape. But Providence is a Christ-centered institution. Having attended there for the better part of a decade now, it would seem that  there is indeed something to the claim that Jesus is central to the life and work of this institution. So

Evangelical Christians ( by "Evangelical Christians" I am using the term in the sense that modern demographers use it, not in its more theo-historical usage that describes the evangelical activity of the church catholic ) are well known for their strict sexual ethic. In fact, this might be the main thing known about them in the popular imagination. Evangelicals don't have sex before marriage, don't believe in abortion, insist on abstinence only sex-ed, are against gay marriage, and have the highest teen pregnancy rates in America. It is easy to caricature evangelical sexual ethics and too often evangelical institutions get themselves into trouble with the media over their positions on sexual ethical issues ( IVP , TWU , ETS , etc.). While it is easy to poke holes in the logic (or lack thereof) of much that passes for evangelical sexuality, I think this is getting the real issue exactly wrong. The real problem evangelicals have created for themselves is a latent form

The US elections loom above everything these days. There is a profound anxiety and exhaustion present in even the most ordinary public encounters. If this is the state of things in Canada, I can only imagine what our neighbours to the south are going through. Everyone seems to be holding their breath and shaking their heads, hoping that somehow things will turn out alright, knowing that even the best possible outcome is still quite terrifying. How did things get like this? How did a man who is objectively incompetent and singularly unsuited for elected office come this close to becoming the next President of the United States and the most powerful man in the world? While most liberal elites will shrug their shoulders and tell some story about the "uneducated whites" who form Trump's base, the answer is both more simple and more nuanced than that. The basic liberal belief is that education can and will solve all of society's problems. Lost your job? Re-educate yourse

Learning to love the world is an activity that requires the cultivation of the skill of being present in the world. In being present in a place and with a people one learns the stories that constitute that place and those people, liberating them from being "those people" to become particular people like Lorna, Emma, Ted, or Michelle. It is this activity of "storying" that Murat Ates has embarked upon in volume two of his Life Fire Prose  collection of short stories. An occasional friend, Ates confessed in a letter written on the inside of the cover to me that this book attempts to be "a little more loving." Ironically, I think he might just have succeeded.  I say ironically because the stories that Ates tells are the confessions of a man who has tried his best to love and be present, but time and again has faltered. He does not hide his pettiness in the frustration he experienced that day in Stella's. He does not attempt to justify his failure

To live in a place is to be keenly aware of the presence of absences. What makes a place a place, and not just a somewhere, are the particularities of the lives of that place and the stories those lives imply. To live in a place requires the development of a gentle love for that place. That the love must be gentle is required by the notion that love does not demand or consume its objects. This love is an entering into the presence of a place and its creatures - a sort of awareness that grows with time and attention. Over the time that is necessary to attune that attention to a place, there will inevitably be losses that, while real, do not make the place lesser, but rather fill that place with the memory of their presence. The gully that marks the beginning of the Snake Creek watershed that crosses our place is not made lesser by the absence of water from it in the late summer. Rather, it stands as a testament to the absence of water that came in the spring and will return again next s

There is a form of religion that attempts to assert power over the natural world by condemning it. Reveling in a denial of the created order, the clerics of this unnatural religion preach a heavenly righteousness that is defined more by the earthliness it denies than the heavenliness it affirms. This religion is well known to us. It is present in the hideous architecture of our churches, in the guilt-driven sermons of our clergy, and in the clear and certain Christian morality that is preached as an alternative to faith. This religion is accepted and celebrated trans-denominationally, yet it is that same religion that was so victoriously defeated by our holy Fathers in the great ecumenical councils of the Nicene age. Gnosticism is as alive today as it was in the time of the Apostles, in the time of Athanasius, and throughout the life of the church.  Gnosticism comes in many forms and has been more or less developed throughout history, but what is so pernicious about it is that it d

In Wendell Berry's 1967 novel, A Place on Earth, Mat Feltner recounts the story of the first time his son Virgil planted a crop. In the hilly country around Port William, farmers must be very careful in how they go about breaking land and planting crops. If not done with a great deal of skill and care, one runs the risk of using up a great deal of top soil and permanently damaging the land. Mat's father had done a great deal of damage to their farm in the early days, and Mat had made his fair share of mistakes along the way as well, but now, it was Virgil's turn to learn. Mat gave Virgil a great deal of space to farm the way he best saw fit, but he also quietly prayed that Virgil would be spared the consequences of his mistakes. One night, after Virgil had planted his first crop - a small piece, no bigger than 2 acres - Mat heard it start to rain, and rain hard. He knew exactly what was going to happen to the field that Virgil had failed to prepare adequately. In the mornin

I write this from my farm which is located on Treaty 2 land in western Manitoba. My great-great-grandfather received a quarter section of land as a gift from the federal government and set up a homestead right around the turn of the twentieth century. My family has farmed this and adjoining lands for over a century now, which for a young country like Canada, constitutes a farm with "deep" roots. Over that century, the nature of agriculture has been deeply affected by colonialism from start to finish.  To understand the pervasive force of colonialism in Canadian agriculture it is necessary to begin with the conception of property rights that John Locke articulated in the 17th century. According to Locke, God has granted people certain inalienable rights - rights that are so strongly guaranteed that not even we can give them up. According to this account of rights, we have a right to freedom. When we use that freedom to perform some type of constructive work we own the r