Books by Dale Harris

Books by Dale Harris
A Feast of Epiphanies

Though I Walk, A Novel

Daytime Moons and Other Celestial Anomalies, a book of poems

Second Wind

Second Wind
An album of songs both old and new. Recorded in 2021, a year of major transition for me, these songs explore the many vicissitudes of the spiritual life,. It's about the mountaintop moments and the Holy Saturday sunrises, the doors He opens that no one can close, and those doors He's closed that will never open again. You can click the image above to give it a listen.

The Song Became a Child

The Song Became a Child
A collection of Christmas songs I wrote and recorded during the early days of the pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. Click the image to listen.

There's a Trick of the Light I'm Learning to Do

This is a collection of songs I wrote and recorded in January - March, 2020 while on sabbatical from ministry. They each deal with a different aspect or expression of the Gospel. Click on the image above to listen.

Three Hands Clapping

This is my latest recording project (released May 27, 2019). It is a double album of 22 songs, which very roughly track the story of my life... a sort of musical autobiography, so to speak. Click the album image to listen.

Ghost Notes

Ghost Notes
A collections of original songs I wrote in 2015, and recorded with the FreeWay Musical Collective. Click the album image to listen.

inversions

Recorded in 2014, these songs are sort of a chronicle of my journey through a pastoral burn-out last winter. They deal with themes of mental-health, spiritual burn-out and depression, but also with the inexorable presence of God in the midst of darkness. Click the album art to download.

soundings

soundings
click image to download
"soundings" is a collection of songs I recorded in September/October of 2013. Dealing with themes of hope, ache, trust and spiritual loss, the songs on this album express various facets of my journey with God.

bridges

bridges
Click to download.
"Bridges" is a collection of original songs I wrote in the summer of 2011, during a soul-searching trip I took out to Alberta; a sort of long twilight in the dark night of the soul. I share it here in hopes these musical reflections on my own spiritual journey might be an encouragement to others: the sun does rise, blood-red but beautiful.

echoes

echoes
Prayers, poems and songs (2005-2009). Click to download
"echoes" is a collection of songs I wrote during my time studying at Briercrest Seminary (2004-2009). It's called "echoes" partly because these songs are "echoes" of times spent with God from my songwriting past, but also because there are musical "echoes" of hymns, songs or poems sprinkled throughout the album. Listen closely and you'll hear them.

Accidentals

This collection of mostly blues/rock/folk inspired songs was recorded in the spring and summer of 2015. I call it "accidentals" because all of the songs on this project were tunes I have had kicking around in my notebooks for many years but had never found a "home" for on previous albums. You can click the image to download the whole album.

random reads

Eating, Praying, Loving (Part III): Thank You Brother Fish

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Many years ago my dad and I took our kids on a fishing trip to a local fish farm near London. They were just old enough at the time to find fishing fascinating, but still young enough that the delicate work of worming the hook and unhooking the catch fell to me.

My son actually landed the big one that day, a nice, plump rainbow trout just waiting to be caught. When he brought it in, it was so feisty that I had some difficulty keeping it still to unhook it, and accidentally left some ugly bruises on its otherwise beautiful rainbow flanks. Later, when we brought in our catch, the staff at the fish farm cleaned it for us, for our cookout that afternoon.

I have clear memories of watching my Dad clean the fish on fishing trips in the Rockies when I was a kid, so I watched nostalgically as the skilled workman turned our beautiful rainbow trout into a feast fit for a fish fry.

If you’ve never seen a fish cleaned before, I should say that it’s not an especially pretty job, but it’s not all that gruesome, either. I’ve certainly never been squeamish about it. But while we watched, I thought about the bruises I’d left on the side of the trout while bringing it in, and I thought about its sleek body flexing and fighting in my hands as I did, just moments earlier. It might have been because I was standing there with my young son, and was feeling especially, paternally, philosophical, but whatever the case, it struck me in that moment unlike it had ever done before, that this thing that we would be eating later in the day was a living creature, just the same as I was. And from there it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to this reminder—something we all know but forget so easily—that food not only gives life, it also takes it.

I think this truth—that the food we eat comes from living creatures—is one we need especially to remember in this modern era of industrialized food production, where the foods we consume are produced somewhere out of sight and out of mind, and seldom bear any resemblance to the animals they once were. Time was you raised the goose before you cooked it—it actually lived with you—and you personally participated in the act of slaughter that brought it to your table. Chicken nuggets, of course, look like no part of any chicken I’ve ever seen; and it’s easy to eat a dozen of them without ever thinking about the fact that what you're eating once scratched the dirt with a forked foot, fussing and clucking with the very breath of life.

Any biblical spirituality of food, however, can’t go very far without facing this truth squarely, that food is death and life together, and that what we eat, we eat at the cost of another living creature. You see this idea all over the place in Torah. First, we notice that the original Adam and Eve were actually created to be vegetarian, that eating meat, though it is clearly sanctioned by the Creator, was not the Creator’s original idea. Humans only became carnivores, according to the biblical record, as a result of the Fall, and after they had emerged from the ark on the other side of the flood (Gen 9:3). Similarly, we see the repeated prohibition against eating blood, because as far as the Bible is concerned, the life of the creature is in the blood (Lev 17:14). To eat blood would do violence to the sanctity of life itself. The same logic seems to underscore many of the food laws we find in Torah—the prohibition against cooking a goat in its mother’s milk for instance (Ex 23:19), or the restriction against eating a mother bird and its own eggs together (Deut 22:6). There are probably other reasons for these commandments, too, but one of their cumulative effects is that they require us to respect the “aliveness” of the things we eat.

However important it is for us to feed ourselves, the Bible seems to be saying, don’t do it without acknowledging how sacred the life is that you are taking to do so; after all, that life too is a gift of the Creator, and he has compassion on all things he has made.

Christian theology usually emphasizes the human being’s distinctness among all the creatures in the creation, and for good reason. We alone are made in the Image of God, and in this, God set us apart from all the other works of his hands. It is possible, however, to emphasize this truth in a way that overshadows a second, equally important truth: that we share a sacred kinship with the rest of his creatures.

This is not a philosophical statement; it’s an exegetical one. Genesis 2:7 describes the creation of the Adam in this way: that God “breathed the breath of life into his nostrils,” and so the man became a “living creature.” That’s my translation. Older Bibles translate that last part as “living soul,” but that’s misleading. The term in Hebrew is nep̄eš ḥay-yāh—“living being”—and it is the exact same term that Genesis 1:24 uses to describe all the “living creatures” that God created on sixth day of creation. In the same way, the term for God’s “breath of life” that brings the human being to life in Gen 2:7 (niš-maṯ ḥay-yîm) is the same term that Genesis 7:22 uses to describe all the living creatures that are destroyed in the flood. Inasmuch as the breath that animates us is the same breath of the same Creator that animates them, we have a kinship – what theologian Charles Sherlock calls a “sixth day solidarity”—with all God’s creatures great and small.

If our eating is to be fully biblical, then, it must acknowledge this kinship in some way. This does not necessarily mean we should start eating vegetarian—though I have eaten vegetarian at various seasons in my life, and found it to be an extremely satisfying diet. It does not mean, either, that we should all go back to organic farming—though recently I went to visit a friend who raises chickens and came home with a dozen farm-fresh eggs that were not only more tasty, but also more meaningful to me, since I had actually met the chicken they came from. These things actually may be part of someone’s response to the Biblical witness.

