In Conversation with David Goa

I met Bishop Sjoberg in the late 1970s when he was President of the Western Canada Synod. I was developing the Spiritual Life Sacred Ritual gallery at the Provincial Museum and sought him out for conversation on Lutheran worship. Our conversation ranged widely and I learned about various Lutheran initiatives including work between the ELCIC and the Lutheran Church Canada - Missouri Synod to produce a joint Service Book. 

Bishop Sjoberg’s childhood formation, his broad ranging experience in Lutheran congregations throughout Canada and internationally and his work as National Bishop has given him a particular vantage point from which to reflect on the church over the last seven decades. It is a blessing to be given the long-view when it comes to the life of the church.

My conversation with Calum began during his undergraduate studies. We talked about his interests in the political life of a number of countries, on international relations and issues of human rights as both a civil gift and a challenge for some cultural communities. We have also talked about the difficult issues often found in the public square and how we might deepen public understanding across the usual political silos.


In this, our third conversation, Calum walks into the origins of Christian Nationalism. Our reflection ranges from the origins of the United States and its puritan and Calvinist patrimony. We explore the legacy of Christian Dominionism under the leadership of R. J. Rushdoony, the seeds of contemporary movements of Christian Nationalism. What are the fears at work surfacing this movement? How does racism and patriarchy figure in how it has unfolded? Why is pluralism anathema to those who claim they want to restore biblical law in the public square? These and other questions shape our conversation together.  


Welcome to our conversation. 

My conversation with Calum began during his undergraduate studies. We talked about his interests in the political life of a number of countries, on international relations and issues of human rights as both a civil gift and a challenge for some cultural communities. We have also talked about the difficult issues often found in the public square and how we might deepen public understanding across the usual political silos.

In this, our second conversation, Calum walks into the legacy of the Jim Crow laws and how the legislatures in the American South pushed back against Reconstruction. He explores the three pivotal pieces of legislation under President Lydon Johnson: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. 

Calum brings this story into what is unfolding in the United States currently: the work of various state legislatures to deprive many, particularly Black Americans, of the franchise and the ongoing work of “making a more perfect union.” 

Welcome to our conversation. 

My conversation with Calum began during his undergraduate studies. We talked about his interests in the political life of a number of countries, on international relations and issues of human rights as both a civil gift and a challenge for some cultural communities. We have also talked about the difficult issues often found in the public square and how we might deepen public understanding across the usual political silos.

Calum did a lovely piece of research exploring culture, pluralism and human rights focused on how this theme unfolded in Quebec and the work of Charles Taylor on this issue. He was also engaged by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and I had the pleasure of discussing some of his work and having larger conversations with him on international challenges we face given the legacy of colonialism. 

We begin these three podcasts thinking about his own intellectual growth over the last few years. We explore the Civil Right Movement, the place of religion and religious ideas in the growth of this movement with particular emphasis on the prophetic tradition. We touch on the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, his drawing on the thinking of Reinhold Niebuhr and Gandhi, on Malcolm X and Dorothy Day, and the political landscape in which they worked and which they sought to transform.  

In our next podcast we will explore the policy changes in the United States that endeavoured to address racism and poverty. 

Our third podcast digs into the roots of Christian Nationalism and its current rise in liberal democratic societies.

Welcome to our conversation. 

We first met a number of years ago when I was curating the international exhibition Anno Domini, Jesus Through the Centuries for the year 2000. I discovered, quite by happenstance, that the marvelous hand-woven tapestry Suffer Little Children to Come unto Me by the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1998) was the property of the Church of Saint Andrew and Saint Paul in Montreal. Richard Topping was the pastor of the church and was eager to see Burn-Jones’ work grace the exhibition. We met face to face some years later when he became Principle of Saint Andrews Hall and then President of the Vancouver School of Theology, at the University of British Columbia. 

Richard has a deep knowledge of the reformer John Calvin and the twentieth century’s great theologian Karl Barth. I want to know what each of them and what Richard made of the church, how they thought about her gifts and what she means in our world. I turned to Richard and our conversation ranged from the 16th century, through the Nazi period that captured so much of the church in Germany, to our own day and the gifts and missteps that mark churches and the faithful in our fragile world.    

Welcome to our conversation. 

Mikel Laurie is pastor of the Highlands Baptist Church in Edmonton. He previously served a United Church. His move from a progressive form of Protestantism to and evangelical church is of particular interest for our conversations on the Ekklesia.  Our conversation moves from his initial work in the United Church, his studies at Regent College, the Vancouver School of Theology and Trinity Western University touching on his time with a peace minister into “the troubles” in Northern Ireland. Mikel is the only person I have known who has met face to face with Ian Paisley, the militant Protestant leader central to the fractured society of Northern Ireland in the 1960s and following. We explore the Baptist idea of doctrinal purity, the “attractional” model of evangelical worship centered on one form or another of spectacle. What attracts people to this model and what does it nurture in them? Has the pandemic ruptured this model of church? 

