Decolonization Series

Examining the hidden ideas that inhabit our imaginations is the serious need of our day. We often allow internalized entitlements, ideologies, and even racisms to colour our thinking and our acting in the world. Leaving these ideas unexamined does make sense; these hidden ideas are often the underpinnings of who we believe we are in this world. To tackle any of these ideas is both painful and risky. But it is absolutely necessary. It is those same, often unexamined, assumptions that do harm to others. Our privilege always comes with a price, a price we really do not want to think too much about.

One of the areas of conversation and exploration that I would like to embark on in the podcast is a frank examination of ways I’ve sought to decolonize my own thinking. As a male cis white straight Christian settler I have a lot of internalized ideas about who I am and how I should expect to navigate this world. These identity markers result in me taking up space that many of my friends who do no share these same markers simply have to struggle in order to occupy. And to be honest, I’ve not earned any of those markers, yet, it is through those markers that I have been able to easily gain the things that I have earned. Privilege opens doors, but it also closes doors for others.

Over the last two decades I have had the opportunity to confront my own internalized privilege through the invaluable friendships of those whose experience has been much harder than my own. These friends have continued to push me out of my own comfort zone as I refuse to overlook the inequity that comes from my own privilege. I listen to their stories and I witness first hand their marginalization and the sheer amount of struggle the have to gain things that I take for granted. Feelings of safety and my confidence that the structures of society will support me in my missteps. Even the fact that I have a voice in almost every room is something many of my friends may never feel. And when I pay attention to their silence, their absence, and their fears, it makes me uncomfortable. I know that is why many folks similar to myself fight tooth and nail to keep the marginalized at bay and to pretend that the world is a fair and equitable place to live. This discomfort is why we white settlers become so tone death as to counter “black lives matter” with “all lives matter.”

There is another option here, one that I see many courageous folks embarking on. The way of embracing discomfort as a gift. A way of laying down our privilege to just be silent in the room where rarely heard voices have bravely spoken up. A way of asking what our discomfort really says about who we are in contrast to who we actually want to be. This alternative option goes by many names, but the one I find most uncomfortable currently is decolonization, mainly because this word counters the lie that I have the right to conquer and subdue this world simply by virtue of being born into a white Canadian Christian family as a straight white man.

Decolonization is not simply saying we are done with our racisms, as if recognizing our inner selves is all that is required. Decolonication is a way of rooting out our internalized racisms and ideologies, laying them bare, and seeking ways of acting and being that counter their influence on ourselves and on the world around us. Decolonization is challenging the language of rights when it rises up in our imaginations. Decolonization is refusing to pretend to be colour blind, refusing to pretend we are not homophobic and sexist, and above all pretending that we are not privileged in our colonized country. Decolonization is above all committing to building something better than the structured society which we created as we rammed our religion down indigenous throats. Decolonization is creating something better than an economy built on slavery and on the economic dependence of those nations we see as less important than our own. Decolonization is refusing to support the status quo because more of the same is simply more of the harm we do to the other, despite anything we might tell ourselves otherwise.

In the podcast I want to make space for those who have taken up this process of entering the discomfort to make their worlds better. I am deliberately not going to ask all my black or queer friends to come speak, as if I’m somehow using my whiteness for their good (white saviorism is a colonial pattern). Not that I wouldn’t enjoy their voices here, but I want to focus on how others who, like me, are confronting their own imaginations. I’m hoping that hearing our experiences of embracing the gift of discomfort will unsettle us so that we can actually hear the stories of others without thinking that simply hearing the experience of those on the underside of history is enough to appease our consciences.

I also want to explore my own decolonization experience as I rethink my life, my faith, and my future. One area that I will tackle early on is my decolonized ideas around the Christian church, if ever they was an institution that needed decolonization it is the one that went hand in hand with the colonization of the world. It is also the religion to which I belong, so that is an uncomfortable complication. I offer my critique as an insider who is convinced that colonization and institution have masked a more radical agenda at the heart of Christianity. An agenda that could actually offer hope for creating a better world than the one we know today.

I would enjoy hearing your thoughts on decolonization? How have you embraced discomfort as a gift in your life? And even what kind of world you imagine we could move toward as we continue this important work of decolonization?

