Contributor

">

Jason Demetri

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec venenatis est sit amet tellus varius, id egestas quam rhoncus.

The Fading of Forgiveness

Tracing the disappearance of the thing we need most.

READ

More From This Contributor

How Much Truth Is There in Beauty?

Would you eat an ugly cucumber? Millions of dollars ride on your answer to that question. So does a lot of theology. According to a recent study published in The Journal of Marketing, tons of produce and other food is tossed out every year in the United States as...

A Letter to C.S. Lewis

Professor C.S. Lewis The Kilns, Lewis Close, Headington, Oxfordshire, UK Dear Professor C.S. Lewis, I hardly mean to bother you. I know you receive thousands of letters each year and that it is your habit to answer all of your mail. I do not want to burden you with...

Dear America

Dear America, You have a memory and history problem. As a political science professor, I am privy to the background and the foreground of the cultural moment as I live vicariously through the lives of my students—active consumers and budding culture makers that they...

Welcome to the Apocalypse

The Veritas Forum hosted a commencement speech contest for the class of 2020, together with Comment and Augustine Collective. As Veritas wrote in the invitation to graduating seniors, “Some people describe commencement speeches as “cultural barometers” that offer...

We Are the Unprecedented Ones

The Veritas Forum hosted a commencement speech contest for the class of 2020, together with Comment and Augustine Collective. As Veritas wrote in the invitation to graduating seniors, “Some people describe commencement speeches as “cultural barometers” that offer...

Memento Mori

WWhat am I looking for? An out of date announcement of my own death? —Stephen Maturin via Patrick O'BrianI see it most clearly the morning after a late night, or at the end of a long and tiresome day. I straighten from the bow I take when I wash my face, I take a...

Lost Word: Tribe

tribe noun \    ˈˈtrīb    \    a people to be together who we cannot be alone. Tribe is the place we live breathe and have our very (human) being together. We were born to ///be very whole, ///be very loved ///be very known. We long to feel the sweet serenade of love...

Reflections on Peacekeeping

I stare at the two envelopes in my hand and feel the fury rise in my throat. I am helping my parents sort through their mail after a trip, helping settle them back into their tiny independent living apartment, helping. The rage astonishes me. Rage toward political...

Meeting Grace

I laid breathless on my back, staring in the direction where my feet would normally be, at an enormous, bulging belly. I gently caressed the ball-shaped appendage, shooting Dave an assuring grin and a thumbs-up as it tightened and relaxed through contractions. The...

Of Loves and Laws

Legality is not morality, this we know. But the relationship between the two is always worth scrutinizing, bound up as it is in foundational questions of truth and conscience, human nature and social change, justice and order. As the flows of human migration continue...

Patchwork Patterns

In need of a small victory and a tactile point of focus, I dedicated a few evenings to mending. Inspired by the beautifully useful Japanese art of sashiko and compelled by a bike-chain-shredded hole in a favourite red jumper, I patched the elbow with geometric...

A Letter to Love

Dear Love, Have you noticed how easily people seem to claim my work for yours lately? To be blunt, I am as offended as I am proud. You may be the star of today’s vernacular, but you’ve become nearly obsolete in practice. And me? Well, I have become a master of...

Renewing the Church for the Sake of the World

The fabric of civilization is unravelling, the barbarians have broken through the gates, and looming threats to society have left the ruling elite anxious, unnerved, looking for someone to blame. So they turn to Christians and the church. The scene will feel contemporary, but in fact it is the opening context for Augustine’s fifth-century apologetic, […]

Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders: They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps...

Heaven

So come home along the dusty hickory-shaded ruts with scotch broom ablaze and orchards rising behind the sharp green of berry fields. Come on ahead if you can, with your fractures and played out luck, your shoes that have forgotten and had to be carried. Come with...

Wrathful and Loving

This is an informative and challenging book, yet neither Jenkins’s criticisms nor his own proposals make it a compelling one.

On Slow Learning

If you have ever owned a tortoise, you already know how difficult paper training can be for some pets. Even if you get so far as to instill in your tortoise the the value of achieving the paper there remains one obstacle— your tortoise’s intrinsic sloth. Even a...

Signals, Smartphones, and Still Small Voices

The human race must be busier than ever, knowing and retelling, talking and reading, liking and scrolling, deleting and adding—friending, following.

Yet sitting at the Wooden Nickel, in my physical body, wearing my particular clothes, I’m presented with a different, or at least complementary, range of possibilities.

Vessels of Myth

Superhero mythology is the direct product of a Judeo-Christian worldview and as such complements Jewish and Christian worldviews in important ways. The “S” shield has ever been an ally of the cross.

