Why Pay Someone Just to Make Art?

Two people stand before two canvases. Both are painting. One deserves to be paid, the other doesn’t. Why?

This article is a particularly brilliant explanation of art as vocation that avoids disparaging art as hobby.

And when it comes to the church in particular paying for art, well, yes, we should, as the author argues well.

No More Ads

Recently, a couple of friendly readers alerted me to the fact that ads will show up on my blog for those who are not logged in to WordPress. I didn’t know that before, since I always log in and don’t see them.

But I was appalled to hear from them that in the previous post on prostitution, a Google ad popped up advertising South American women for the picking. Good grief.

So I’ve gone back to WordPress and found out my blog can go ad-free for thirty bucks a year. I’ve forked it over, and I trust that will be that.

Let me know, then, if this doesn’t work, please: I’d like no more bizarre juxtapositions on the blog. We have plenty to deal with between you and me as it is!

A Better Way on Prostitution

Julia Beazley, of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, writes on a recent report that analyzes Sweden’s ten-year-old campaign to reduce prostitution by prosecuting pimps and johns. It seems to be a dramatic success, not only in reducing crime and exploitation, but also in encouraging proper attitudes toward both sex and women. At a time when some of our Canadian and American politicians talk about decriminalizing prostitution–and a lunatic fringe defends it as empowering for women–this is refreshing news.

Wondering Fair Now Launched

A multi-national team of sharp young writers–plus one not-so-young professor–has begun a blog called “Wondering Fair” to engage Big Issues in a small, winsome way. Australians, Brazilians, Italians, Canadians, Americans, Brits, and others are on board. Drop by here.

Woe, Canada: A Bad, Bad Decision

The Canadian census has for decades asked a question about religious affiliation, thus providing Canadian scholars with data our American cousins can only envy. Indeed, many of us have advocated recently that Statistics Canada ask another question, one about actual attendance at services, to give us world-class data on this crucial indicator of religious observance.

Alas, the current government is about to drop the so-called long form and instead make the question about religion, among others, strictly voluntary–thus providing data about as useless as one can imagine. “Among those who wanted to record their religious views, 25% said–ah, who cares?”

If you’re Canadian and want to make some helpful political noise about this retrograde step, here is the place to make it:

Hon. Tony Clement, Minister of Industry, C.D. Howe Building, 235 Queen Street, Ottawa, Ontario  K1A 0H5
Telephone: 613-995-9001
Fax: 613-992-0302
Email: minister.industry@ic.gc.ca

Not Right Now, Please: I’m . . .

A friend of mine recently sent me an e-mail as he was preparing a speech:

“If you had to choose one issue that we Christians face as we tell other people about Jesus, what would it be? Would you say it’s pluralism—the wide range of religious and philosophical options available? Relativism—that says it doesn’t really matter what you choose? Consumerism—that encourages each of us to think of all of life as a supermarket? Individualism—that makes it all about me?”

I’d like to know what you think. Here’s what I said:

Prosperity “Gospel” in Canada…

…and much more. I’m ‘way overdue in notifying you of the release of Church & Faith Trends, the publication of the Centre for Research on Canadian Evangelicalism, which your servant assists as senior advisor.

Duke University’s Catherine Bowler offers the first-ever study of health-and-wealth teaching in Canada, which has produced Canada’s largest congregation, alas. CRCE’s Rick Hiemstra and Crandall University’s Prof. Sam Reimer look at congregational income in Canada over the last decade, with particular attention to the recent recession. And a new book on Canadian Pentecostalism gets a serious look.

The Latest Radio Bit…

I’ve been off-blog for a while, doing things like–well, like this: giving an interview to Drew Marshall, who runs an unconventional radio show out of Toronto.

Brother Marshall manages in less than 20 minutes to get me to commit myself (not an easy thing to do, as readers of this blog well recognize) to opinions about Marci McDonald’s book, street preaching, Making the Best of It, Chris Tomlin, Dave Crowder, and, of all people, Mark Driscoll.

FWIW, here it is–along with Drew’s much longer interview (he knows where the listeners are) with Brian McLaren, a founding member of the rock group “Kansas,” and other (more) interesting people.

More Video: Stanford Multi-Faith Seminar 2010

Two events in which your servant was involved are now available for video (and audio) consumption.

The first is a threefold presentation of Islam (of a very generic sort), Hinduism (of the Advaita Vedanta sort), and Christianity (of the Orthodox, Orthoprax, and Entirely Proper sort, needless to say) with some Q&A with the audience. The second is my own presentation on the grounds for believing Christianity to be true.

