…or at least this is how I do it.
Given that some people have asked me about the method I use to write, I thought I would write my process down here.  I would be curious to hear how it compares to others.  What follows could be employed for everything from writing term papers to writing books.
(1) Thesis Question
As soon as you know that you will be writing, begin to think about a question or an argument that interests you (if this is for a term paper, begin thinking at the start of the course, if it’s for a Masters thesis, begin thinking at the start of your degree).
(2)Rough Outline
As soon a you think of a question or argument that interests you, begin to compile sub-topics and necessarily related questions into a (very rough) outline.
(3) Research
Research like a crazy motherfucker.  Seriously. You need to demonstrate a comprehensive knowledge of your topic (or as close as you can get to that) so bury yourself in the appropriate literature.  However, you also need to be creative so read widely.  If, for example, you are writing on the question: “Is there a counter-imperial element to Paul’s writings?” then you need to know the ins-and-outs of Pauline scholarship.  However, it’s also very useful to read what others outside that guild have written about Paul.  This is because so-called outsiders sometimes glimpse elements that ‘insiders’ overlook.  Further, read others who have written on this topic (say on counter-imperial politics more generally) as they will enrich your reading and your thinking.  So, to continue the example, it’s worth looking at the liberation theologians and the ways in which they employ the biblical texts, it’s also a good idea to look at what social and political theorists have written on the subject, and so on.
As you research, continue to expand or correct the (very rough) outline you created.  You will discover sections that you need to add and you might wish to drop other sections that you discover to be no longer relevant.  You will also discover that you may need to tweak the order of your various sections.  It’s always good to ask yourself: “Why does this section follow from the prior section?”  Additionally, you may find that your original thesis question was too vague or not really where you want to go, so you should clarify that while engaging in this research.
It’s also good to go back over things you have already read in order to see how your prior readings apply to your thesis (after all, you’ve probably already been reading around this topic, if it is something that interests you).  This is why it’s useful to build a library and read every book with a pencil in order to trace arguments and note areas that jump out at you.  Referring back to your own library allows you to do a lot of research very quickly.
In this raw research phase, I tend to type quick bullet notes and leave these notes organized first by author then by book (this comes in handy later).
This stage takes the bulk of my total writing time — probably about 60% of it.
(4) Organize your notes: Part I
Once your research i done, your general outline should be pretty clearly established.  You should know the flow of your argument and all the major sections contained therein.
So, at this stage, I print off my rough notes and go back and use a pen to write in the margins beside each bullet point what section that point belongs within.  I then create a new text document, with all my section headings and cut and paste the notes into their relevant sections.  While cutting and pasting, I also underline the key words or points made in each note so that I can easily see what is important.
(5) Organizing your notes: Part II
With this done, I turn to my first major section and once again print a hard copy of the document.  I then look at the various subsections that make up that section and, once again, write that in the margin next to each bullet.  I then repeat the process of creating a new document, with all the subsections marked and cut and paste the bullet points into their appropriate spots.  As you do this, you may find some points that actually fit better into other major sections and so you can move these around accordingly.
(6) Organizing your notes: Part III
The flow of your argument, and what you want to write, should be getting increasingly clear at this point but there is still one more stage to go.  Once again, I print off a hard copy of each subsection and, using a pen, I mark the key point or theme of each paragraph within that subsection.  Then, creating another text document with each paragraph labeled, I go back and cut and paste the bullet notes into their appropriate paragraphs.  Again, because your argument is getting clearer all the time, you may find notes that fit better in other sections, so make sure to take the time to cut them out and move them to that place.
At this stage your argument should be crystal clear.  You should know exactly what you want to say and you should know why each section follows each other section, why each subsection belongs where it does, and why one paragraph leads to the next.  I realize that this is a painstaking process but it really pays off not only in terms of the richness of your own thoughts (you’ll have spent a lot of time thinking about what you are going to write by this point) but also in terms of the clarity of your writing.  Clarity is priceless — it’s the difference between a B grade and an A grade (regardless of how ‘smart’ your argument is).
Also, given that this takes time, and given that you won’t always be writing but will probably want to takes some breaks to read (and eat and sleep and all that other stuff), it’s a good idea to continue doing some reading around your topic while engaging in these last three stages.  It’s easy to continue adding notes to various sections as you organize them.  This will continue to enrich your paper and will allow you to stay on top of any new scholarship that appears in your field while you are writing.
Stages (4)-(6) of of this process probably take 25-30% of my total writing time.
(7) Write!
Now you know what you want to say and when you want to say it, so all you need to do is say it.  Once again, I print a hard copy of my now extremely well organized notes and I write a first draft, working from paragraph one, of subsection one, in section one, all the way through to the end.
Of course, sometimes writing comes more naturally than at other times and so, if you ever start feeling blocked or too tired to start a new section or continue whatever part you have in progress, it’s nice to give yourself a break by going back and rereading and editing a previous section.  If you do this as you write, you will have already edited your thesis several times before you even finish it.
At this point, because everything is organized very thematically, it is handy to also have a copy of your very first rough notes (organized by author and book) because referring back to that will ensure that you don’t quote somebody out of context, and it will help you to remember the broader arguments of the authors you decide to engage in more detail.
Again, you can still continue to read literature that is relevant to your subject as you engage in this process.  However, at this point, I tend to focus my reading on sections that I have yet to write.
(8) Edit
You have now completed a very polished draft of your thesis (given the multiple edits you did while writing).  However, I still go over the whole thing at least two more times after I finish writing.
Once those edits are done, I will put everything down for a week and try not to think about it.  Then I will go back to the thesis and edit it twice more.  This will help me to see points where my thoughts are either unclear (perhaps they are clear to me, because I’ve been buried in this subject for a year, but I need to ask if they are clear to the reader who is picking this thesis up for the first time) or where they need to be refined.
And that’s it.  Given all the prep work, the writing and editing tends to go quite quickly for me.  I would estimate that steps (7)-(8) take about 10-15% of my total writing time.
So, voila, follow these steps and you should get a 4.0.  Not only that, you may find that somebody wants to publish your thesis.