But even without an over-haul of our entire diets and the food system that supports them, there are ways we can be more biblical when it comes to this aspect of life. Here’s a simple idea for starters. The 12th Century mendicant monk, Francis of Assissi, is famous for his deeply spiritual love for literally “all creatures of our God and King.” That hymn, in fact, is based on his second most famous prayer, The Canticle of the Creatures, in which he praises the Lord by singing the praises of the sun—“Sir Brother Sun,” he calls it—his sister the water—his brother the fire. In short, he praises the Lord, by celebrating his kinship with the rest of the Lord's creation.

What if, in our eating, we took a page from St. Francis’s prayer-book? What if the next time we sat down at table and said grace, we actually thanked the Lord for our brother the cow, our sister the chicken, our cousin the rainbow trout, and indeed, thanked them, our creaturely kin, for giving their lives to feed ours? If we did, we might take one step closer to understanding the true meaning of Psalm 104:28-30, when it reminds us that the same ruach of God that throbs in our lungs throbs in theirs also, and like us, when God takes it from them, they too die and return to dust, just as surely as we will do.

Salome Danced, a song

Every once in a while a songwriter hears a song in his head and is able to bring it to life exactly as he heard it. Other times he has no idea what he was trying to say, even after the song is fully realized. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive, necessarily, and this song, "Salome Danced" was a bit of both. It's sort of a musical midrash on the story of Salome in the gospels. I'd had the piano riff floating around for a while, and thought it sounded vaguely Persian. When I started the lyrics, I wanted to write something that captured both the sensuality of the story but also the terrible pathos. What I got is certainly what I heard, but even so, I'm not entirely sure what it means. 




Salome’s eyes danced glittering like the stars at midnight
Salome’s eyes danced ebony behind the veil
Brimming like a chalice of gold full wine dark red
Salome danced (she danced) and St. John lost his head

Salome’s hands danced fragrant and dripping with myrrh
Salome’s hands danced fluttering behind the veil
Soaring like a bird of paradise with wings outspread
Salome danced (she danced) and St John lost his head

For a fleeting glimpse behind the seven veils
St John lost his head
For a lingering touch of those gilded nails
St John lost his head
Just to lift her to his lips like the holy grail
Yeah St John lost his head

Salome’s feet danced jangling with bells of silver
Salome’s feet danced luminous on barefoot souls
Gliding like a vapor of incense with a graceful tread
Salome danced (she danced) and St John lost his head

For a fleeting glimpse behind the seven veils
St John lost his head
For a lingering touch of those gilded nails
St John lost his head
Just to lift her to his lips like the holy grail
Yeah St John lost his head

And O I see her hiding in the shadows
Somewhere in the darkness a little girl cries
While mamma was waiting
And the party guests were watching
And Herod was laughing
Ah something inside her died

For a fleeting glimpse behind the seven veils
St John lost his head
For a lingering touch of those gilded nails
St John lost his head
Just to lift her to his lips like the holy grail
Yeah St John lost his head
Like the tragic ending of a sordid tale
Yeah St. John lost his head

Conspiracies Exposed (Part III): The Secret about Conspiracy Theories

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I know a man who is an avid consumer of conspiracy theories. He keeps abreast of them all, from the most rabid rants of Alex Jones to the most erudite speculations about the proliferation of G5 technology. He is especially consumed with conspiracy theories of the biblical variety, and emails me periodically wondering where we are on the “timeline of biblical prophecy,” if I think some recent event or other in global politics might actually be the work of the Anti-Christ, or if this or that political leader may in fact be the Beast of Revelation. Often his emails are accompanied by videos from websites with titles like “bannedvideo.com,” which connect the dots between the Bible and world events more freely than a toddler with a crayon in an activity book.

If it sounds like I’m making fun, I am really not. I’ve shared in previous posts how harmful I think conspiracy theorizing (as distinguished from “conspiracy hypothesizing”) can be, how complex the issues are, and how high the stakes. As a pastor, I care about this man a great deal and have often wished we could have real dialogue about some of these ideas. The challenge, of course, is that conspiracy theories tend to be all-or-nothing ways of thinking, making real dialogue about them fraught with tension. If the evil-doers really have infiltrated the highest levels of the government and the furthest reaches of the news media, then anyone who offers any evidence to the contrary is either their dupe, their flunkey, or their instrument. The framework has animosity built into it.

Early on in my relationship with this man, I was really struggling to figure out how to respond to all this pastorally, so I reached out to one of my theological mentors for advice. We talked it all over, and before I knew it, we were theologically theorizing about conspiracy theories themselves. At one point, my mentor said something that completely recast what a conspiracy theory is, for me, and why we find them so compelling.

“A conspiracy theory,” he said, “has the same spiritual allure as the occult, and may actually be the opposite side of that coin.”

I asked him to explain. The person with a conspiracy theory believes they have acquired “hidden knowledge” about spiritual realities that are invisible to the average person, he said, that they have seen through reality, so to speak, and have accessed a deeper, darker reality on the other side. This is the same kind of thing that “occult knowledge” offers, the ability to “see through” the everyday and access an invisible reality lurking on the other side. And for both, the allure is the same: we want to access “hidden knowledge” because we believe it will give us power. In the case of occult knowledge, the offer of power is clear. Dr. Faustus summoned Mephistopheles because the devil offered to give him what he wanted. In the case of a conspiracy theory the offer of power is less obvious, but just as alluring. It promises us that if we just “trust the theory” we’ll have power over our enemies (because they won’t be able to take us in), the power to escape their manipulations.

I’m still trying to decide if this theory about conspiracy theories has something to it or not. The unconvinced would point out that, even if they share “hidden knowledge” in common, conspiracy theories and occult practices have opposite impulses. The one wants to align with evil, while the other wants to resist it.

Fair enough; but if there’s any connection at all, it would explain why so many conspiracy theories seem to offer such detailed, elaborate, even intimate knowledge about “what the devil’s up to.” It would also explain, possibly, why so many of the conversations I’ve had with bona fide conspiracy theorists, have had such an undercurrent of fear, anger, xenophobia, and often even glimmers of hatred to them. If you can know a tree by its fruit, the fruit of a full-on conspiracy theory does not seem to be peace, hope, joy or love; at least not in my experience it doesn’t.

Maybe “occult” is going too far though. There was a heresy that the early church rejected, way back in the early days of the faith, called Gnosticism. The term comes from the Greek word for knowledge, because the Gnostics believed that what would save you, in the end, was knowledge, especially hidden knowledge about spiritual things, knowledge the initiate had and the uninitiated didn’t. Gnosticism probably had a finger or two in the “occult pie” itself, but it was not an occult system per se; at least, it didn’t have to be. The Gnostics weren’t looking for magical power necessarily, they were after hidden knowledge, because they believed that salvation lay in knowing "the secret."

In their case, the "secret" involved ascending through an elaborate system of spiritual planes inhabited by all sorts of spiritual beings, but the key is that the world as it was—the world you could see and touch and love with the creator’s love—was to be rejected in favor of a “higher,” “better,” “more-real” world that was invisible, and immaterial, and attained only through secret knowledge.