I have found it worked best to save the video to my computer (which takes a while) and then run it.

Marci McDonald, “The Armageddon Factor”: Part 3: Conclusions (UPDATED)

I have argued so far that Marci McDonald’s book has so many evident problems that it is hard to trust what she says in any areas one cannot check. And that’s too bad, because I don’t think she’s wrong about one crucial matter, the matter at the core of the book. There is a Religious Right in Canada and it has influence worth noticing.

Let’s clarify what we should not mean by that. Over the last several decades, evangelicals and Roman Catholics in Canada have engaged in Canadian public life more and differently than they had done in the previous generation. Since the innovations of the Pearson and Trudeau years, particularly having to do with a wide range of sex- and family-related matters, and in the light of the Quiet Revolution, evangelicals and Catholics have woken up to the fact that Canada isn’t automatically, generally, and perpetually Christian anymore. So these Christians have organized and entered political life both provincially and federally in new ways, in greater numbers, and with more noticeable results. (I have written about some of these developments here: “Bearing Witness: Christian Groups Engage Canadian Politics since the 1960s,” in Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity: Canada between Europe and America, ed. David Lyon and Marguerite Van Die [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000], 113-28.)

The mere fact, then, that theologically conservative Christians increasingly have involved themselves in Canadian public life is not news, and it isn’t fundamentally what Ms. McDonald is talking about. Thus no one needs to be alarmed about Catholic bishops or the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada speaking out about and advocating for their views on abortion, or euthanasia, or the nature of marriage, or Christian education–nor about them sometimes working together on these and other issues on which they share common concerns–as if this is a Scary New Thing. It isn’t. And Ms. McDonald’s book usually makes clear that she’s not alarmed about it, either. She distinguishes sometimes (not, alas, invariably) between such mainstream Christian groups simply playing their parts in the civic conversation, on the one hand, and the people that actually frighten her, on the other.

Who are those alarming people?

Marci McDonald, “The Armageddon Factor”: Part 2: Interpretation

In the previous post, I suggested that Marci McDonald blurs important distinctions among various religious groups, movements, and categories she discusses. She does it so much, in fact, that her central argument, that there is an emerging and important Religious Right in Canada, is compromised: Who and what are the Religious Right? How are they related to Canadian “social conservatives” or “so-cons” and to those she calls “theo-cons”? It’s not clear whom she is describing, unless she means simply “everyone to my political or religious right who is connecting religion and politics and advocating for their views in public”–and that’s not a very helpful characterization. I don’t mean to be unkind: I truly think that is the best way to characterize Ms. McDonald’s understanding of the Religious Right, lacking a definition from her book itself.

As for other misdemeanours of journalistic interpretation, here are a few.

Alongside of reporting what has actually happened or is actually happening, Ms. McDonald sometimes suggests what she thinks might have happened, or what she thinks might be happening, or what she thinks might happen, or what some other people think has happened, or think might have happened, or think might be happening, or think might happen. Reporting such opinions can sometimes be worthwhile, to be sure. But in a project whose heart is an assertion of fact–This is happening, and it’s important–trading in opinions rather than interpretations of fact puts one’s credibility at risk. And if you don’t name or even identify the sources of those opinions, so much the worse.

Marci McDonald, “The Armageddon Factor”: Part 1: Information

Marci McDonald is described on the flyleaf of her new book, The Armageddon Factor (Random House Canada), as “one of Canada’s most respected journalists” and winner of numerous impressive awards for her craft. She spent several years in the USA on behalf of both Maclean’s and U.S. News & World Report, and clearly was troubled by what she saw there of the American Religious Right. Returning to Canada, she has spent considerable time  researching the rise of what she fears (and I use the verb advisedly) is a similar political movement in Canada.

Her account of a putative Religious Right, alas, is not what we ought to be able to expect of such a prominent journalist. As a historian of recent North American evangelicalism and as an occasional journalist myself, I’m going to take the measure of this book according to the two key components of journalism–and of history: information and interpretation (Parts 1 and 2 of this series). On both counts, I will argue, this book frequently fails to pass even minimal journalistic standards.

I will then argue in Part 3 that her conclusions are mistaken—except where they’re not. Marci McDonald—who, during our two interviews, I found to be both intelligent and pleasant—is not wrong about everything. Not at all. In fact, my main regret about this book is that its several flaws will allow those who prefer to do so to discount its important message: There is a Religious Right in Canada and it’s more important than many people have thought. In fact, it is more important than I had thought.