All posts by Robert Dean

Vaccine Hesitancy among Christians

I was pleased to get my COVID vaccination a couple of weeks ago.  I view getting vaccinated as part of my missional calling as a Christian to love my neighbour.  Unfortunately, many Christians do not see things in the way I do, with the potential risk that we do not reach herd immunity as a society.  Southern Manitoba, where I currently reside, is often considered to be one of the Bible-belts of Canada, yet it has the lowest vaccination rate in the province. Continue reading Vaccine Hesitancy among Christians

Review of “The Church in a Secular Age”

I have contributed a review of Norwegian theologian Silje Kvamme Bjørndal’s book The Church in a Secular Age: A Pneumatological Reconstruction of Stanley Hauerwas’s Ecclesiology (Pickwick, 2018) to Reading Religion: A Publication of the American Academy of Religion.  For those interested, the review can be accessed here.

Easter Encounters

“For the Church does not exist just to transmit a message across the centuries through a duly constituted hierarchy that arbitrarily lays down what people must believe; it exists so that people in this and every century may encounter Jesus of Nazareth as a living contemporary.  This sacrament of Holy Communion that we gather to perform here is not the memorial of a dead leader, conducted by one of his duly authorized successors who controls access to his legacy; it is an event where we are invited to meet the living Jesus as surely as did his disciples on the first Easter Day.  And the Bible is not an authorized code of a society managed by priests and preachers for their private purposes, but the set of human words through which the call of God is still uniquely immediate to human beings today, human words with divine energy behind them.  Easter should be the moment to recover each year that sense of being contemporary with God’s action in Jesus.  Everything the church does – celebrating Holy Communion, reading the Bible, ordaining priests and bishops – is meant to be in the service of this contemporary encounter.  It all ought to be transparent to Jesus, not holding back or veiling his presence.” – Rowan Williams, Choose Life: Christmas and Easter Sermons in Canterbury Cathedral (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 145-46.

Xplore Series at CMU

I have been invited to return to Canadian Mennonite University and offer the six week lecture series on Dietrich Bonhoeffer that was cut short last spring due to the pandemic.  The series entitled, “Theological Resistance in Troubled Times: The Compelling Witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” is being offered through CMU’s Xplore program that encourages learning among those 55 years of age and older.  My first lecture, this Thursday at 11:30 am Central Time, will provide a biographical orientation to Bonhoeffer’s life and legacy.  The series is being offered on Zoom this year, so if you fall into that demographic, you can register for $40.  You can learn more about the CMU Xplore series and register for the course here.