I wonder if the worst of modern day conspiracy theories are really a form of Gnosticism, an offer of salvation—literal salvation from the machinations of the mysterious Beast of Revelation—not by trusting solely in the saving work of Jesus Christ, but by trusting in our own ability to figure out what lies “behind the veil.” Even if they’re not exactly a gnostic in nature, I’m wary of conspiracy theories for the same reason the early church was wary of Gnosticism: because they don’t teach us how to love the creation with the Creator’s love. Instead they teach us to suspect it, to distrust it, to reject it, in favor of something “more real” we think we can see going on behind the scenes.

The unconvinced would push back here, probably.

What could be more loving than to help people see “the truth?”

Possibly so; as a preacher, I’ve certainly committed my life to that end. But in the case of a conspiracy theory, I would suggest that because it’s always after some “hidden cause” for evil that must be lurking somewhere where no one can see it, it can distract us from addressing the very real, very obvious evil that we face in the “real world” every day: the pain of the exploited, the suffering of the oppressed, the need of the poor, the turmoil of the lost. These are things the Gospel wants to address literally, and it’s possible to become so consumed trying to work out the Number of the Beast, that we miss the million opportunities we face every day to come alongside the victims of the Beast with the grace, the love, and the healing power of the God.

After all, as Christians we possess the greatest secret of all—the Mystery of Divine Love as revealed in the Gospel—and this is, as the Apostle Paul reminds us in Colossains 1:26, an open secret, one that God has made fully public in the death and resurrection of his Son. According to Revelation 12:11, only this public declaration of the love of God in Christ has the power to overcome the Beast, and however much he may conspire, it alone will triumph, in the end.

Of Games and God (Part III): The Quest for Transcendent Immersion

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One of my favorite video games as a kid was that 1980s cult classic, Dragon’s Lair. If you somehow missed the 80s, all you need to know is that Dragon’s Lair was a fantasy adventure game, where the player guided a valiant knight named Dirk the Daring on a quest to rescue the fair Princess Daphne from the clutches of an evil dragon named Singe. This was in the days when home consoles were still in their infancy, so Dragon’s Lair was one of those quarter-munching arcade attractions of a by-gone era. It played largely like an elaborate choose-your-own-adventure game, where every level presented you with a series of puzzles or booby-traps, and you had to decide if you would, for instance, turn left or drink the potion, draw your sword or dodge right. There was some careful timing and some sharp reflexes required, for sure, but most of it was trial and error.

What set Dragon’s Lair apart from its contemporaries, however, were the graphics. In the days when most other games were still mucking about with pixelated space invaders or monochrome pac-men, Dragon’s Lair had found a way to harness cutting-edge laserdisc technology to present action scenes on-par with those of an animated Disney feature, the likes of which had never been seen in a video-game format before. As a result, Dragon’s Lair allowed the player to immerse himself in the adventure more fully and more magically than any other game in the arcade. While you didn’t exactly become Dirk the Daring (the advent of the true action adventure RPG was still a few years away), still, Dragon’s Lair invited you into a compellingly-realized, intricately-textured world, where your actions progressed a living, breathing story, and your imagination—because it had to work less-hard to fill in the visual gaps—was free to soar.

Held up against the standard of today’s most popular video game adventures, of course, Dragon’s Lair looks somewhat naif. It’s almost a bit too-cute-for-words, next to the sprawling kingdom of Hyrule in Breath of the Wild, say, or the cinematic (and rather grown-up) cut-scenes of The Witcher 3. A purist would probably argue that it doesn’t even qualify as a true RPG. At the time, however, Dragon’s Lair sparkled as an alluring hint of what a video game could be: not just a fun digital pass-time, but an immersive journey into an alternate world.


“Immersion” is, in fact, the technical the term gamers use to describe all this. The degree to which a video game recreates an experience so vividly that you can allow yourself to believe it’s really happening to you, is its level of “immersion.” Gamers sometimes evaluate games based on how “immersive” it is, and often the more elaborate role playing games will allow independent programmers to develop modifications to the original code (called “Mods”) that increase a game’s “immersion” even more. The immersive nature of video-gaming, I think, is one of the aspects that sets it apart from other human activities. In reading, for instance, you are invited to immerse yourself in a story, but the world of the story—its sights, sounds, movements and sensations—must be supplied entirely by the imagination. Cinema is much more sensory, of course, but the worlds created through film are no-where near so interactive. Only video games bring the human imagination to life so fully, in a genuine, interactive, multi-sensory experience.

“Immersion” is an important concept, not just in gaming, but in thinking about gaming theologically, too. If it’s true that one of the appeals of gaming is the way it allows you to escape the world-as-it-is and immerse yourself in an alternate world, so completely and so compellingly that it imaginatively transfigures the real world as you do, then in this gaming intersects with one of the main themes (and appeals) of theology, too. Like video games, theology also acknowledges and affirms the human desire to experience a world unlike the world as it is, to be taken out, above, or beyond every-day human experience, and immerse ourselves in something transcendent. C. S. Lewis famously put it like this: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Interestingly, as a way of illustrating that truth, Lewis invented the magical world of Narnia, a place that imaginatively satisfied a child’s desire for transcendent immersion, by poetically offering them an alternate world to explore. In doing so, of course, he also provided us with one of the 20th Centuries great symbols for the Christian life: becoming a King or Queen of Narnia in the everyday world of modern England.

Great care is needed here. The transcendence that theology offers is not some computer-engineered projection of human desires, sustained by our own ingenuity, any more than it is an imaginary kingdom for children, dreamed up by a creative storyteller. The transcendence that theology offers is, in fact, the world-as-it-is, transfigured by the holy and heavenly presence of the very Spirit of God Himself; and remarkably, as we immerse ourselves in that presence, we find ourselves not taken out of the world but sent into it, to love it and embrace it and supernaturally redeem it with his grace and truth. The immersion that theology offers, you might say, immerses us more fully than we could ever imagine in the ordinary stuff of earth, by immersing us completely in the extra-ordinary stuff of heaven.

So in this theology and video-games are plying different trades. But as an analogy for how theology does its work—and, perhaps, as evidence that this work speaks more intimately to the human heart than we might otherwise have expected—we can look to the immersive worlds of today’s best video games. In them we discover that the human spirit is in fact longing for an experience of the transcendent, that we are wired for something that nothing in this world can satisfy. And by them we are reminded that to satisfy this longing is not just our deepest need, but also a source of sheer delight.

Eating, Praying, Loving (Part II): Saying Grace

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One of the most memorable moments in my early days of being a pastor was the time I was meeting with a young couple, relatively new to the country and completely new to the church, who had recently decided to follow Jesus. Their experience in our church was their first introduction to Christianity, and I was discipling them in their newfound Faith.

This was one of our first meetings, and part way into it, the wife asked me, "How do you say grace before a meal?" It occurred to me that this simple act of thanksgiving was entirely foreign to them, but that they had seen folks in our church doing it, and wanted to know more.

So I explained the basics. Before you eat, someone says a simple prayer, thanking God for the food he has provided and asking his blessing as you eat it. It could be as simple as speaking to a good friend who has invited you over to dinner, thanking the host for his hospitality, so to speak.

