CRC Campus Ministries, University of Toronto and Crux Books present:
Justice and Creation:
a double book launch for
“The Justice Project” (Ed. Brian McLaren et. al.)
“The Gift of Creation” (Ed. Norman Wirzba)
with contributor Dr. Sylvia C. Keesmaat
Commentaries by:
Bruxy Cavey (The Meeting House)
Ron Kuipers (Institute for Christian Studies)
Music by Michael Iafrate, Alison Hari Singh, and Zoe Thiessen and The Hildegard Project (featuring Billy Gekas).
Facebook event info here.
Empire Remixed and CRC Campus Ministries present Andy Crouch … in conversation
Monday, November 2, 8.00pm
Chaplain’s Office, Wycliffe College
5 Hoskin Avenue Toronto
A number of months ago, we reported here at Empire Remixed, the greatest Christian bookseller in the world thought that maybe Beyond Homelessness by Steve Bouma-Prediger and Brian Walsh was probably the “book of the year” in 2009.
Well, Christianity Today didn’t see things that way and gave the nod to a book called Culture Making by some young upstart named Andy Crouch. We are sure that the fact that Mr. Crouch is a senior editor with that same magazine had nothing to do with their choice. So to show that we aren’t sore about this, we’re hosting an event with the guy to see if he’s all that he’s cracked up to be.
Okay, the tone of that whole paragraph was decidedly tongue in cheek. Here’s what the same Byron Borger said about Culture Making. This book “is spectacularly important and truly wonderful; wonderful for the cogent ideas and the lovely writing, the insight and the charm.” We agree. And that’s why we are hosting a salon-style conversation with Andy on November 2 in Toronto.
The evening will kick off with Andy talking for fifteen minutes or so about his book and the kinds of things that animate him as he reflects on Christian culture making. And then, over some appropriate liquid refreshments, we will have a wide-ranging, open-ended conversation with the lad about whatever we want to talk about.
Brian Walsh will host and facilitate the conversation.
The event is free, but a donation for refreshments will be gratefully received.
Romans, Home and Empire
by Brian Walsh
Some months ago I got to thinking about Paul’s letter to the Romans and the problems of homelessness. Essentially my question was, what happens if I take the work that I’ve done on the dynamics of home, homelessness and homecoming with Steve Bouma-Prediger in Beyond Homelessness and integrate it with the work I’m doing with Sylvia Keesmaat on “disarming Romans.”
And the results are kind of interesting. So this week I employed these themes in a sermon for the Wine Before Breakfast community at the University of Toronto. The service opened with Empire Remixer Dave Krause performing Bruce Cockburn’s “Santiago Dawn” and the reading of Romans 4.1-25. That is the passage that talks about Abraham’s faith and how all of us are children of Abraham. Storytelling and questions of the family tree – this is the stuff of which home is made.
So setting the stage with a summary of Romans 1-3 from the perspective of home I then went on to reflect on what it means to have Abraham as our father. Here’s what I came up with.
by Brian Walsh
On Saturday, October 2 a young man named David DeWees ended his life on the subway tracks at High Park Station in Toronto. David had been charged with two counts of sexual luring and two counts of invitation to sexual touch arising out of his ministry at Ontario Pioneer Camp.
Dave was a well-loved and highly respected teacher at Jarvis Collegiate in Toronto and the outpouring of grief over his death has been intense amonst his students and colleagues. Dave was also a member of the Wine Before Breakfast community for one semester a couple of years ago. Together with a couple of friends he participated in our worship, ate at the same Eucharist table with all of us, prayed, sang, and grew in discipleship.
Dave was arrested on Thursday morning. The Toronto Star erroneously reported that he had been charged with sexual assault. Within 48 hours of his arrest and release on bail, David Dewees was dead. Read the rest of this entry »
by Brian Walsh
Some months ago I posted a targum on Romans 1.1-25 that received a fair bit of attention. That piece was also criticized at another site because I somehow didn’t have the “courage” to continue my expansion on Romans 1 beyond verse 25 and deal with the thorny verses supposedly about homosexuality. This morning I expanded that earlier targum, only picking it up at verse 16 and then running with it until the end of the chapter. I didn’t expand this targum to reply to a critic but to minister to the Wine Before Breakfast community at the University of Toronto.
I post it here for broader reflection and response.
by Andrew Stephens-Rennie
Despite everything Mark Carney’s been saying lately about the end of a recession, I think I’m more apt to agree with Green Day that we’re still in the midst of a 21st Century Breakdown.
Maybe it’s all the rain we’ve been getting in the nation’s capital lately, but I think I’m less apt to pronounce the bounce-back from one of the biggest hits our economy’s taken since 1929 and following. Optimism may have its place, but there’s a difference between optimism and ignorance. I think I’ll probably throw my lot in with Jeff Rubin before I put my faith in Carney. I’m not sure the worst of it is over.
We’ve squandered so much, and continue to do so at an ever-increasing rate. Perhaps it’s not all that far out there that this world’s going to shrink, that the resource wars will increase, and that things may get a whole lot messier. We may not be talking Apocalypse Very Soon, but we may need to think about the ways in which our excessive consumption is going to increase global conflict. Read the rest of this entry »
by Brian Walsh
Every week during the school year I write an email inviting folks to come to
worship with us at Wine Before Breakfast. While most readers of these blogs
have no way of joining us in Toronto on Tuesday mornings, once in a while I
will share that invitation with the broader Empire Remixed community if it
seems that what I have written may be of benefit to those who read these
blogs. Here is the piece for this week.