Eclectic Doctor Podcast

Over the years it has been suggested to me quite a few times that I should produce some regular content in the form of a podcast or vlog. It seems some people enjoy the way that I explain things which is always encouraging for a teacher to hear. Yet it is also intimidating to consider because I follow a few really polished podcasts and have generated regular content in the past, it is a lot of work. One podcast I enjoy, Advent of Computing with Sean Haas, even graciously gives you insights into his process of organizing and preparing that series. I believe what I’m considering here is best taken as a serious project treated it almost like a part-time job (at least in the beginning).

The other struggle I’m having around podcasting is one my thesis director, Dr. Heather Eaton, challenged me with as I neared the end of my doctoral studies – you can be a scholar who writes and engages primarily with academia or you can be one who blogs and engages primarily with the rest of the world through the internet – but both will be too much to do well. I know she was concerned because at the time I was an avid blogger and she wanted me to succeed in whatever direction I headed. This did not preclude blogging, in my mind at least, but her wise advice was to decide what I should focus on going forward. (The teaching part is a non-negotiable for me, I love teaching.)

Freedom Log was my main blogging effort going back to 2005. Something I picked up towards the end of my theology undergrad and followed me until thesis writing took over my life (drops off in regularity around 2010). At the end of that time the thesis writing frankly burned me out and taking on many new courses to develop and teach has not helped. All that is a bit more stable these days even though I’ve had to diversify my teaching due to the lack of theology positions in my city and a college just up the road that is happy to have me teach software development. The big difference for me now is that while I do love the journaling aspect of blogging, what I need to produce is something consistent and somewhat polished (although I expect the polished part will come with doing over time).

So I’ve been starting to gather names of conversation partners and topics that I would like to cover. Following Sean Haas’ cue I have a big old spreadsheet started and I can imagine a few topics that will turn into a series of episodes already. I mentioned this podcast on my personal Facebook page and I am encouraged by the diverse group of people who said they’d be willing listen to and even to participate in recorded conversations on a lot of the topics I am interested in: theological themes especially around how faith is expressed in culture, how as a theologian I approach teaching, my love of games, gamification in teaching, as well as deconstruction and decolonialization of faith. I have at least enough material to keep me going for a while.

I’ve already started scripting episodes and identifying research I will need to do. I have made a Patreon account which I’ll launch at the same time. I even have a good setup for live streaming which I’d love to play around with once I get things rolling. The one thing I’m going to say upfront is that, like the blog, the podcast will be primarily for me. I think that it will be great to have folks come along for the ride, but I need to start there. As people get more involved in the conversations I hope the podcast will generate I expect to cover off topics I cannot even imagine at this point. But the best way I know to keep the momentum is to make something that I will enjoy, even if that is quirky and eclectic.

I’m going to use the blog here as a way of keeping you updated. The first episode will be my partner, Sharon, interviewing me about the podcast. I think it will set the stage for something new and fun. I hope you will join me on this journey.

What a Fall!

Sorry for dropping off the planet just as things were getting started. I had a good reason, let me tell you the story.

As I was prepping for running my new Christology course I ended up having a conversation with my friend Michael at church. I had been chatting with him about doing some teaching for a lay school of theology that he works with and I was completely unaware that he taught at Algonquin’s School of Advanced Technology  up the street from my home. My teaching background and former career are both in IT, which he did not know. So when that came out in a conversation he strongly urged me to apply for a couple permanent positions there as well as for sessional teaching. So I did.

Now I have a developer background, although I’ve worked in everything from traditional coding to security policy development and implementation, my training was really in software development. The course they offered me was for the BITNet programme with Carleton university. That’s awesome. But the course was NET1001 Computer Technology Basics. This is an introduction to computers for network specialist students that dealt with everything from the physical components of computers to the repair of those components. Cool, but not my specialty. So suddenly I found myself teaching two new courses and running new labs (so essentially three new courses in one semester). Yikes.

That’s when I dropped off a lot of things, hunkered down and prepped.