My Third Third

Then, oh so deliberately, we walked up the hill in an intimate silence that looked like respect and felt like fear. For a moment, I thought we might hold hands. There but for the grace and all that.

Worldview by Sound Bite

We humbly suggest to a secular audience and to Christians that God is much bigger and the Christian story of surrendering to God’s love is much better and more beautiful than many of us have ever been told.

Showing Us Our Inconsistent Selves

According to The Hobbit, the twenty-first century loves pre-teen bathroom humour, absurd chase scenes, sentimental mush about home and family—and other-wordly beauty and heights of awe. Thank you, Mr. Jackson.

Redemption

(Originally published March 2010:) The Word became flesh, not to save our souls from this fallen world, but in order to restore us as lovers of this world.

Following Bavinck’s Lead

This study by James Eglinton represents a significant advance in Bavinck scholarship, a breakthrough that has important ramifications for those of us who find in neocalvinism a rich resource for our social-ethical vision.

The Theatre of God

We civilized Christians have got to catch the living vision of Psalm 104 again. We believers have to hear this Word of God reform our perception, let it be born again as it were, to wide eyed, childlike astonishment at the marvelous, mystifying handiwork of the Lord all around us if we are really serious about responding to his revelation aright.

Unconventional Wisdom

Jacobsen’s insight into the degree to which the suburbanization of North America has been bad for church and community life is stunning—even more so if you had not previously considered the possibility.

Because I Have To

SIX QUESTIONS . . . I think all good art should do that in people’s lives: help them to do more than just look around, but to actually see the world God has made for them to delight in.

Seeking Truth Beyond the “Cloud”

The claim that “for the human species, selfishness is extinction,” fails to ring true given the overarching pattern in Cloud Atlas. As the main characters espouse optimistic beliefs, their convictions are undermined by the recurring motifs of violence and brutality that shape their world.

A Vision for a Different Economic System

The newest Jubilee Centre book contends that the biblical law—and particularly the Old Testament laws that applied to Israel concerning Sabbath, the usury prohibition, and Jubilee—provides a coherent paradigm for envisaging an alternative to the current capitalist system, one that will encourage relationality.

Understanding Autonomy, As it Should Be

A proper conception of autonomy is a rich picture of someone standing back from his contingent preferences and seeing that the attainment of his own good is inseparable from the maintenance of the common good.

Translating the Quirks and Peculiarities

SIX QUESTIONS . . . But I guess what I want to cultivate in all of my work is a sense of the omnipresent reality and activity of God, who is present whether or not named, whether or not recognized, upholding the universe by the word of His power, and writing the grand Story of time and eternity.

Close Enough to Hear Others Breathe

“The people that I try to care for are also caring for me. I’m giving them something yes, but they are also giving me things and in this mysterious economy I’ve received far more than I’ve given. I don’t mean economically. I mean in the deeper terms of life.”

Scaling Conversations

Blackberries are buzzing, politics is fast-paced, but are we actually performing? Could it be that even deep in the bowels of technological connectedness in the twenty-first century, politics still demands old-fashioned, one-on-one conversations for results?

The Essential Story

From what stance can we call others to virtue if our vision of virtue is based on our own self-chosen Story? When someone asks, “Why should I listen to you?” or, in the language of a two-year-old, “Who made you the boss of me?” what can we say?

The Absurdity of Reconciliation

Religion is key in the work of reconciliation precisely because when it comes to the ineffable absurdity of “why,” the state, like the three friends of Job, is better suited to silence.

It Is No Shame to Work for Money

When it comes to compensation, how should employees and employers respond, inwardly and outwardly? What does a faithful “pay posture” look like? And what are some of the spiritual challenges associated with monetary rewards?

Models Behaving Badly

We need models. But if a careful humility does not accompany their application, history tells us that there are many other blind alleys we can yet drive down.

Pregnant with Focus

Two new books on rather different topics—technology and pregnancy—encourage us to step back and refocus our lives as followers of Christ.

Band-Aids for Cancer

Contemporary functional Gnosticism cannot be corrected by merely addressing the worldview of classical Gnosticism as an apologetic problem.

A Perennial Moment of Opportunity

Yes, we want faithful participation in art, business, politics, education, and every other sphere. But how do we arrive at a worldview? Intuition may get the conversation started, but biblical knowledge will win the day.

The Untamed Word

Certainly, we must read the Bible with the larger church, and any radical departure from the broad sense of the faithful through the ages is a red flag for interpreters. But Wright’s picture of Jesus suggests that we must always be ready for God in Christ Jesus to speak to his church anew, even if he speaks sometimes against his church.