And in one of the tenderest moments I’ve ever experienced in my pastoral work, the wife turned to the husband. “Ok, then,” she said. “You’ve been doing it right.” I call it tender because in that moment I was suddenly teleported to their dining room in my mind’s eye, and watched as this husband fumbled his honest way through this most basic of Christian tasks. Something I have been doing since childhood and taken for granted all my life, was to him a profound privilege and a beautiful mystery, something he knew Christians ought to do but was not sure if he was worthy of the task.

I’m sharing this story as the second stop on our journey through this “biblical spirituality of food,” because that moment with that couple gave me a brand new appreciation—even a new thankfulness—for the act of giving thanks before a meal. If you’ve been saying it since childhood, that God is great and God is good and so we thank him for our food, it may begin to feel somewhat rote, but if you can see it with the fresh eyes of a new disciple, you will discover how fundamental this simple prayer really is for Christian spiritual formation.

Because food, of course, is life. Literally. If we couldn’t eat we would die, and if we don’t we will. It is really that simple. And by pausing briefly to thank the Creator before we dig in, we acknowledge that we don’t just depend on him for our food, but for the very life it sustains. In doing this we adopt that singular posture which is the proper, natural, and necessary posture of the Christian: one of utter thankfulness.

Scripture actually enjoins God’s people to be thankful more than it does almost any other command. “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good, his love endures forever,” says the Psalmist. “Give thanks in all circumstances for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus,” says the Apostle. And in another place, speaking about food specifically he says, “Everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” It’s not for nothing that the central act of Christian worship, the Lord’s sacred meal, is often called the Eucharist—Greek for “thanksgiving.” After all, the only thing we could ever really “give” to the Almighty Creator of everything is simply our “thanks,” and then open our hands to receive as an unmerited gift everything that comes from him.

What better way to practice this most fundamental attitude of Christianity, than to do it literally, three times a day, whenever we sit down to devour the concrete physical gifts he has provided to keep our concrete physical bodies alive? After all, like all the rest of his creatures, we too look to him to give us our food in due season (Ps 104:27).

This is where any spirituality of food must start, I think: with a deeper appreciation for and greater sincerity in the act of saying thanks. This has always been so, but it is more important than ever, in our modern age where human ingenuity has increased our ability to produce food beyond the wildest dreams of generations past, and it’s easy, maybe, to pretend that we’re our own providers, that we could feed ourselves without God’s help, thank you very much. Because of this, it’s perhaps all the more urgent for us to pause continually and renew our thankfulness, not just for the food we receive, but for the very privilege of getting to say thanks for it.

Another term for the prayer before the meal, of course, is “saying grace.” This is because when we thank the Creator for our food, we are saying the truest truth of all: that it’s all grace. The food that keeps us alive, yes, but also the table it’s set on, the good friends we have to share it with, the love of God, the mercy of salvation. It really is all grace. And the discipline of saying it’s so, three times a day before we eat, teaches us not just to be thankful for the food, but for every good and perfect gift that comes down from above—from the saving grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, to the simplest gifts of air to breathe and food to eat.

The Years the Locusts Have Stolen, a song

For better or worse, I was raised on the glam metal of the 80s. My first ever album was Def Leopard's Hysteria, and I played it till the tape was worn through. Listening back to some of that old music, I'm a bit chagrined that my taste was so clearly that of a 14-year-old boy, but then again, I was just a 14-year-old boy. 

One of my favorite bands of all time, actually, was a somewhat obscure metal band called White Lion. You may know them from one or the other of their two big radio hits, "Wait," and/or "When the Children Cry," but they have a whole treasure trove of musical gems in the vault, just waiting to be discovered. This is owing, primarily, to the fret-board wizardry of their lead guitarist, Vitto Bratta. Bratta was probably the best guitarist to come out of the glam metal era, and had White Lion's star burned a bit brighter for a bit longer, he may have earned a spot in that league of guitar legends that includes the likes of Hendrix, Clapton and Van Halen. As it was, I always felt that he was both more melodically tasteful and more technically accomplished than Eddie Van Halen, the guitarist who was, undoubtedly, his biggest inspiration.

Anyways, I'll never forget the day I first heard the opening riff of the opening song of Pride, their break-through second album. I am a bit of a synesthete, so all I can say is that before the song was done, I was awash in rich waves of majestic purple, darker than the sea is deep, and spangled with bright bursts of Roman candle silver. After that came "Don't Give Up," "Lady of the Valley," "Wait," and each song was like nothing I'd ever heard before but had been listening for all my life. Bear in mind, I was only a 14-year-old boy.

All this is by way of introduction to this week's cut from my "Three Hands Clapping" album. The day I started writing it, I'd recently listened to White Lion's Pride for old time's sake, and had it in mind that I wanted to write a song in homage to this band that had played such a prominent part in my musical formation. I'd also had it in mind for a while that I wanted to write a song based on Joel 2:25, but I didn't know where to begin. I did my best to put these two ideas together, and this is what came out. I ain't no Vitta Bratta, of course (not by a long shot), but the opening riff and the solo is the nearest I can come to approximating his awesomeness.

I hope you enjoy!



Hear a rattle of wings
Like a whisper of death
In a wilderness bleached by the sun
And the stubble is dry
And there’s nothing else left
When the black cloud is lifted and gone

When the bones are picked clean
And the heart has been turned into dust
You can’t unsee what you’ve seen
And there’s nobody left you can trust

I’ll pay you back for the years the locusts have stolen
I’ll pay you back for the tears that fell in the dark
When the sun has turned black
And the stars from the sky are fallen
I’ll pay you back, I’ll pay you back

And you’re not who you were
And you’re not who you are
And you’re not who you’re gonna be
And you can’t get it back
And you can’t let it go
And you can’t find a way to get free

Like a stone in your heart
It’ll weigh you down, regret
And it’ll tear you apart
All the things you can’t forget

I’ll pay you back for the years the locusts have stolen
I’ll pay you back for the tears that fell in the dark
When the sun has turned black
And the stars from the sky are fallen
I’ll pay you back, I’ll pay you back

Conspiracies Exposed (Part II): But then again, Conspirators Do Conspire

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Many years ago I knew a man who had lived all his life in South Africa before immigrating to Canada. He was a highly successful, well-educated professional, a committed Christian and a respected member of our community. He was also adamantly convinced that the Catholic Church was the anti-Christ, the public face of the Freemasons, and part of a sinister plot to dominate the world.

I disagreed with his theory, and he and I had many long, intense conversations about why. He had, after all, oodles of reasons to make his claim. He shared with me a whole library’s worth of video tapes, lectures, and talks that laid it all out.

Why, for instance, was there the image of a winged lion depicted on the floor of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, when the winged lion was notoriously the symbol of Babylon?

I tried in vain to explain that the winged lion also happened to be the traditional symbol for St. Mark the Evangelist, based on John’s glimpse of the four living creatures in Heaven (Revelation 4:7) and Ezekiel’s glimpse of the creatures with the head of a lion and the wings of an eagle, surrounding the throne of God (Ezekiel 1:10). I then tried to explain that St. Mark’s Gospel is traditionally associated with Peter, since Irenaeus (ca.180 AD) calls him the “disciple and interpreter of Peter.” It therefore makes sense that in St. Peter’s church in Rome there would be the image of Mark’s winged lion.