When I started prepping my course for Algonquin I was chatting with my good friend Doug, he’s a hard core developer, about teaching a hardware course. His comment was quite helpful: “I’m a developer, I don’t care if it is squirrels in the machine that make it work.” Really, as a developer there is a level of abstraction that you live in unless you are coding at a really low level, which many of us learned but is only relevant to a subset of development. I did mostly multimedia and web-based development in my career. And while I did have to know a fair bit about networking for the security work I did, I always learned it as I went along. This was uncharted waters for me, but I do love a challenge.

The other hurdle I ran into was that these courses at Algonquin are taught quite differently than university courses. In the university you have a set of course objectives to cover (fairly high level), maybe a paragraph description of how the last professor taught the course, and other than submitting a syllabus you are on your own. I’ve never had a syllabus rejected, in fact I think they just publish it right away. And the syllabus just has the basics – a short description, required and recommended texts, outline of assignments, and a breakdown of how the course will be marked. That’s pretty much it, although we’ve been adding specific learning objectives more recently in order to adhere to certain accreditation rules. Easy.

At Algonquin they gave me the slide deck for the last running (just the slides although by the look of them they were probably the notes as well) and a fairly detailed syllabus that I am not allowed to modify more than 10% in any given semester. I know that syllabus went through an approval process because it was kicked back to me to fix the marking schema because the rules had changed since it was last run. This syllabus even had a list of lectures, so things are pretty standard which makes sense, it is just not what I am used to.

My first step was going through the lectures and labs to make sure I could use what was there. Yeah, I didn’t think that would fly either. The slides were horrible actually. Text crammed onto a stock PowerPoint slide template and endless math??? Worse, the labs were written for different machines than I had for my students. I spent a day setting up a dozen identical lab machines for my students and learning the hardware. Then another day re-writing the first lab and then turned my focus to the lectures.

Now I am grateful that I had something for the course, even unusable slides, because it gave me a sense of the range of material to be covered as well as where the course got bogged down. There were four lessons on math and circuit logic, the syllabus had space for one. I knew from this that that previous students were having trouble grasping the concepts, and some merciful (possibly frustrated) professor had lingered there until the class was ready to move on. So I talked to Michael, he is the guy for BITNet at Algonquin, and asked what math was really needed. Then distilled it into a few things: Converting between base 10 math to base 2, base 16, and a wee bit of base 8; basic binary math; one’s and two’s compliment math; and circuit logic. I could leave aside things like the math behind floating point numbers, I could just teach that conceptually instead of mathematically. The second thing I did was figure out where they needed this math so that I could always ground the technical in the practical, because if you know you will need certain types of math you will put a bit more effort into understanding it.

I ended up reducing the math to two lessons: circuits and number systems in one lesson and the rest in the second. I gave them one lab that was online just doing the math (instantly evaluated with feedback) and then tested them right away on the material. It worked well. But I’m probably now boring you with the details. All in all I worked my ass off this semester but it was hugely rewarding.

So now I am back in the IT world, teaching. I’m running Java (Android development) labs as well as Web development labs this coming semester and lecturing about God’s self-communication to humanity at the university. It should be a bit less insane, but still a full semester. (The last time I worked in Java it was 1.1 so I’ve been updating those skills big time!)

Oh, and I used the squirrel comment from Doug as a kind of running joke in my class. At the end of the semester a number of appreciative students gifted me a stuffed squirrel that I named BITsy. Here she is in our Christmas tree.

I’m hoping to post a bit more this semester, if I do not you will know what happened.

 

Preparing for the Fall

This fall is going to be exciting, but it will be a lot of work getting there. I spent a day in the studio at Saint Paul University recording lectures for my upcoming new course THO3164: Jesus the Christ and the Language of Christian Hope. I  am really pumped because this course lets me do a deep dive into material that in the past was only a small part of courses I’ve taught. We had workers outside while we were recording and I know they could hear my projecting voice because at one point they started singing “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” We had to pause a few times. But we did manage five lectures, only 25 to go!

I also took some BrightSpace training with Algonquin this week. I was worried it would be a waste of time (although getting paid to do training is always welcome). I was pleasantly surprised because the training has improved a lot since I did it with Ottawa University. Lots of stuff that I learned the hard way was covered, but I also learned a few new tricks that will make putting together courses a bit easier. One of the advantages Algonquin has is that they seem to have thought through what components they wanted to include in BrightSpace a bit better than Ottawa University. This is likely because they have the benefit of institutions using the software for almost two years already.