I have had the pleasure over the last decade or so of thinking with Ray Sawatsky about religion and culture. I am delighted to talk with him in this series of conversations on the Ekklesia. He is an astute commenter on the entanglement between a number of political interests and evangelical church leaders. How have these entanglements shaped his generation’s growing unease and distance from the churches that shaped their childhood? 

Ray has worked very effectively with a number of para-church organizations, family charities, educational institutions and think tanks, all part of the broad evangelical world. Few have as rich a sense of the shape and reshaping of the evangelical tradition and there implications for both church and the larger culture. He explores the model of the evangelical churches international charitable work. In the last few years, he has been giving sober second-thought to much of what he has been a partner in. Where is “the other” in the evangelical world? Why the fixation on the sexual life? Is charitable work also a process of manufacturing “need” and the latest chapter in colonialism? Have we created a charitable industrial complex? Are megachurches a kind of spiritual Walmart? How did this unfold and where does it lead? 

Pastor Ingrid grew up in post-war Germany and navigated the trauma of the war’s shadow. She discusses the habit of taking refuge in church doctrine as a way of avoiding the responsibility for what unfolded in Germany; the church as a gathering of family and friends, of the like-minded, while teaching engagement with strangers; a church “turned inwards”. She speaks of the gifts she was given by the homeless who sought shelter under the porch at Trinity Lutheran Church in Edmonton; the deep regard for social justice that seemed, at times, to accompany a drawing away from worship and its gift of leading us to draw near to God’s presence; and, a sense of never being able to do enough for the healing of the world. She speaks of her vision of the church as a guest house for all focused both on confession, communion and working with a steady hand to heal the wounds of our common life.In November of 2021 Pastor Ingrid became the pastor at Saint Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Vancouver, where she now serves in English and German.

Jacques Maritain was raised a protestant in France initially studying science at the Sorbonne in Paris. He became disillusioned with the perspective of scientism that dominate the academy. Attending the lectures of Henri Bergson whose work highlighted the place of intuition and sympathy Maritain and his wife Raissa Oumansoff, a Russian Jew, set upon a new path which led to their entering the Roman Catholic Church. Maritain has written “just about everything” and Jason West was working through his book Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. Knowing Professor West’s penchant for logic and reason I was interested on hearing how art and the third transcendental, the beautiful, was woven into his thought.  

Professor West’s intellectual journey took him from atheism through the study of medieval logic and the work of Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas. A solitary month reading and rereading Saint Augustine’s The Confessions and a friend’s casual invitation to attend the Roman Catholic liturgy, not unlike Maritain, led him into the Church.     

Our conversation begins with Maritain, art, logic and reason and concludes thinking about the good, the true, and the beautiful.
       
Welcome to our conversation. 

And there are others: those who have cultivated a sense of place, alert to what is unfolding. They work for a better common world and do so because ambition has not dimmed or colonized their aspirations. Usually, you have to look to find them since those with ambition tend to fill the public space. 

Among the indigenous peoples of Canada this distinction is vivid. Elders and knowledge keepers, often quiet and behind the scenes, tend the flames that enlighten and draw forth the pure water that mirrors what is unfolding, “the signs of the times”; those who speak, often a quiet word that illuminates how we may live attentive to the beauty and richness of our life together, a world fit for our children and our children’s children. 

Margaret Rathnavalu grew up on a farm near the hamlet of Duhamel in the Camrose district of Alberta. At the University of Alberta, she studied education. Following two years of teaching in Peace River she joined the development agency, the Canadian University Studies Overseas (CUSO) and went to Zambia in 1964. She taught children for six years. Then she returned to Canada with her husband Lawrence and together they moved to Wabasca-Desmarais, the home of the Big Stone Cree and Woodland Cree peoples. They both taught for three years. They listened, and learned and became friends. Returning to Camrose in 1980 she taught at the Chester Ronning School until her retirement in 2001. 

Margaret regularly seeks to engage political leadership, municipal, provincial, and federal as well as her fellow citizens. I have admired the depth of her learning about the challenges we all face given how the economy of Alberta and our larger world has been shaped. Fracking, the mining of the Fort McMurray region and coal on the eastern sloops of the Rocky Mountains, the despoiling of the waters of life, all have called her to listen and speak and seek healing. Her formation, learning, and her experience engaging politicians and corporate leadership surfaces many important lessons.