Doesn’t it?

My friend was decidedly unconvinced. We batted “evidences” back and forth more furiously than two ping-pong masters in a championship match. At one point I asked him, somewhat exasperatedly, why was he so convinced that his theory had to be true. Where, I asked, did all this suspicion come from?

I’ve never forgotten his answer. It’s because, he explained, he had lived in South Africa during apartheid. And when that oppressive system came to its final, inglorious end, many ordinary South African citizens were shocked, appalled, and flabbergasted to discover all the secret, even diabolical government conspiracies that had been festering for years under the surface of their presumably civilized society. People were disappeared in the dead of night; extrajudicial killings were carried out by government sanctioned death-squads; propaganda was printed in papers; lies were taught as fact in schools.

"I’m suspicious," he said, "because I’ve lived through a conspiracy before. I know that they are possible."

This brings me to the point of this second post in our series on conspiracy theories. Simply put: people sometimes conspire. This is both the draw, and also the great danger of a conspiracy theory.

I’m making this point in particular because of some of the feedback I received from my last post. I was surprised, and even a bit perplexed, by how many readers pushed back on my basic premise, that conspiracy theories are a “hole you don’t want to fall down” (to borrow a phrase from another blogger). I heard comments like (or to the effect of): “Even so, I don’t think you should just blindly accept the mainstream narrative.” Or: “Just because an idea isn’t accepted by the general public doesn’t mean it’s crazy.” Or: “I expect there were a lot of ‘conspiracy theorists’ rounded up under the regime of Hitler because thy spoke up about their ‘theories’ that the Nazis were ‘conspiring’ to take over the world.”

Without unpacking each of these comments, I would suggest that all of them touch in one way or another on the same thing that my South African friend was getting at.

History shows that people do, sometimes, conspire. Sometimes disastrously. Sometimes diabolically.

But if I may, let me suggest that even so, a conspiracy theory is not a helpful way to process, or respond to this truth.

And let me suggest this by clarifying some terminology. I have noticed in the discourse surrounding the recent Covid-19 conspiracy theories, a certain imprecision, even sloppiness in the language that is especially unhelpful when it comes to something as psychologically complex and epistemologically subtle as a bona fide conspiracy theory. People seem to be using the term to refer, on the one hand, to any suspicion that “we’re not getting the whole story here,” any hunch that people in power may have ulterior motives we’re not hearing about. On the other hand, of course, it’s still being used to refer to (and often to ridicule) the most egregious instances of neurotic paranoia, the tin-foil hats and chem-trail fears of the Info-Wars variety.

I call this imprecision unhelpful because it has two equal and opposite effects. First, it allows us to silence dissenters with scorn—next thing you know they’ll have us wearing tin-foil hats, right? But second, it closes us off to the possibility we might be wrong-- after all, no one wants to discover they've all this time been the dupe of a conspirator, right? Both these effects together leave us less likely to ask probing questions, less likely to hear ideas we don’t already agree with, and more likely to be manipulated.

Given that, it may be helpful to distinguish a “conspiracy theory” from a “conspiracy hypothesis,” and to use these terms more precisely in our discussions. The word “theory” itself comes from the Greek word theoria, “to look” or “to see.” As far as I can tell, this is because a “theory” is an abstract, generalized way of thinking about a set of phenomena that allows you to “see it all,” in a sense, as a whole. The value of a theory is its explanatory power. It accounts for “all the data” and it allows you to make comprehensive predictions about the world. The challenge of a theory is its “completeness.” The theory has already, in a sense, settled the question, and so any data that doesn’t fit the theory is either ignored, over-looked, or pounded into the round hole of the theory until it’s no longer square.

A hypothesis, by contrast, is less generalized, less abstract, more of a “working model” for explaining particular phenomena. Consequently, hypotheses are much more responsive to the data as it is. A hypothesis doesn’t have to “see it all as a whole” the way a theory does, and so any data that disproves it doesn’t create cognitive dissonance, rather, it simply suggests adjustments to the hypothesis are necessary.

Any real scientists in the room may argue that I’m butchering the use of these terms as they are used in the laboratory. Fair enough. But in epistemological terms, I think this is an important distinction. A “theory” must explain all the data, whereas individual data suggest “hypotheses.”

This distinction sheds profound light, I think, when we bring it to the issue of conspiracy theories. What makes a “conspiracy theory” more than just a simple “suspicion that something’s afoot,” is not that it expresses skepticism about generally held beliefs. It’s that it requires the adherent to fit all the evidence—even the evidence that disproves the theory—into its framework, however ruthlessly you have to distort reality in order to get it all in. A conspiracy theory, you might say, is not so much about “what you believe” as “how you believe it,” a certain way of holding one’s beliefs, more than it is any specific set of beliefs, per se.

If I’m on to something in this definition, I would argue that many of the ideas that get dismissed in public discourse as “conspiracy theories” would probably turn out to be a “conspiracy hypotheses,” if we could sit down and discuss them at length; and if they weren’t they would certainly be more healthy and helpful if they were expressed as one.

How would you know the difference? I think a simple litmus test would be: A) how open are you to humbly engage with perspectives that disagree with your own? B) how willing are you to hear facts that disprove your hypothesis and modify it accordingly? and C) (this one is the hardest) how much does your skepticism emerge from the darkest flotsam of the human heart—pride, ideological obstinance, rebellion against authority, xenophobia, paranoia?

If I answered “very closed,” “unwilling,” and “mostly” to those three questions, chances are that I’ve bought into a conspiracy theory, the way I’ve been defining it here.

And chances are, too, that instead of becoming less likely to be duped, I’ve actually made myself more likely to be.

I say that because of the premise I started this post with: that history proves that people do conspire.

It’s true; but fascinatingly, history also proves that one of the methods the conspirators have used to get away with their conspiracies, is to convince the public to buy in to a “conspiracy theory” of one sort or another. Speaking precisely, Hitler did not round up and kill “conspiracy theorists” during Nazi Germany. He rounded up and killed political dissenters (among many others). But one of the reasons he was able to do this with impunity was because he had convinced the German public to believe a conspiracy theory, in the fullest sense of the term: that a secret cabal of Jews was conspiring to take over the world, and the only thing that stood between them and Jewish domination were the horrific “solutions” of the Nazi regime. If we did some digging, we could probably think of more examples, both historical and contemporary, of times when the real conspirators used the epistemological shell game of a conspiracy theory to distract the public from what was really going on.

After all, the lesson of history is not just that people conspire. It’s also that people are often far too willing to let a political ideology, a xenophobia, a paranoia, a fear of honest dialogue, or some combination of all these things, do the thinking for us, sometimes with disastrous results. The solution, of course, is not blind naivete, any more than it is blind skepticism. The solution is actually opening our eyes. It's to look at the world with a earnest desire to know the truth, however wrong the truth might prove us to be on this or that assumption, and in so seeking it, to let the truth set us free.


The Kairos of Gaming: Of Games and God, Part II

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Last night I opened the “Minecraft game saves” folder on my laptop, dropped my latest Minecraft world onto a flashdrive, and then proceeded to clean out the whole folder, every save, every backup, every screenshot. All of it went to that great digital recycling bin in the sky.