I’m still waiting on my course materials and directives for the NET1001: Computer Technology Basics course and labs I’ll be teaching at Algonquin. I have the shells in BrightSpace, but no content. Big difference between college and university is that in college you work with developed curriculum but at the university you start with a clean slate and build from scratch. Both are work, but a different kind of work. My real joy will be when I stand in the classroom and start my first lecture with almost 90 students! It is going to be awesome.

The screenshot is from the overview page for my new online course with Saint Paul University. Doesn’t it look pretty?

What I Would Do Differently (part 1)

 

It has been quite a few years now since I’ve pastored a church. During this time I’ve reflected a lot on what I did wrong and what I did right. I still have a lot of fond memories of the good things we, as a church, did in our city and even beyond our city. The road trips to do teaching workshops, exploring notions of justice in community, training up leaders who went out to serve in other congregations, and even the deep enduring friendships that we cultivated. These good things definitely have their counterpoints in the things I wish I had done differently. Some of these things we got right in the beginning, but somehow, they were overtaken or misaligned by the demands of pastoral ministry. As a result we’ve had to work through a few relationship stumbles from those days and there are still a few we have yet to work through, especially from the  last couple of years of Freedom Vineyard. As these reflections percolate in my heart I thought it would be helpful to me, and possibly others, to reflect on them here. I want to reflect on the first idea, more ideas will come and more will come on each idea I am sure.

Mentoring/Discipleship

The idea of discipleship has been coming up a lot for me lately and I am sure it is God trying to get my attention. For me I understand discipling and mentoring along the same lines. You disciple by giving to others what has been life-giving to you so that they too can grow and mature and give what they learn and become away to others. I am convinced that this cycle of health is why Jesus made discipleship central to his mission for the Church.

My own basic foundation for discipleship actually comes from being part of a twelve-step programme when I was a troubled teen trying to bring back some order to my life. In that programme I learned the value of intentional mentoring and I was blessed many great mentors during the two years I was actively part of the programme. I also learned through the programme the value of walking with others who were actively working on their own personal and spiritual development. Health begets health. Discipleship is not a downward authoritarian structure, it is servant leadership and intentional life sharing.

In our early years as a congregation I spent a lot of my time deliberately mentoring/discipling people. In our community we intentionally modeled this by not doing things alone. So when people called the church looking for groceries, I would grab one of our people to come along with me. When someone asked for prayer, I would not go alone. When I was asked to run a workshop we’d fill a van and go. In the going  we would spend the time talking about what we were going to do and what we hoped God would do. On the trips home we spend time talking about how God changed our own lives. Those are some of my fondest memories, and the times when we really saw people grow in their faith. Unfortunately, mentoring like this was also the first casualty of success.

As the church grew and I was looking after more groups (we had a connected house church model) it became easier to just do things myself which is never healthy for the church. I see a lot of pastors doing too much alone in churches today. As evangelicals we value entrepreneurship in our church planters. So our brave independent leaders go out and continue the cycle of clergy dependency that plagues our churches. It is an easy trap to fall into, especially when you get caught up in the lie that everything has to be done immediately (or even done at all). We were no exception, try as I might to stop our church from becoming the ‘Frank show’, there was a point when the ‘Frank show’ was what people really wanted. It was at this point that I believe discipleship had died in our community.

One of our stated goals as a community was to always be gathering in such a way that we were growing as people and as God followers. Our slogan was: Freedom Vineyard helping you become all you can be in Christ. This vision was great for orienting us and it is actually a big part of why we pulled the plug on the church when we did – we were no longer seeing people grow. However, my biggest regret is not facing this reality sooner. Not that I think I could have rescued the church, but it might have been a lot less painful for many of us if we had pulled the plug a few years earlier.