On Wednesday afternoon a group of around thirty five people were treated to a “house concert” and conversation with the incomparable Martyn Joseph in my office. This was a moving time for all involved, including Martyn. In fact, when we all joined in on the chorus of one of Martyn’s new songs it was the artist who was as blown away as the audience. He asked us to sing. So we did. But we gave Martyn not just the tune back. We offered him some wonderful harmonies improvised on the spot. Pretty amazing.
Another poignant moment was when Martyn responded to a request and played “Whoever it was that brought me here, will have to take me home.” About a verse into the song, however, the artist forgot the words. So longtime Wine Before Breakfast bandhood member, Dave Krause (who was doing sound that day), prompted Martyn, feeding him his own lines. An embarrassing moment of performance? No a lovely moment of community. Read the rest of this entry »
by Brian Walsh
“This was the first time that I have prayed in public in six years.”
September is always a bit of a challenge for me. Maybe I’m not that unique and other campus ministers have an ambivalent mixture of excitement and dread as the academic year begins. But my transition in September is intensified by the contrast between life on an organic farm two hours outside of the city and the deeply urban reality of ministry at the University of Toronto. Don’t get me wrong. I love campus ministry and I love downtown Toronto. But it sure is different from feeding animals, harvesting crops and the daily adventure of farming.
So when well-meaning folks ask me, “Are you excited about getting back to campus?”, I know what the right answer is. But I can’t always quite give it. Yes, I’m excited. Sort of. But you know, living half the week in my office on campus and half the week at home with my family on the farm isn’t the best of lifestyles.
That’s all a way to set up what happened this morning. Something that doesn’t take away the ambivalence, nor does it erase the intensity of the contrast, but something that gave me a hope and a joy that is pretty hard to express adequately.
I had sent out an email late Sunday night inviting folks to join me for prayer at the beginning of this semester on Tuesday morning. I hadn’t even checked this out with the other members of our staff team, and I didn’t place an expecation on my colleagues to attend. And this morning I didn’t really know if I’d be praying alone or with a room full of people. Five showed up. We talked for a while, and then spent some time in prayer. Good time. Good prayer. Community enriching prayer.
And then, while we were sort of packing up and getting ready to move on with the rest of the day, one of the students present said to me, “This was the first time that I have prayed in public in six years.” And she thanked me for making this possible for her.
Elizabeth has been a part of our ministry community for three of those six years. And come to think of it, I’d never noticed that she hadn’t prayed any sentence prayers in our midst.
Then she said that she was excited about reading Romans with our Wine Before Breakfast community this year because we had been reading Romans that first year that she joined our community. And then she told me that my last sermon of that year (in April of 2007) had been profoundly healing for her. That sermon had given her permission to be a member of a believing and worshipping community, even with all of her doubts and all of her hurt and disappointment with the church.
But that wasn’t everything. The last thing that she told me was that she was finding ways to give voice to her Christian faith in the context of a course that she is teaching in the social sciences. Elizabeth went in to the social sciences fully cognizant of the insistence on religious neutrality in that kind of scholarship.
She knows the methodological and pedagogical rules and by and large obeys them. But she now wants to quietly and gracefully allow her own Christian faith to shine through her teaching and research.
Can you imagine how excited I am about my short conversation with Elizabeth? Because she found a place in a worshipping community, gathering around a table of bread and wine, participating in the liturgy and a community of hospitality, she can now pray. Because she met Christ in our midst, in the preaching of the Word, in the sacraments, in table fellowship, in an openness of conversation that refuses to censor, she can now pray. And because she can pray, she can begin to imagine what a grace-filled Christian scholarship might look like.
I still miss my family and my life at Russet House Farm. Elizabeth doesn’t take away that longing. But Elizabeth does remind me of why we do campus ministry and why worship is at the heart of it all.
by Andrew Stephens-Rennie
“What do you mean God isn’t an old white European male? When did that happen? That’s exactly who it was, last time I saw a Sunday School flannelgraph…”
You know? I’ve tried. And recently I tried again to pick up books from Donald Miller’s catalogue to make my way through them. And yet, despite the number of times I’ve been told how refreshing they are, how these books open up a whole new world of Christian faith, how we’re able to blow apart the box we’ve created for God, I’ve still got some issues. Maybe it’s just me…If I were capable of speaking objectively, I’d talk about many life-giving aspects of these stories. I like the flow, the heart-on-sleeve honesty, and the On The Road kinda feel.
But here’s my problem. And maybe it’s just that this has become my new Kryptonite, but the capital-He God still really bugs me. And He is everywhere in those books. He’s in multiple sentences per page. He just looms throughout the stories. And I suppose that could be quite intentional. Read the rest of this entry »
by Brian Walsh
I have been spending this week at Camp Fowler in the Adriondacks. While my daughter Lydia is a camper, the camp director Kent Busman has graciously let me stay at the camp, doing a little work here and there, but mostly writing. Kent is a huge Bruce Cockburn fan and thought that having me around writing a book on Cockburn sounded like a good idea to him.
The theme of the camp this summer is “Hunting for Hope.” Seems like an important theme to me. “Hunting” for hope because hope is not easily found. Not in the times in which we live. We’re talking about hope here, not cheap optimism. Optimism always has its head in clouds, and never really faces the brokenness that is all around and deep within us. You only start hunting for hope when you realize that you desperately need it, when you start to feel that despair lurking in your heart. Heavy stuff for a bunch of kids, but if anyone can sensitively pull this off it will the staff at Camp Fowler. Read the rest of this entry »
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