Then I gave said flash drive to my wife and told her to hide it somewhere in the house, with strict instructions that, however much I might beg her to do otherwise, she should not return it until Christmas.

I feel—and probably sound—somewhat pathetic making this confession, but it’s true. I have been wanting to focus more of my energy on writing, have felt called to do this in fact, and the plain truth of the matter is this: that left to my own devices, I would pour far more time than I have to spare into the enjoyable, but otherwise unproductive business of mining and crafting, leaving far too little left over to do what I really want to do, which is to write.

I am not sharing all this simply for absolution, however. It’s more to point out our first landmark in the “theology of gaming” we started journeying towards in my last post. It is, I think, both the best starting place for discussing video games from a theological perspective, and, interestingly, the strongest theological objection to gaming as a human activity, at the same time.

I’m thinking here of the way video games consume time.

Let me start with the theological objection. I mentioned in a previous post that the two main games I’ve spent my time playing over the last decade have been Minecraft and Skyrim. Skyrim, if you haven’t heard, is a Tolkeinesque fantasy role-playing game, set in a vast and intricately detailed open kingdom known as Skyrim, a province of the imaginary world of Tamriel. It’s basically a living, breathing Dungeons and Dragons fantasy, complete with elves, orcs, giants, and demons. Your main job in Skyrim is to advance through the story-line, completing quests and conquering foes, until you acquire both the skills and the spells necessary to defeat an apocalyptic, world-eating dragon named Alduin, and so become the fabled Dragonborn.



Skyrim is available through a video game distribution service called Steam. This is handy, because whenever you log onto Steam, it tracks the number of hours you’ve spent playing any given game in your account. Consequently, I can tell you with great precision that, since embarking on my very first quest in Skyrim, I have logged no less than 539 hours playing the game.

539 is a lot of hours. If I had played them all in a row I’d have been playing for 22 straight days. If it was a full-time career, I would have already been 3 months on the job. And that’s only counting the hours I played over Steam (you can also play off-line), and it’s only counting the hours I spent playing Skyrim—who knows what my stats would look like if I included all my Minecrafting into the equation.

There is a place in the Psalms where the psalmist cries out to the Lord, “Teach us O Lord to number our days.” The idea, of course, is that the number of our days is, in fact, remarkably small. Three score and ten years—or, 613,200 hours—is all the Psalmist gives us. Subtract 8 hours a day for sleep, and that leaves us with only 408,800 left over. If I kept going at my Skyrim rate, I would burn up almost 10,000 of those playing video games.

This would probably be tragic, because after 539 hours of play, all I have to show for my efforts in the world of Skyrim is a series of pointless achievements in a video game, a fully levelled-up wood elf warrior, and an imaginary chest full of digital treasures that I can literally do nothing with.

Enthusiasts would want to pump the breaks here, and argue that there are all kinds of benefits that come from gaming-- social, emotional, intellectual, and so on-- but even so, from a strict "productivity" point of view, time spent playing video games is, in fact, time mostly wasted.

But that, as I say, is not only the greatest objection to video games, it is also the greatest starting place for thinking about them theologically. Video games, after all, remind us that time need not always be spent productively in order for it to be spent well. There are some activities, actually, that are inherently valuable and intrinsically worth doing.

In order to appreciate this, we need to consider the function of play in human experience. A video game is, first and foremost, just that: a thing to be played; and any theology of gaming, if it is going to explain the phenomenon accurately, will have to first develop a working theology of play. In his study of human play, Dutch theorist Johan Huizinga suggested that there were three specific factors that made an activity playful, anthropologically speaking. First, the activity must be voluntary; second, it must follow a scripted logic; and third, it must stand apart in time and space from all other activities. Video games, of course, meet all three of these requirements, but its this third that I wish to focus on here.

Something happens to time and space when a video game launches—a kind of suspended animation—and the player enters into a time and space entirely set apart. This is why, at the height of my Skyrim days, I could start a quest at 9:00 in the evening, and before I knew it the whole household was sleeping, it was 2:00 in the morning, and as far as I could tell, less than ten minutes had passed. There are other forms of play that have this same effect on me—reading fiction can sometimes do it—but few activities, I think, open us up to a “time set apart” the way video gaming does.

In God in the Machine, Liel Leibovitz argues that this is one of the great sociological gifts that video games give us, the ability, as he calls it, to waste time. “Speaking of video games,” he says, “parents, educators, and other responsible adults frequently and often sneeringly label them a waste of time. They are right, but for all the wrong reasons. Video games do waste time, but not mindlessly, never wantonly. They waste time in a way necessary to curb the otherwise rampant industriousness of developed capitalist societies, necessary to solve the central problem of the medium, namely how not to force humans, thoroughly analog creatures that we are, into digital mind-sets, bound by code and devoid of free will.”

In other words, video games allow us to escape the modern utilitarian view of "spending time"—the “time is money” philosophy of the modern world—that operates continually on the assumption that an activity is only worth doing if there is “something to show for it” at the end. To the extent that “to sanctify” something means “to set it aside for a special purpose,” video games give us a sense of what it means to experience “sanctified time.” Kairos is the word theologians sometimes use to describe “sanctified time,” and often kairos is held in tension with chronos, or chronological time. Kairos is time set-apart, time that has no utilitarian purpose, time that unfolds in some way parallel to chronological time, and is valuable not because of what you can do with it, but because of what it does to you.

In pointing all this out, it needs to be squarely faced that there is, surprisingly very little discussion of play whatsoever in the Scriptures. Unlike the ancient Greeks, the ancient Israelites did not seem to have any sporting events; nor are there any depictions of any Bible characters playing at anything. It is true that Jesus pointed out children as exemplars for life in the Kingdom, but that was clearly because of their humility, not their playfulness.

However important it may be for human development and well-being, the Bible largely ignores play.

But that may be because the Bible has in full what all our playfulness can only hint at: the truest doorway onto kairos time, and the only thing really worth wasting our chronos on: the act of Biblical worship.

I use the word “waste” very carefully here. After all, there is nothing at all “wasteful” about worshiping God. It is the one thing we were made for, the trajectory of the Christian life, and that thing we will be doing when time is finally, fully “set apart” and we are with him for eternity.

There is nothing wasteful about worship.

But, in the strictest sense—the capitalistic, utilitarian, means-to-an-end sense—there is nothing “practical” about it, either. The very first sacrifice described in the Book of Leviticus is the whole burnt offering, which the worshiper offers voluntarily, as an expression of thanks and devotion to the Lord. It doesn’t start with the atoning sacrifices, which are “used” to deal with the problem of our sin. It doesn’t start with the sacrifices “used” to expiate our uncleanness. It starts with the one that you give for no other reason than that you want to worship God, and all you get out of it is the joy of having worshiped. With some sacrifices, of course, you got to keep the meat, or at least a portion of it, and eat it with your friends and family. Not so the whole-burnt offering. The goat, or lamb, or bull, or pigeon, went on the altar, and went entirely up in smoke, so that no portion of it could be “used” for any other purpose.