Pointing to the Good

SIX QUESTIONS . . . My awareness of the tremendous importance of education policy and regulation is developing and I look forward to becoming more practiced in designing, proposing, and advocating for better educational alternatives.

The Possibility of History to Continue

“Progress” is the buzzword of our time. Anyone wondering what “progress” entails, but does not wish to wade through Kant, Hegel, or Nietzsche, will benefit from Tom Darby’s new and very funny novel, Disorderly Notions.

Habits and Destiny

The long practice of Christian habits embeds faith, hope, and love so deeply within a human life that they can preserve our lives and our character and predict our future activity.

Patience, Trust, and Vision

SIX QUESTIONS . . . I have become convinced that the richness of the Christian faith can be embodied more fully and faithfully the more aware we are of theology, the traditions and importance of the church, and the significance of culture.

American Heretics

While too benevolent, and even-handed to a fault, Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion offers diagnosis and prescriptions for American Christianity that are spot on.

Morality, markets, and Michael Sandel

In Santa Ana in California prisoners can buy a cell upgrade. In Dallas, Texas, underachieving children are paid to read books. These are, alas, some of the saner and less offensive illustrations Michael Sandel offers.

Faith in China?

How striking to hear a well-known Chinese intellectual insist that the Christianity he saw in the villages of Yunnan, in rugged southwest China, is now as indigenous as the region’s famous buckwheat cakes.

Equitable Opportunities for All Children

Since the government mandates education for children and provides resources for fulfilling that mandate, no organizations seeking to fulfill the government’s education mandate should be denied access to such resources simply because they provide education from an explicitly religious perspective.
Parental choice: the next civil rights movement.

Disestablishing Our Secular Schools

This is thorny ground. Society needs to inculcate habits and attitudes that permit adults to live together. But for government to seek to shape the beliefs of young people threatens the fundamental right of free exercise of religion. The tasks of educational reform must start, then, with the process of educational disestablishment and real assistance to independent schools.

A Different Way

SIX QUESTIONS . . . In a sense, all my research and writing has aimed to understand how some societies came to see an irreconcilable conflict between social justice and the rights of conscience, a conflict played out especially in popular education.

The Grand Rapids Intellectuals

The Reformed Journal bridged the ethno-religious subculture of Dutch-Calvinist America and the wider academy, and it served as an incubator for several household names in Christian scholarship.

Poem: Planting a Sequoia

All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard, Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil. Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific, And the sky above us stayed the dull gray Of an old year coming to an...

Footprints in the Snow

“Men and women resist believing that they follow beaten paths. But they really become insufferably proud when they look around and think they leave no tracks.”

“Of Gods and Men”

Why this standard-setting work of sacred cinema will never be a hit with the Christian community—and why this is a tragedy.

A Regimen of Aimless Strolling

Billy Collins sashays into Big Ideas with apparent ease, poem after poem—death, love, the self, the death of love, love of the self. Beginning with the impossible or the mundane he transforms the conversation, like a witty party guest, into larger questions: Who am I? Why am I here?

Thinkers Outside the Box

Two recent volumes, by Paul Foster (ed.) and Pope Benedict XVI, help us remember that some thinkers do not fit into neat and tidy categories of scientific method, nor even of traditional Christian forms of theology.

The Postpartum Transformation

Up All Night is at its best when it is focused on this postpartum transformation: from our carefully cultivated identities before children to the reality that we are actually just managing intrusive chaos.

God(s): A User’s Guide

The exhibit rightly conveys that religion takes practice, not merely observation. But does it “use” God towards other ends—human sociality, the aesthetics of ritual, inexhaustible discourse?

A Poet’s Evolution

Johnston’s purpose is to explore the tension between the subjective and the objective, to keep these two realms of experience in balance.

Surprised by the Spirit

How might an openness to the Spirit’s work in the entirety of the created order lead us to have eyes that look for surprising and unpredictable developments in cultural and political realms?

The “Occupy” Debt Serfs

The problem is we have used our remaining economic freedom over the past several decades to further maximize our own situations at the expense of our neighbours’.

Unrealistic

It takes dedicated effort to understand a charity’s work and social context well enough to assess the true impact of their work—and what corresponding overhead costs are therefore appropriate.

Remembering Arthur Holmes

I am indebted to Art Holmes not only for my calling to be philosopher, but also for some of the themes that are foundational to my own teaching and writing.

Dream Small

You don’t need me to tell you to dream big. But I do hope you’ll hear me when I encourage you to also dream small. Because that might be what really matters.

