Southminster is an amazing church in the Glebe (right close to Lansdowne Park). I will be preaching there on the following dates:
Jan. 15th, 29th. Feb 26th.
This coming semester at the Ottawa School of Theology and Spirituality I will be delivering a course introducing North American Evangelicalism. I am hoping to do this through historical moments and stories, looking at the formative American evangelical identity that grew out of the revivalism of the Great Awakenings and following the windy tale to the religious nones and dones of our day. The interesting part, for me, is that no matter where we find ourselves in Christian (and sometimes even secular) spaces the shadow of this evangelicalism is not hard to find.
For Sharon and I Dominion is our absolute favourite board game. We just obtained the most recent expansion, Allies, as well. We have purchased a massive card box for all the sets, but alas with all the playmats and tokens this has not been large enough. I’ve had the idea for a while now to make something to lay out the basic money and victory cards with a place for all the non-card pieces of the game – today was the day.
Yesterday I had my last meeting of the semester, the end of term meeting for my Web Design students. I have to say that when the students showed up for their final demos there was a lot of feedback to be given. But boy did they work hard to take that to heart. Even though it is exclusively a front end course (I taught a full stack course also this semester) the students were using LocalStorage, Cookies, Canvas animations, and even parsing JSON responses from AJAX requests. I am quite happy with the results as well, a couple of them I had to pull myself away from the web app to write up my evaluation, because it was so good. But now that I am done it is time to get some of the long awaited Spring projects done.
A few years back I had the privilege of co-authoring a paper with my friend Robbie Walker. Robbie is a queer Pentecostal theologian (PhD candidate Trinity College, Toronto). I am not sure how I first encountered Robbie, I think it was through Generous Spaciousness way back, but however it happened I’ve been blessed by Robbie’s keen mind and authentic Christian faith. And I especially enjoyed the way that Robbie shaped our work together trying to understand some of the ways that our evangelical kin approach or avoid issues of LGBTQ+ inclusion.
Last year I had the opportunity to deliver a series of lectures and conversations about the diversity of expressions of worship in the Christian Church. I wanted to create a space where we could reflect on our own experiences of liturgy and worship as well as explore a few different approaches and practices that would challenge us to learn from each other. I had a great and engaged group of learners for the journey with the Ottawa School of Theology and Spirituality – and now I’m preparing to offer this teaching through the Atlantic School of Theology‘s continuing education series in May-June 2022. I am pretty excited.
I am preparing to deliver a course through the Ottawa School of Theology and Spirituality in September (2022) on Evangelicalism. This is the abstract I submitted for their pamphlet:
Who are the Evangelicals? Together we will explore the story of Evangelicalism in North America. Our focus is on those traditions who have identified with Evangelicalism in Canada and the United States. We will look at evangelicals through the lenses of the Fundamentalist movement, post-war neo-evangelicalism, and evangelicals today.
I recently noticed on Facebook that another “old school” RPG was being kickstarted and this got me thinking “why is there such a fascination with the old school stuff?” I chose an image of my friends playing Dungeon World because I’ve often described this game as “feeling like what I remember of the early days of playing Dungeons and Dragons.” Back then we were kids telling epic stories together. But this capacity to tell epic stories really should transcend the game mechanics, and to be honest I think that there is a bit of selective memory going on, at least in my own mind theatre.
Examining the hidden ideas that inhabit our imaginations is the serious need of our day. We often allow internalized entitlements, ideologies, and even racisms to colour our thinking and our acting in the world. Leaving these ideas unexamined does make sense; these hidden ideas are often the underpinnings of who we believe we are in this world. To tackle any of these ideas is both painful and risky. But it is absolutely necessary. It is those same, often unexamined, assumptions that do harm to others. Our privilege always comes with a price, a price we really do not want to think too much about.
Over the years it has been suggested to me quite a few times that I should produce some regular content in the form of a podcast or vlog. It seems some people enjoy the way that I explain things which is always encouraging for a teacher to hear. Yet it is also intimidating to consider because I follow a few really polished podcasts and have generated regular content in the past, it is a lot of work. One podcast I enjoy, Advent of Computing with Sean Haas, even graciously gives you insights into his process of organizing and preparing that series. I believe what I’m considering here is best taken as a serious project treated it almost like a part-time job (at least in the beginning).