Category Archives: Review

Flight over Convenience Store

debs/ November 26, 2018

One of my favourite times of the year is when UofT colleges have their annual book sale.
First-Order Confession: One of my least-guilty guilty pleasures is buying old books (–I wish I’d use the library more!). Second-Order Confession: One of my more-guilty guilty pleasures is bookshelf-virtue-signalling.

To prevent the regression of my better guilty pleasures to its lesser form, I tell myself upon purchasing such books that I must read them all.  I am maybe 20% successful; and even less if you include the books from last year’s book sale that I haven’t started.

This blog post will be a reflection on the dominant themes in four books of such books.

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Book Report: The Art of Loving

debs/ April 2, 2018

There is a core idea I try to live by that I couldn’t quite put into words… until this one summer afternoon some two years ago when I discovered Erich Fromm in a second-hand bookstore in Canmore.  It so happens that Erich Fromm had already put into words my impressions and intuitions in his succinct little book, the Art of Loving … before even my mother was conceived.

An organized mind is a way to my heart. In this respect, The Art of Loving had me at “Table of Contents” …

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Making shadow work work for me

debs/ December 5, 2017

“Shadow work is all the unpaid for labour done in a wage-based economy.”
Shadow work includes: commuting to work, doing the laundry, figuring out how to use self-checkout at the grocery store…

All this unaccounted for labour adds mental strain, called decision fatigue, to our already very exhaustive mental energy. Life hacks that limit shadow work are often circulated. For example, certain “successful people” wear the same thing every day to reduce the shadow work required to decide what to wear every morning.

While life hacks help you minimize shadow work, what if you can make shadow work work for you? What if there is a way to profit from it?

All this is basically a segue for me to show you some interesting money-earning and money-saving apps.

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Book Report: Surprised by Hope

debs/ November 20, 2017

I read N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope for Sunday School earlier this year and compiled some thoughts on it.

The “Human Colossus” seems to goes through cycles of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. I and more aware, now, that even within the larger arcs of these cycles (large enough to have fancy names like “modernism”, “postmodernism”, etc.), there are phases of micro-construction, micro-deconstruction, and micro-reconstruction.  I view Surprised by Hope as N.T. Wright’s attempt to reexamine and deconstruct some conceptual fallacies that the Christian community has become comfortable, and then reconstruct them. Wright reconstructs our understanding of Resurrection, Baptism, Eucharist, temple, prayer, marriage, scripture, evangelism, justice, hell, love, etc. as “signposts” pointing to new creation and the Kingdom that new creation will be subject to.  I’ll comment on some of these in the following paragraphs.

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