The Given World
These posts are part of an ongoing project committed to resisting what G.K. Chesterton called “a small and cramped eternity” — that profane vision of Christianity as somehow limited to what happens on a Sunday morning, rather than a vision-shattering insight into reality itself.
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Old-School Movie Magic
Fetish or Sacrament? My kids and I have been watching Light and Magic, a docuseries on Disney+ all about the history of the special effects house, Industrial Light & Magic. The series begins by outlining George Lucas’s rationale for establishing the company. His vision of a space opera that would merge the visuals of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:…
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Awakening
A brief detailed chronicle of our minute-by-minute dislocation This entry — long overdue — tracks some of the ways that we find ourselves unsettled from a creaturely way of life even in just the first few minutes of an average day. My hope is that it will also uncover counter-movements and signs of what Charles…
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A.I., Bitcoin, and Cloud
An attempt at a theological ABC in memory of Frederick Buechner Frederick Buechner passed away last week at the age of 96. Arguably one of the greatest Christian writers in English of the 20th century, Buechner was a novelist, essayist, minister, teacher, and more. I first encountered him in Philip Yancey’s book, Soul Survivor, where he…
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Fake Plastic Earth
Attempting to uncover the creaturely roots of AstroTurf My wife was talking to our neighbour down the road. They had been working for about a year on renovating their front yard. They had built some short faux-stone walls and recently added what looked like plastic hedges and fake foliage all around the space in order…
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I, Pencil by Leonard Read
Two kinds of “wonder” I first came across the essay, “I, Pencil: My Family History as Told to Leonard E. Read,” via Thomas Thwaites’s Toaster Project website. It may be more accurate to describe the piece as a short story or a monologue. In it, a pencil tells us the story of how it is made —…
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A Theology of Barcodes
Mark of the Beast, or Brilliant Human Innovation? (Or both?) I don’t think that I ever actually thought that barcodes were a tool of the Antichrist. When I was a young teenager, still very much in the throes of a passionate interest in eschatology—not unlike a young secular nerd being fascinated with Star Trek—I think I maybe did believe…
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The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites
Seeking a path out of abstraction I’ve read Thomas Thwaites’s The Toaster Project twice and continue to get insights out of it—I’ll cut to the chase now to just say that it is fantastic. As I describe below, Thwaites’s project informs the larger project of The Given World in important ways by exemplifying the kind of analytical approach a theology of…
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The Loneliness of Work
This post was originally posted at my short-lived website, Faith Working. I am not sure I currently agree with everything herein, but thought I’d repost here anyways — I’ll post new stuff as it comes up. Throughout the New Testament, we see a common approach when it comes to missionary work: Jesus does not send people out…
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Meaning at Work: Part 2
Finding a Gateway to the Outside This post was originally posted at my short-lived website, Faith Working. I am not sure I currently agree with everything herein, but thought I’d repost here anyways — I’ll post new stuff as it comes up. It’s interesting that, when we recount the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19:1-10, we often…
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Meaning at Work: Part 1
What is meaning? Some people might describe it as a kind of feeling — of what? Depth? Appropriateness? Well-suitedness? Awe? Each of these descriptions involve an encounter between my inner understanding of the world and an outside reality. Meaning emerges, it seems, in that encounter with the outside, whether as a confirmation of my understanding…
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