Finding Nuance in the Practice of Politics

I wish Jonathan Chaplin’s recently published book had been available to me twenty years ago. Understanding Dooyeweerd’s distinctions and frameworks would’ve come much more easily with Chaplin’s aid.

Dooyeweerd Comes to Zumi’s

Much Western theorizing has taken the reductionist path. In response, theories of civil society have appeared that attempt (with varying degrees of success) to account for the rich diversity of institutions, associations, and communities of our daily lives.

Museum of Data

Google’s efforts to “organize the world’s information” fail to recognize that some things are not reducible to information.

Art as a Public Responsibility

Discussion of government arts funding is a complicated business. It implicates our ideas about what it means to be human, to foster neighbourliness, to practice art, and to promote a good society.

Poem: The Future

For God's sake, be done with this jabber of "a better world." What blasphemy! No "futuristic" twit or child thereof ever in embodied light will see a better world than this, though they foretell inevitably a worse. Do something! Go cut the weeds beside the oblivious...

Avatars, Tattoos, and Yoga

Evangelicals’ failure to seriously consider the truth of embodiment and the incarnation has made them open to practices that weaken the reality of embodiment Anderson’s book offers a first step toward a corrective.

The New Economic “I AM . . . “

“As with psychology and politics, economics plays an important role in our lives. But it cannot satisfy the irresistible impulse for a comprehensive worldview. ”

Today Comment reprints reflections from 1998 on four trends that were converging then, and converge still today.

Sex and Identity

God created humanity with a capacity to enjoy intimacy, closeness, and connection with other human beings—and if we forget that sexuality is supposed to move us towards others in connection and closeness, we forget part of what makes us human.

Life’s Big Questions: Who Am I?

“We [still] need to counter the world’s standards of identity and worth based on performance, on biology, on comparison/competition, on acquisition, on conformance, or on exclusion . . . From a biblical perspective, our identities and self-worth are rooted in the relationships we have with God, with our fellow humans, and with God’s creation.”
Today Comment reprints reflections from 2004 that are equally imperative seven years on.

The Place of Race

Jennings’s new book is a valuable contribution to the theology of race conversation—one that needs many more voices—but it still leaves some questions unanswered.

Our National Debt is Immoral

Canada’s fiscal situation today is admired the world over, but it hasn’t always been this way. In the midst of the U.S. debt crisis, today Comment reprints a 1993 article from its founding editor, a piece which can still bear fruit today.

The Enchanted Animal

The story Brooks tells—while filling in the reductionist modern narratives about what we really are—includes some flimsy, charm-like religion inserted as science.

Art: a Gift of God

Art serves the pivotal role of tapping into our imagination to offer a vision of what human flourishing might look like in the various spheres of life.

Evangelical Public Policy: What’s Next?

It may be too early to tell whether the changing evangelical political movement reflects a maturing political mind—but they make a convincing case that this moment presents remarkable opportunities to shape the movement’s future direction.

The North

While avarice has fuelled much of humanity’s steady and often destructive march into the forest, there is yet majesty in the courage and ingenuity such adventures reveal about the human spirit and the “people who aren’t afraid.”

Light unto my path

One day I found myself on a quiet side street in an industrial park in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. I was lost. My feet ached from walking. I was cold and wet from rain and snow and feeling more than a little out of place. My growing anxiety was placated only by...

Week of May 22, 2011

1. "It shouldn't be this way, but it is. One can lament that ersatz meaning sells when authentic meaning is lost, but Oprah was also a salve on a deeply wounded culture. To need Oprah to cope with the loss of a child is excruciatingly pathetic, but for the devastated...

Bearing the Cross

CarbOthelo pastel pencil on paper 2009For the final task of a drawing class at Redeemer University College, my classmates and I were asked to visually reflect on what it means to us to bear the cross of Christ in our lives. The symbol chosen for us to work with was...

In the Flesh

I suspect that when Christ demanded the faith of a child, he had this in mind: the squirming, wiggling faith that won’t be cast from my lap, turned away from the pew, forced outside the circle of his brothers.

War of the Worldviews

Dambisa Moyo’s How the West was Lost tries to analyze the causes of the American “Great Recession” and describe possible futures for the global economy, but ultimately fails to provide a compelling diagnosis and prognosis.

Week of May 15, 2011

1. " Are Christian School Graduates World-Changers?" Next week Cardus with the University of Notre Dame is hosting pre-release discussions on the data yielded from themost substantive study everof Christian schools in North America. Read Ray Pennings' op-ed on the...