Discipleship had died because we had settled into a pattern of leader-follower/clergy-congregant. In fact people actually resisted changing this model once it had settled in. This pattern had become our new status quo and folks were comfortable with that. The moment I could no longer deny that this had happened was when I suggested some new ways to start reaching out to our neighbours and was vocally resisted by the group I was supposed to be leading. That meeting shook me deeply. We had gone from being a loving community that was growing deeply in our relationship with God and with reaching people no other church seemed interested in to being a church that wanted to just keep their tight knit community the same as always without too many things to disrupt our comfort. It is actually a bit more complicated than this sounds, but the net result was the same. Discipleship was no longer possible in such an environment. Much as we still love the people God gathered to us at Freedom, it was clear that our church needed to close.

If (and possibly when because there is a deep restlessness in me still) we are to pastor again I will do my best to do two things. First I will cultivate a community of mentoring and discipleship. In fact I think that needs to be part of how we relate to people even if those people never come to know Jesus. It is giving our best for others and hoping that they too will see the Jesus we have seen and be drawn to His faithful love. Jesus did this, the cross is a great risk, so is discipling and we cannot forget that one of His disciples turned out to be a traitor. So this is the first thing – I would make it all about discipling and disciple-making.

The second is that I would do my best not to go so fast that discipling becomes a casualty of success. If that means programmes never start, great. Programmes without discipling disciplers are not worth having. The thing is that we have a lot of churches with great programmes already, programmes are not what the Body of Christ is lacking. What we need are discipling communities who, like Jesus, walk among the rest of the people (especially the ones religious people do not want to touch) sharing our hopes, dreams, struggles, and our vision for the good life. We need mentors and disciplers.

Like I said at the beginning, these are ideas still percolating in me. I expect to share more ideas over time. Also I would love some interaction, especially for any of you starting out in church planting who want to learn from my mistakes.

The image is from me sharing about theological training with our regional leaders at our yearly retreat. I loved those gatherings and this year was the first time I wasn’t extended an invitation. The photo was taken by my good friend Andrew Jennings.

Landing and Taking Off Again

Back from a great conference in Kentucky, the Society of Vineyard Scholars. It was the culmination of a marathon of work, so I have not been able to blog much at all. Later today I will negotiate a new teaching contract, so things are not settling down for me either. We tend to take off on the weekends in the Summer which is great, but I usually try to disconnect from my work and blogging. I’m sure I’ll be back at this a bit more intently in the fall.

I will be posting my paper from the conference for your reading pleasure. It went over really well. My big challenge is that I am still neck deep in lecture preparation for next semester at Saint Paul and taking on new courses will only make that worse. Plus I’m doing a lot of reading to write a chapter for a book project I am part of, trying to squeeze in an hour or so of reading here and there. I have most of it on my kindle so I am dragging that around quite a bit these days. And finally I’m setting up a closed forum for Vineyard pastors wanting to talk about pastoral realities of inclusion, inter-religious work, ecumenism, and more. This is to support a network of people tired of debating whether or not we should be doing these things and sharing real experiences, good and bad, with just doing them. I think this will be helpful and I’ll let you know how the project progresses.

I also have a few home projects I’d like to talk about here. Cladding my basement stairs with maple, raising a set of stairs at the cottage, and finally finishing the until I built into my front entrance. At this rate the cottage will get done first – I need to source some metal post caps yet, but it is a quick job and good for a weekend up there. Plus my brother is coming up and I think we could do this together.

The image is from the opening panel on the intersection of Christianity and Culture. It was really quite good. SVS is my favourite academic conference. 

 

Politics and the Upcoming Election

June we’ll be back at the polls here in Ontario voting in a new provincial government. This year the political climate is quite strange. The PCs have selected Doug Ford as their leader (I’m going to resist the urge to candidate bash here) which seems a strange choice to me. The Liberals seem to have ticked off the more vocal and volatile conservative base. The NDPs and Greens are once again framed as being inconsequential. It should not be surprising that even in our last election there was a rise in the number of rejected ballots and I suspect that trend will continue. (You can vote non-confidence in Ontario and if enough do the election of a riding is redone with new candidates!)