We see this at work, too, in the Biblical command to practice Sabbath. Sabbath time is the most fully set-apart time of all, and it is—again speaking from a strictly capitalistic perspective—useless time. Sure, you could argue that resting one day in seven makes you more productive for the other six, but that is never the justification the Scriptures give for keeping Sabbath. We are to do it simply to mark how God set us free from slavery (Deuteronomy 5:12), and how God himself created the world (Exodus 20:11). Sabbath-time, in other words, assures us that however productive we may think we are, still all the work in the world won’t sustain the world. That’s God’s job; and because he has pledged himself to do this job, he does not exact from us a factory-efficient accounting of what we produced with every second.

Video games, of course, are not worship. A legalist might go so far as to argue that video games can leads us into false worship; and they may have a point. All I am trying to argue here is that gaming is an expression of a deeply seeded desire in us to escape into kairos time, where chronos is suspended for just a moment, and time itself can be well-wasted. However imperfectly video gaming expresses this desire, I think the Bible would say that the desire itself tells us something about human nature before God.

We were made to worship. And when we are worshiping we are entering into that experience which all the video games in the world hint at, perhaps, but none of them ever fully achieve: a time and space fully set apart, where we are doing the one thing that has no capitalistic utility but makes us most fully human: coming to know God, so that we might enjoy him forever.

Eating, Praying, Loving: A Biblical Spirituality of Food (Part 1)

Last summer I went through a season where I was constantly struggling with this low-grade fatigue that I couldn’t seem to shake. It might have been my ramped-up hours at work, or subtle changes in my bedtime routines; it might have been the fact that I had just celebrated my 46th birthday, or possibly a combination of all three, but after a month or two of seeing me drag myself around, my wife had had enough and sent me off to see her naturopath.

I didn’t know what to expect, but I was willing to try pretty much anything if it would get me back to feeling normal. To my surprise, Dr. Laura spend a great deal of time talking to me simply about my diet. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t an in-depth exploration of what kinds of food I was using to fuel my body. She even asked me to spend the next two weeks tracking it, writing down in a food diary every morsel that entered my mouth.

I have always assumed that I was a relatively healthy eater. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. I do the majority of my shopping on the outside aisles of the grocery store. I eat vegetarian a lot of the time. I mean, I wasn’t no health-food guru or nothing, but I did okay.

And then, two weeks later, I handed in my homework to Dr. Laura and received the painful truth. Turns out I have a tendency to skip meals (mostly breakfast and lunch), power through with coffee, and compensate with all kinds of empty carbs late in the day; then I over do it at dinnertime and go to bed feeling gross.

And I wondered why I was always out of vim and vinegar. You could get away with a diet like that when you were 25 and your metabolism could handle it, but at 46? Man: grow up, right?

But this post is not meant to be the true-confessions of a reformed carb-binger. And it’s not even a promo for the value of naturopathy (although, the modified Keto diet Dr. Laura recommended to me did wonders for my energy levels and general sense of well-being). But this post is not about that.

It’s about the spirituality of food.

Because the three or four months I spent paying close attention to everything I ate opened my eyes in a way they had never been opened before to the fact that our diets actually have a profound impact on our spiritual well-being.

We are, after all, holistic creatures. Our spirits and our bodies are intricately connected and interrelated. This is why Jesus enjoined us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, souls, minds, and strength. Because your physical eating, sleeping, breathing, sweating life is lived before the Lord as much as your praying, thinking, yearning, introspective life is.

To put it very simply: you don’t “have” a body; you “are” a body. And the Scriptures consistently assume this, and affirm this, and appreciate this fact. The same God of peace who will sanctify our “spirits” and our “souls," also intends to sanctify our “bodies”  in 1 Thessalonians 5:23.  These are each part and parcel with the other.

Even on a very concrete level, it should be obvious that what I eat affects me spiritually. If I feel like garbage physically, because I’ve been treating my digestive tract like a garburator for the worst kind of junk food, it’s not that likely that I’ll have much motivation for extended prayer, Bible study, or works of mercy. If I have no physical energy because I’ve been skipping meals and carb-ing up late in the day, it’s not too likely I’ll have much spiritual energy either.

The more I meditated on this, during my weeks of diet-journaling for Dr. Laura, the more I noticed how often and how profoundly the Scriptures actually address food as a significant concern in the spiritual life: from Torah’s dietary laws to Jesus’ teaching about fasting, the Bible makes no bones about it that there is some mysterious connection between our diets and our spirits.

Just exactly what that connection is remains to be seen.  Over the next little while I hope to spend some time exploring this topic here at terra incognita, in a series on the spirituality of food that I’m calling, “Eating, Praying, Loving.” So if this post piqued your appetite for more (pun intended), let me invite you to check back in over the coming days.

If you’re still scratching your head skeptically, wondering if I’m not biting off more than I can chew on this one (pun still intended), let me just suggest this, as a starting place for building a “biblical spirituality of food.”

Simply put: it is no accident that the central act of Christian worship (the most famousest Hillsong ditty not withstanding) is, and has always been a shared meal. The Eucharist, Holy Communion, our glorious supper with Jesus, is not merely a metaphorical act. Even if you’re not sacramental in your theology on this point, all but the most ardent of Zwinglians would agree, I hope, that our symbolic meal with the Lord is no mere symbol. (As if it could just as easily have been a bungee jump for the Lord, or something, and it still would have accomplished the same purpose.)

As the primary sign of his presence among us and our spiritual fellowship with each other, as his way of strengthening us and encouraging us in the spiritual life, as an opportunity to encounter him and the mysterious means of our communion with him, he gave—wonder of wonders—food for us to eat together.

Of course Jesus is not only our host at the table, he is also the feast itself (this bread is his body), but in making that spiritual leap to the sacramental meaning of the meal, the bread and cup do not cease to be—all but  the most ardent of transubstantiationalists would agree, I hope—it does not cease to be food for us. Literal, real, life-sustaining bread and wine.

Because the Word of God knew all along what I am just beginning really to appreciate, that there is in fact something mysteriously spiritual about the act of eating, and so, when it reached for a symbol that could mysteriously express our union with Him, it reached, of all places, into the cupboard, and pulled out a loaf of fresh-baked bread.

Conspiracies Exposed: A Pastoral Reflection (Part 1)

In sound production, a feedback loop is what happens when a microphone is placed too close to a speaker, causing the microphone to pick up the signal from the speaker and send it through the amplifier, so that it comes back out the speaker again, where the microphone picks it up again (a little bit louder this time) and sends it back through the amp, where the mic picks it up and sends it through yet again, until before you know it the paint is peeling off the walls.

Anyone who’s ever been reduced to a quivering mass of deafened jelly by the piercing squeal of a low-fi PA system in a school auditorium before, will know exactly what I’m talking about. Because when feedback happens, usually it’s the worst frequencies in the signal—the sharpest, the most hair-raising, the most soul-piercing—get amplified the most, and so what comes out of the speaker is enough to make the banshee cower in fear.

In this regard, a conspiracy theory is very much like the feedback squealing out of that low-fi school auditorium PA system.

 Let me explain.

The other day one of my favorite blogs, Reasons Why posted a piece on “Reasons Why a Conspiracy Theory is a Hole You Don’t Want to Fall Down.” It covers everything from the Paul is Dead Conspiracy Theory to the darkest holocaust denials of Jim Keegstra, and is certainly worth a read.