Healing Division (#4)

Graphite, paper, wood, paint and resin 13" x 13" (3" deep) 2011This piece is part of a series that responds to repentance, and subsequently, healing. Seeking forgiveness can be a difficult process, especially when reopening deep wounds from the past in hopes of...

On the Street

The contemporary obsession with “street style”—as embodied in blogs such as The Sartorialist and Garance Dore—reveals not just a changing perception of clothing, but also a shift in the way we see ourselves and the purpose of public places.

Week of May 8, 2011

1. Hey, Cardus is blogging every weekday. www.cardus.ca/blog. 2. Kevin DeYoung, "Parenting 001": "I can't change my kids' hearts. I am responsible for my heart and must be responsible to teach them the way of the Lord. But nothin' guarantees nothin'." 3. "A person you...

Widows & Orphans: Workman’s Glove

Found glove, goldleaf, paint, photograph, wooded frames 2008Widows & Orphans: Workman's Glove is part of a series in which a found object is presented alongside documentation of its source. The two, image and object, are juxtaposed in two handcrafted and...

Saving Veronica

Appropriate legends do not obscure, but rather amplify, the truth of the gospel. Should Christians learn to discern between actual events and the myths—whose actuality is secondary—that embellish them, they may be moved to rediscover legends of the image of Christ.

Week of May 1, 2011

1. We have much to learn, grasshoppers: Comment publisher Ray Pennings walks the stage later today in Grand Rapids, receiving his Master of Arts in Religion. We heartily congratulate our fearless leader of research, and look forward—with all the world—to the...

Nothing on You

Wood, water, soap, air, tubing, motors 18 x 8 feet 2011Nothing on You is a full room installation in which a wooden plank floor/platform is installed six inches above the present floor. Upon the entrance to the room, small soap bubbles emerge from missing knots in the...

Week of April 24, 2011

1. Marilynne Robinson on Christian Liberalism: The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead delivered the Kuyper Prize Lecture at Princeton Theological Seminary's Kuyper Center a few weeks ago. Here's a summary and a link to the MP3. 2. 'The Phantom Tollbooth' and the...

Untitled

Oil on panel 24" x 16" 2009He isn't looking at you. He's looking at the picture-plane, the site of the methodological drama and the working space of painting. He is obligated to the spectatorial pretense of the portrait. The "black of portraiture" takes up the rest of...

Week of April 17, 2011

Comment wishes for its readers a reflective, restorative weekend. After Good Friday comes Easter—all will be well.Also, Acton Institute and Kuyper College launch " Common Grace," a major Abraham Kuyper translation project.    

Idols, Icons, and Facebook

Technology shapes us. But how we use technology shapes it, too. We make of our technology an idol or an icon. Our gaze—our intention—helps determine what the technology becomes.

Peace I Give To You (video)

Video still 2006 TRT: 2.5 min (Featuring Ehren Tool)http://www.mmd.ca/Melissa_Day/Peace_movie.html"In Mel Day's video, Peace I give to you, Ehren Tool, a former U.S. Marine strides into an idyllic Western American landscape of rolling, green hills singing the old...

Ha Ling’s Peak

Last June was the first Father’s Day that passed for me without my father, and possibly the last one that I would spend with my son. So I thought it would be a good idea to climb a mountain.

Week of April 10, 2011

1. Discuss: "The Christian Party must either confine itself to stating what ends are desirable and what means are lawful or else it must go further and select from among the lawful means those which it deems possible and efficacious and give to these its practical...

End

Graphite and charcoal on paper 51" x 105" 2009I make work that evokes a sense of anxiety within the landscape. The cold abandoned empty pool image functions as a metaphor for containment, control of the landscape, and the void, both in a material and psychological...

Week of April 3, 2011

1. Follow up to "A Shakespeare Every Decade?": In which Alan Jacobs— an English professor—feeds Bill James—a baseball statistician—the business onodorous comparisons. If I were to go around with a three-ring rationale for the liberal arts, Alan Jacobs would be one of...

Apathy//Epiphany (3/5)

Pen and Ink 2010This pen and ink drawing is the third in a series of five wrestling with the idea of epiphany.Like a pig in mud, a half naked boor slothfully swigs at a can of cheap beer as he is slowly covered. How does he react? How do we react to the gifts of grace...

Jesus, Maria y José

Jesus, Maria y José, 2005 (84" x 72" x 24") is a mixed media assemblage composed of two paintings (oil on canvas) a chair, medical tubing, an infant feeding bag, an IV pole, and a rosary. With this piece, I wish to draw the viewer into that conceptual space between...