Every Canadian election CBC puts up a vote compass to help you sort through the issues. While it is not perfect or comprehensive, I highly recommend it and have put up a synopsis of my run through after I weighted the results for the issues that I feel are most important. What initially strikes me is that while I’m not as economically left wing as my favoured party (I’m not sure they have the Greens that accurate I find their economics quite a bit ore conservative than Compass reports) I am not terribly far from any of the parties in an overall sense. 51% agreement with the Progressive Conservatives on issues is not a huge difference from 66% for the Green party. Seeing that brings me a bit of hope in what I can weather even if say Ford gets actually in, although I know this would be quite different if I were an LGBTQ+ identified person, a non-settler, a recent immigrant, or even a member of the Sikh or Muslim communities. (I would have liked to see LGBTQ+ issues raised in the vote compass because I know people in that community that are deeply concerned about this election.)

What is interesting to me as a political theologian is the narrative dynamics of the current election process. Despite the desire I have to urge people to vote based primarily on issues, it really is a climate of personalities forged in story that will be most persuasive this election. Worse, these stories are amplified and thrown around as if all that matters is the personal narrative of each party leader – which will likely cost some good candidates their riding. The Greens are left out of this narrative vilification largely because there is a concerted effort to not give them public voice despite the fact that they are running candidates in every riding. Alas if the Greens were afforded more public visibility they might end up with a worse narrative framing, so I need to be careful what I wish for.

If I could urge anything it is this: get to know your candidates and think deeply about how they frame the issues that matter to you. Take the narratives about the candidates and party leaders with a grain of salt. But do not completely discount those narratives. And most importantly – vote.

Presbyterians Work Hard

This last week and again this week I am providing pulpit supply for St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Richmond, ON. What a great congregation. I ended up getting some of the information I needed to prepare the service midway through last week, which made for quite a busy week. This busyness was compounded by the realization that Presbyterians really work to put together their liturgies!

In many of the traditions that have a detailed formal liturgy there are service books that let you quickly put together the various prayers and elements of the worship service. I have a deep love of formal liturgy, although I must admit I do always want to marry the ancient and formal liturgy with the contemporary and intimate worship music of my own tradition. I also appreciate that when you are invited to lead, throwing them off their liturgical rhythm is not the way to bless the congregation. So I appreciate that when I go speak in some formal contexts they already have lots of liturgical resources to draw on – not so with the Presbyterians it seems. I did grab a Presbyterian hymnal this week so I am ahead of the curve. This congregation has a distinct order of prayers and readings that are crafted week by week. It is really quite something, in fact I found it quite spiritually encouraging putting the liturgy together last week.

Yesterday I simply read through the readings from the Revised Common Lectionary and have been letting them sit with my spirit as I went through my day. This morning I am starting to frame out the prayers and order of service so that I can get some help choosing hymns that will be familiar and meaningful. I might teach them a new song this week, there seems to be space for that, but we’ll have to see what fits into the service.

If you are in the West Ottawa or Richmond area and would like to experience a really warm and inviting congregation why not come an join us this Sunday.

I grabbed the picture from St. Andrew’s website. The church looks tiny from the front, but as I pulled into the parking lot there is a huge addition on the back. The sanctuary was rebuilt in the late 1800s and has tonnes of charm. 

Furniture Restoration (Part I)

So we had this really great chair that we rescued one day and have been meaning to re-upholster for ages now. Foxy, our cat, had fallen in love with the chair as it sat temporarily in our living room, apparently she watched with great sadness as Sharon removed it to the garage. I am trying to keep a handle on projects that make it to the garage so I decided to tackle stripping it down right away. Such a dusty project! But as you can see the chair has really great bones.

The covering of the chair was disintegrating and so was the jute strapping that held the springs from the bottom. In fact once I had started pulling all the furniture tacks it was really interesting to see how this chair was constructed.

Under the covering was a thin burlap like layer over cotton pile and straw! Then another thin burlap or jute layer and a network of rope (likely jute) tying the springs into place. The springs were attached to a woven layer of thick jute strips on the bottom and then a thin black clothe finished things off. Everything was tacked together.

Sharon wanted me to keep the covering as a template, but the seat part fell apart on me. I tried with the chair back but when she came out and saw it she decided it would be easier to just do it from scratch, so all the straw and materials went into the garbage. I kept the springs which are in fantastic shape.

