I always cringe at the practically inevitable “What gives you hope?” at the end of an interview, and then double-cringe at the, “Well, I’m an optimist at heart~” that so often follows.
Here are two tidbits I’ve come across recently offer some anti-cringeworthy, if you will, responses which I will be savoring.
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.
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” …
The Tale of Three Trees was passed down to me orally, as folktales are, while roaming through the streets of GuangZhou last year. The storyteller loved and cherished this tale from childhood. The simplistic yet deep-reaching truth of the story had inspired her to write her own.
8 months laters, by the rarest of chances, that this book caught our eyes while we were visiting a flea market in Stockholm. We only saw it fitting to bring this story back to the storyteller, now a bride, as she goes forth to build a new home (and joint library collection) with her groom.
As this tale has and continues to travel with us wherever we go since that night in GuangZhou.
We hope this book, having traveled from Stockholm to Toronto, will find its resting place in Hong Kong.
… But not before adding a few words of our own 😉
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.