Towards the end of the post, the author mentions the fact that “almost 30% of Americans believe the coronavirus was manufactured artificially and intentionally,” and describes a newspaper full of “anti-Chinese and Sinophobic articles regarding COVID-19” that was delivered anonymously to their door.

It all made me wonder: is there is something about a crisis like the coronavirus pandemic that makes us especially at risk of “falling down the hole” of an good old-fashioned conspiracy theory? Conspiracy Theories, after all, give us simple black-and-white explanations for complex issues, where there is a clear (if unseen) villain to pin the problem on and a clearer hero (ourselves) to resist it. They feed the hunger of our xenophobia and scratch scapegoating itch that crises tend to aggravate in us. They allow us to project our anxieties and sublimate our fears in ways that give them faces and names.

But in all these ways, as I’ve said, a Conspiracy Theory is like that awful squeal coming out of the high school PA system. They are, if you will, an epistemological feedback loop.

When I was studying the ethics of education as part of my teacher training in Alberta, in the 90s, we looked at the story of Jim Keegstra as a case-study in what not to do. If you haven’t heard, Keegstra was a High School teacher in Eckville Alberta, who was charged and convicted of hate speech in 1984, for teaching his students, among other things, that the holocaust was really an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the Jewish people as part of a clandestine plan to take over the world. I read a fair bit of Keegstra’s story for that class, and was stunned not only that a teacher could get away with teaching these things, but that anyone could believe such rubbish in the first place.

And then my ethics prof explained something about conspiracy theories that I’ve never forgotten. A conspiracy theory, he said, is psychologically self-reinforcing. First of all, they require a great deal of social “risk” to buy into one, because they set you apart from the vast majority of the public who don’t believe. They may even open you to ridicule, rejection, or, in Keegstra’s case, legal action. As a result, the person who has bought in has a profoundly strong (if sub-conscious) motivation to guard their investment. Too much is at stake to be proven wrong.

And this is where the epistemological feedback loop begins. Since the psychological stakes are so high, once you’ve signed on to a conspiracy theory, you become more interested in “being right,” than you are in “discovering the truth.” And once you’ve made that subtle shift in your thinking, then any evidence that someone might produce to disprove your theory, becomes for you all the more evidence that you were right. The microphone picks up the signal and just sends it through the amplifier of your conspiracy theory, making it louder (and grosser) than it was before.

For the conspiracy theorist, photographs documenting the very real holocaust become evidence simply of how advanced the “Jewish plot” for world domination really is. “See! They have even infiltrated the history books and news media, slipping in their faked photos …”

For the conspiracy theorist, the lack of evidence proving the existence of a clandestine Illuminati pulling the strings of global politics becomes evidence, simply, of how powerful the Illuminati really are, that they could effectively erase all trace of their activities. “Of course there’s no sign of them! That’s how secret they really are.”

And on and on it goes, until the paint is peeling off the walls.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to participate in a live-streamed theological conversation with Kim Alexander, professor of church history at Regent University in Virginia. We were talking about the theological meaning the church could draw from the Covid-19 pandemic, and the lessons that church history could teach us about it. I was hoping to dig into the ways eschatology, Christology, and pneumatology must illuminate our theodicy at a time like this. You know: the biggies.

But then a question popped up in the chat bar, that asked, in effect:“What should the church do about all the COVID-19 conspiracy theories floating around?”

It was a bit deflating, to be honest, but I have to admit that four weeks later, that's the question I'm still chewing on.  I'm planning to post more about conspiracy theories in the days to come, both in general, and as it relates to the pandemic specifically, so I hope you’ll check back in as I continue to chew it over. But for today let me simply say this: let’s remember that usually when a feedback loop happens, the worst frequencies in the signal are the ones that get amplified; and whatever we choose to believe about the coronavirus, let’s not allow the epistemological feedback loop of a conspiracy theory amplify the worst frequencies in us.

Of Games and God: A Theological Analysis of Video Games (Part I)


A couple of years ago I was sitting in a coffee shop with a friend of mine who is an avid video gamer, discussing his favorite pastime, and some how or other our conversation took a decidedly theological turn.

I think I asked him what he thought the spiritual significance of gaming was, and from there I wondered out loud what themes he would draw on, if he were to develop a “theology of video gaming.”

My friend was quite a bit younger than I, and had spent far fewer hours reading theology than he had playing video games, so he was a bit at a loss where to begin. I suggested a few starter ideas—the spirituality of play, the theological meaning of technology, the role of community, and so on—and a good hour later we had unearthed enough raw material to write, if not a full-on theological treatise, at the very least a respectable prolegomenon to one.

I’ve thought over that conversation in the coffee shop a number of times since, and have had it in the back of my mind for a while now to write something about the theological meaning of video games. I even started some initial research on the topic, reading Liel Leibovitz’s God in the Machine, and  Craig Detweiler's Halos and Avatars, an anthology of theological essays on the topic. This gave me even more fodder for the theological canon, but somehow I never found the time to sit down and assemble my thoughts into anything cohesive.

And then the world went into Covid-19 lockdown mode in the spring of 2020, all my usual routines were chaotically disrupted, and I suddenly found myself with not only a renewed interest in gaming, but also oodles of time to write about it. Of course, it may be that a series on the theological meaning of video games was waiting for just such a time as this to be written. According to this article by the BBC, gaming numbers have soared since the pandemic started, and across the board the gaming industry is seeing record sales as more and more people are turning to video games to pass the time.

The reasons for this might be obvious—as the world is collectively stuck at home and looking for fresh ways to while away the hours—but the meaning of it, and especially the theological meaning of it, is less so. What, if anything, does our skyrocketing desire to romp in these digital amusement parks tell us about God, and about ourselves in relation to God?

It would be a question worth asking even if the pandemic hadn’t stuck us all inside and glued us to our computer screens. According to this 2018 survey, conducted by the Entertainment Software Association, some 65% of American adults play video games, 75% of American households have at least one gamer in residence, and 79% of these believe that gaming “has a positive impact on their lives.” Nor is gaming mere child’s-play anymore. The average age of an American gamer is 33, and he or she (it’s almost an even gender split) is spending somewhere around 7-8 hours a week playing video games.

Given these stats, perhaps no phenomenon is more ripe for some theological reflection these days than that of the no-longer-nerdy, deceptively facile, and undeniably ubiquitous video game. What is happening to us, from a theological perspective, during all those hours we spend in these magical worlds of our own creation?

It’s a question I propose to explore over the next couple of weeks here at terra incognita, in a blog series I'm calling "Of Games and God." I hope you will join me for the journey.

Of course, if you do, it would only be fair of me to put all my cards on the table. I would describe myself as a consistent-but-not-so-avid gamer. The only games I’ve really played in the last 10 years are Skyrim and Minecraft; but then, I’ve really played them in the last 10 years. I’ve logged more hours than I care to admit questing to become the Dragonborn in the one, and I’ve built entire pixelated kingdoms in the other (Exhibit A: the video walk-through of my latest Minecraft creation, below). So: as I weave together the various threads that together make up my “theology of video gaming,” know that I am speaking as one who—though he is hardly a master of the arcane digital arts—is no untrained initiate, either.

But more on that in blog-posts to come. For today, whether you consider yourself a master or an initiate, let me pose to you the same question that got my friend and I started that day in the coffee shop: what themes would you draw on, if you were to develop a theology of video gaming?