Prophetic ministry, resurgent

Anglicans kick their political theology up a notch

Kai Nagata

Immigration lawyer Mitchell Goldberg speaks out against Bill C-31 on the steps of Quebec City’s Anglican cathedral. Photo courtesy of Bruce Myers.

In March I wrote an article for The Tyee called “Occupy the Pews,” exploring the idea of prophetic ministry. That’s when members of a church apply Christian teachings to the world around them, which often means confronting uncomfortable contradictions, speaking truth, and challenging power.

Effective prophets, like Jesus of Nazareth, tend to have short careers.

I argued that with its clear values and existing infrastructure, the Anglican Church of Canada should be a powerful organ of progressive social change. Yet this impulse is often stymied by the practicalities of institutional survival. The Church struggles constantly to reconcile its spiritual calling with real-world politics and economics.

Those challenges continue, but as spring arrives across Canada there are signs of stirring.

Do Dogs go to Heaven?

A Pet’s Death Opens A Wider View of Salvation

Bruce Myers

My dog died.

He was a seven-year-old, somewhat goofy, charmingly disobedient, painfully cute Bernese mountain dog named Calvin, in recognition of the fact he was an ordination gift from my two best friends in seminary, now both Presbyterian clergymen.

A 10-week-old puppy when we were united, Calvin became almost better known in my first parish than I was, enchanting young and old with equal, slobbery alacrity. When I moved abroad for a year of graduate studies, he moved to the family farm and became as much my mother’s dog as mine. When I returned to Canada and moved to Quebec City, he effortlessly learned to be a canis urbanis. As a single person, Calvin was an especially important part of my life. He was, as the canine stereotype goes, my faithful companion.

Infrastructure Wars: Connectivity and the Role of the State

A Review of Jo Guldi’s Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012, 297 pages.

Joshua Paetkau

The opening paragraph of Jo Guldi’s Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State plunges the reader into the sinkhole of a 1726 British road large enough to swallow a horse.  This scene is directly contrasted with the wide level highways of 1848 setting the stage for a classic tale of human ingenuity, progress and national unity. It is not to be. Guldi instead depicts a vivid dialectical landscape, narrating the rise and demise of infrastructure, and the many battles between, with far-reaching and incisive clarity.

On the Fast Track…to What?

Roma Rights in Canada

Ashley Cole

Last year, while working alongside refugee claimants, I held a small child in my arms and looked on as her parents stared at me in disbelief. In their country people don’t hold their children, they run over them with their cars or throw Molotov cocktails through their windows. So when they saw me showing attention and love to their child they were speechless, and I have to admit, so was I. I had never encountered others who had been so palpably scared by deep-seeded racism that it forced them to flee their homes and come to Canada, and this has been just one of my experiences with the Roma.

The Gunfighter and the Nation State Part III

“You Know What You Are? Just A Dirty Son-of-a-Bitch”

Andre Forget

If anyone in my generation has seen a western (aside from throwback pieces like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 3:10 to Yuma or Appaloosa) there are pretty good odds it has starred Clint Eastwood. The squinting green eyes, the reluctant gravel voice, the bursts of extreme and shocking violence; if John Wayne typified the western in the forties and fifties, Eastwood’s shadow lies long on the westerns of the sixties, seventies and eighties. Wayne’s heroes embodied the quintessential American virtues of independence, loyalty, toughness and fair play – Eastwood’s were morally ambiguous, vengeful, anti-social, and opaque. If westerns are, as I’ve been trying suggest, a barometer of American self-image, the movement from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to the Man With No Name is telling.

Occupy the Pews

In England and Canada, the Anglican Church seems to have forgotten whose side Jesus was on. Some folks are jogging its memory.

Kai Nagata

Eviction of the Occupy camp at London's St. Paul's Cathedral began Monday. Photo: Kai Nagata.

This article originally appeared in the Tyee.

If you happen to be looking for B.C. Premier Christy Clark at 8 o’clock on a Sunday morning, you might find her at Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Vancouver. A former religious studies scholar at the University of Edinburgh, Clark worships now and then at the century-old Anglican church on Burrard. She even popped up as a reader at one recent service, filling the beautifully restored Gothic interior with her smooth radio voice.

A Sermon Preached on the Conversion of St. Paul

Jeffrey Metcalfe

St. Paul was a pious man: a man who knew his creeds, who said his prayers, a man who believed them: a man of faith.

St. Paul was an educated man: a man who wrote Greek in the morning, read Aramaic in the afternoon, and chanted Hebrew in the evening; a man fluent in the scriptures of his people and familiar with the philosophies of the Gentiles.

St. Paul was a trustworthy man: an ancient day bishop’s man, the kind of person authorities send in to clean up religious messes. He’s the guy you want on your side in any clerical council or theological debate.

And St. Paul was a good man: a man on his way to making a difference in the world. A man who painfully saw the misrecognition and misdirection of his people, and a man who was prepared to do whatever it took to aid God’s mission in the world.

Even if at the time, that mission included killing Christians.

The Gunfighter and the Nation State Part II

“When The Legend Becomes Fact, Print The Legend”

Andre Forget

Westerns are origin stories. Myths about taming the frontier, they narrate the first encounters between colonists and indigenous peoples, the lawless feudal era of the cowboy and the cattle baron, and the arrival of law, order, and the state. A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that Shane shows how order is built on a mythic violence which sits uncomfortably between the feudal age and the age of the nation; it uses feudal means to undo the feudal order. This violence, however, is kept at arm’s length from the peaceful community that benefits from it. John Ford’s 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance takes up a lot of the same questions but ends on a significantly more cynical note.

Bishop to Speak on Church and Politics

“The most serious deficit Canada faces as a nation is its leadership deficit. This national challenge goes far beyond the political parties and includes the major institutions that operate within Canadian society. The heart of the problem is found in our complete rejection of making public decisions based on the concept of the ‘Common Good’.”

So says Canadian Anglican bishop and former member of the Ontario Legislature, The Rt. Rev. Dennis Drainville, who will be presenting a lecture on February 29th, at 7:00pm, entitled “Where Have all the (Good) Leaders Gone?” It will be held at Seeley Hall, Trinity College, in Toronto, Ontario. All are welcome.

See poster here.

The Gunfighter and the Nation State Part I

“There’s No Living With A Killing”

Andre Forget

It’s a familiar image. The screen brightens to reveal a ruggedly picturesque landscape of rolling plains, high bluffs and twisting rivers; in the distance we can see a small speck that slowly grows larger until it is identified as a lone horseman riding towards us. The origin of the horseman is unimportant. He has appeared out of the landscape, and we already know that when the film closes we will see him disappear back into the landscape: he is elemental, barely human.