The Eagle & Child

I’m reading Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief again. Last summer I read his collected short stories, some of them while sitting in an Adirondack  chair on the west coast of Vancouver Island overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The weather wasn’t great those couple of days on the ocean, but it was perfect for the melancholic nostalgia of MacLeod’s [...]

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I wrote my final exam for my Greek I & II this morning.  This Biblical (Koine) Greek intensive covers two semesters’ worth of Greek in 4 weeks. And truth be told, it wasn’t that bad! Everyone I spoke to was all doom and gloom about the month-long intensives.  ”Say goodbye to your family for the [...]

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Today this question came to mind: “Why do we believe in Christ?”* My childhood answer would have been, “So that I can go to heaven.”  I think that continues to be the answer of many mature Christians as well.  Maybe the answer would be more nuanced–something like, “Because he died for me/my sins.”  Or perhaps [...]

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For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.  – John Steinbeck, The Pearl These words got me thinking, though I don’t know if I’m interpreting them correctly.  This school year has been one of [...]

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So Google Street View has reached Heerlen, The Netherlands, the place of my birth and the first seven years of my life.  I can “walk” around my old neighbourhood.  How cool! Technology! So here’s the third installment of a series of posts which will only be interesting to me and possibly some members of my [...]

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I’m fascinated with how one language relates to another and what that looks like in translation.  One of the special features on Monty Python’s Holy Grail special edition is a scene from the film which was dubbed (i.e. translated) into Japanese with English subtitles translated from the Japanese dub.  It’s fascinating what happens to words [...]

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I haven’t written anything about creation/evolution in a while.  I’m not really going to in this post, either. At least not in terms of theories or possibilities. However, the BioLogos Foundation has been posting a series of short video clips on YouTube, in which a variety of Biblical scholars talk about various aspects of creation/evolution, [...]

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I miss the Olympics already.  It was fun to have an “event” that warranted having the TV on during supper.  Not that it’s something to be desired, to have the TV on during supper, but it’s the kind of thing that children remember.  ”When the Olympics were on we would watch them during supper.”  Plus, [...]

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how faint the whisper we hear of him! (Job 26:14, TNIV) * * * Here is bigger than you can imagine Now is forever (Bruce Cockburn) I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about pain and suffering and genocide and natural disasters and…God.  Without diminishing the pain and horror, and without denying the legitimacy of [...]

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As a part of the MDiv (Master of Divinity – said like this) program, I am required to take a course called “Theology and Practice of Christian Spirituality and Formation”.  It is a class studying the reason for and use of the spiritual disciplines (such as fasting, solitude, silence, the prayer of examen, etc.) Our first [...]

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