Advent: Collideorscape

Joshua Paetkau

The Sunday preacher is apocalyptic. A bit tongue-in-cheek, but nonetheless. This is the first Sunday of advent, after all, the dawning of the Christian year; the time when traditionally Christians began to think about death. And why not? The hustle and bustle of commercial Christmas pales, indeed vanishes, in the swirling vortex of activity that is the Christian story. Here we encounter a murderous king driven mad to the point of genocide by news of an infant birth, foreign intellectuals who undertake an incredible journey in order to lavish expensive gifts on a small family, and agrarian labourers who neglect their work in an act of spontaneous celebration. Insanity and jubilation, unfeigned merriment and unspeakable horror; the enigma of Christmas. Advent is an onslaught ominous, glorious, unpredictable. Like wildfire, like storm the news of the coming Messiah spreads causing disturbance and upheaval in its wake. What is at stake is nothing less than a fundamental reshaping of reality that leaves all who encounter it profoundly unsettled. All, that is, except those closest to the narrative’s centre of gravity. Mary and Joseph, those paragons of serenity, who accept the incredible tasks thrust upon them with an unbelievable, almost infuriating, calm.

I Am Not The 99%

Andre Forget

I’m am not part of the 99%. I mean this in both a global and in a local sense. While many university graduates struggle to find any work at all, let alone work in their field or work that uses their degree in some way, I find myself employed by my alma mater in work that I find stimulating, meaningful and lucrative. Does this mean that I am part of the 1%? I pay my taxes fairly willingly (knowing that I will get the bulk of it back), would have voted NDP in both the federal election and the Manitoba provincial election had I been allowed, and am entirely on board with wealth redistribution. Perhaps others in my position could lend their support to the Occupy movement whole-heartedly, without a shadow of doubt. I cannot.

Getting to Mt. Athos

Andre Forget

Orthodoxy.  The word has always had a strange taste in my mouth, as if it were an arcane branch of medicine or an obscure and ancient legal state of affairs.  Until this past year, when I moved naively to Istanbul on a vague and ill-defined search for an experience of the Other, my knowledge of Orthodoxy was almost purely academic.  I’d read Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World in my first year of university (and probably missed the point), and I’d had a few conversations with a former Anglican of my acquaintance who had gone on to be baptized Orthodox in his late twenties, but in my limited understanding of the Orthodox I thought of them as a sort of eastern Catholic – all liturgy and incense and icons.  I was to find out exactly how wrong I was, and how impoverished my understanding of global Christianity had been. 

Imagination Beyond Horror

An Introduction to the Catholic Commons

Jeffrey Metcalfe

“The horror is that for the first time we live in a world in which we can no longer imagine a better one.”¹

Theodor Adorno

Can an idea change the world?  If not, we in the Church should give up now; there is no point in continuing.  For over two-thousand years we thought we knew the answer to this question.  It led us to welcome the stranger, to feed the hungry, to redistribute our wealth, and to fight against the principalities and powers of the darkness of the age.  Granted, we were never entirely faithful to the Idea.  From the beginning, some of us tried to use it to enslave the stranger, to engorge ourselves, to consolidate our wealth, and to become the principalities and powers.  Yet the Idea would not stay our possession, it would always return to confront us, to invite us back, and at times, it would bring the Emperor himself to his knees.