So now the decision. I could make a stiffer seat by upholstering an insert and then covering the whole thing. Or I could reconstruct the original seat with strapping top and bottom (I think that would be easier than the rope thing on top. I’m going to give the whole thing a nice sanding and then re-finish the wood. But for now the garbage is dealt with which was my main goal. I’ll definitely do a video when I finish the wood and when we re-upholster the chair.

 

Anticipation

I have been very busy, but in a good way.

Last week I talked about prepping for a couple job applications which I am hoping will lead to a full time teaching position. Not teaching theology, but something that will be satisfying and make teaching theology part-time a sustainable enterprise. With a bit of back and forth between me and a friend, I think I have put my best foot forward. So now I wait (I’m also waiting on another application that I sent out months back, so much waiting.)

I did take a day to sharpen up my chisels. I inherited a bunch of chisels from my dad and they were in quite rough shape. My history with sharpening has not been the best. My first real attempt at sharpening was not very good, even though I used my buddy’s sharpening machine. I’ve since been watching tonnes of videos on sharpening and decided that stones and a diamond plate for polishing were the way I wanted to go. I sharpened about half of my chisels – I know they were sharp because when I was using one it slipped and had no trouble sticking right into my hand. It is possible to be proud as you go running for a band-aid. They are not perfect, but I am confident that I’ve got a technique that works for me and the more I use it the better it will get. I’ve also taken to sharpening my kitchen knives every time I use them, which makes them so much better to work with – this has convinced me that sharp tools are always better.

I took the newly sharpened chisels out for a spin cleaning up some practice dovetails. I have a bunch of drawers to join with dovetails and I had never done a dovetail joint before. I do have a jig for my router, which I plan to use to make half-blind dovetails on the drawer boxes. But mentally I was stuck trying to figure out how I could use a round router bit to make square dovetail slots. Doing the joint by hand let me work the problem out (the answer is that the jig rounds over the tenons so they should fit without a lot of chisel work). It is simply satisfying to shape a piece of wood and feel how the joint should go together. Note to self, ceder scraps smell great but they are crap for fine carpentry.

Apart from a few social events I have had my head down preparing my Christology course for the fall. Once I had the course completely laid out I was able to dig into individual lectures to prepare the slides and scripts. These will be pre-recorded (30 hours) lectures for a completely online course. I am using a synthesis of the gospel narrative to frame my course: pre-incarnation, incarnation, ministry and teaching, passion, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and promised return. I completed my introductory video decks and scripts first – I might tweak these as I go but it is good to have them ready and practiced as they are the first videos the students see and should give the students a sense of excitement about the course. The introduction to the subject was really fun as I explore the guiding creedal question: who do you say that I am? All I’ll say here is that the Nicene council figures large in that piece. Anyone who thinks the theology of worship songs isn’t important has not read enough church history, “damn your catchy jingles Arius!”

What has me most jazzed about my preparation is the doctrine of the preexistence of Christ. I stumbled upon an article by Douglas McCready that led me to his really good book on the subject He Came Down from Heaven. McCready starts his article with the idea that this doctrine is most often simply assumed to be true or it is challenged, but rarely is this doctrine adequately explored on its own merits. This explains why I was having trouble finding substantial discussions of preexistence in the usual suspects from my bookshelf. I encountered a bit of ideal preexistence in some of the readings, but this is quite unsatisfying, it is not the idea of Jesus that preexists, but Christ as God. If we go the other way you end up with an apotheosis of Jesus the Human becoming Jesus the God. But if we have a preexistence of Christ, then the Christ (fully God) takes on human flesh becoming fully human. I’m still processing the theological implications, it feels like I’ve stumbled upon the most delicious treasure.

So this is what has been keeping me busy, with the weather warming up I hope to get into my shop a bit more so I’ll try to do another video soon. I do have video footage to edit from Richard’s 50th celebration gaming day, just need time to edit it down. I have one full SD card and a bunch of stuff on my phone, yikes.

The image is from a late fall camping trip I took with some of my gaming friends. It was the image we used to promote our Dungeon World Encounter Deck Cards kickstarter. A project we are hoping to continue working on, but I think we flew too close to the sun the first time. Richard Dufault took the photo and added the text, he’s photographing cosplayers in Cornwall this weekend at CAPE.