hope Archives - Keith Shields

Hope for the Evangelical Mind

In 2004, ten years after the publication of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark A. Noll was unrepentant about his assessment of the Evangelical mind. I remain largely unrepentant about the book’s historical arguments, its assessment of evangelical strengths and weaknesses, and its indictment of evangelical intellectual efforts, though I have changed my mind…

Hope in Troubled Times

The following is a short excerpt from a sermon preached at Bow Valley Christian Church on October 30, 2016. The entire sermon can be heard here. In a world of fear and pessimism, Jesus provides hope. Can we proclaim that to the world? When we hear people lamenting about this weird presidential election in the…

Hope

Hope is what gets us through difficult times. Depression is the result when we face challenging circumstances without hope. Hope is not about knowing for sure that a good result is ahead; it is about having a reasonable faith that a good result is ahead. There are a variety of approaches to faith, but…

Aedes aegypti mosquito

Photo credit: Alex Wild[1] (Click on the photo to get a larger image.) This terrifying picture shows an Aedes aegypti mosquito rising out of the water immediately after it has metamorphosed from its larval stage. Without a sense of scale this creature looks like some dragon from a Peter Jackson film. Despite the fact that it…

The Storms of Life

Andrew Stanton, one of the directors at Pixar, is quoted in Ed Catmull’s book, Creativity Inc. Stanton has written and directed Finding Nemo and Wall-E (among many others) and knows the incredible amount of work that goes into assembling a team and then creating an animated movie. He has this to say about life’s difficulties.…

We Started Turning Feral

Tana French opens chapter six of Broken Harbour with two paragraphs of philosophical musing by her protagonist, Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy. He reminisces about the way things were and then he states that something has changed. Somewhere along the line “we started turning feral.” I remember this country back when I was growing up. We went…

Good Work

When I grew up in Western Canada there was a weekly CBC television show called “Marketplace.” The theme song was sung by Stompin’ Tom Connors and the lyrics I most remember said, The Consumer, they call us, We’re the people that buy While everyone else is out to sell Some kind of merchandise Another sale…

Character

I had a dream last night that prompted me to think about the word “character.” More specifically, I have been thinking about “good character.” What does it mean to be a person of good character? In this dream I was asked for my opinion of a definition of character. The definition I was given was,…

Red Letters

A few days ago I saw a heart-rending sight. I came upon a suicide just as the police had arrived and put a blanket over the body. Someone (I could not tell you who they were or even their gender) had jumped off of the pedestrian walkway of the Burrard Street bridge to the sea-wall…