In noting that several translations of the First Testament — from the LXX to the NRSV — tend to water down language that refers to God ‘birthing’ the world, John Goldingay writes the following:

Such alteration and watering down of the text may reflect a desire to protect God’s transcendence.  The First Testament offers much evidence that this is not a desire God shares, but human beings often prefer their God safely transcendent (Theology of the Old Testament: Volume One, Israel’s Gospel, 62).

Not only is this explicit disavowal of faith in a purely transcendent God found in the First Testament, it is also found in the Second Testament and, significantly, on the lips of Jesus himself.  Thus, as he prepares to depart from his disciples, Jesus engages in a speech in Matthew 25.31-46 that is intended to counter any future desire to locate Jesus as a transcendent (and thus rather safe) Lord.  Rather than projecting that his future location will be solely in heaven, at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, Jesus states that he is actually to be found in the material and imminent existence of ‘the least of these’ — the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned.
Methinks that many Christians today may want to reconsider these things.  Jesus, for many, has become little more than a safely transcendent deity who doesn’t intervene much into our lives and who also doesn’t really ask all that much of us.  However, instead of piddling around in prayers to this distant Jesus, we might be better served to jump into the hard work of serving the Jesus who is found in ‘the least of these’.  In the end, our ultimate allegiance should not be to the conception of Jesus we talk to in our heads; rather, our ultimate allegiance should be to the crucified people of today, and the Jesus we encounter there.  Everything else — our faith, our values, our priorities — should be subordinate to that.

[This is the transcript of a talk I gave tonight to a group of third year nursing students at the University of Western Ontario, in my hometown.  I sometimes forget how un-obvious this information is to a lot of people, and so I thought I would post it here.  Many thanks to the lovely students and talk organizers who invited me.  It is good to see people who want to get more intimately involved in such things.]
Confronting Stereotypes Regarding Street-involved Youth
When it comes to homelessness and poverty, I am constantly surprised by the amount of the blatant lies and violently discriminatory attitudes that pervade public dialogue on these matters.  Over the last forty years, a great deal of good work has been done – both in the Academy and in the public square – about matters related to systemic violence and discrimination against people with diverse ethnicities, genders, sexual preferences, and mental or physical abilities, but little has been done to overcome the systemic violence and discrimination that continues to impact people who are poor.  Thus, for example, one would be rightfully challenged for saying, “So-and-so is black; therefore, she must be lazy” but few people seem to question the equally false and offensive assertion that “So-and-so is poor; therefore, she must be lazy”. 
It is worth asking ourselves why systemic violence and stereotypes related to economic issues have remained so entrenched in our social imaginaries.  I am inclined to think that this is partly the case because our institutions of higher education are very closely connected to structures that perpetuate a divide between the wealthy and the poor, and that even the more liberating work being done in the public square has mostly benefited wealthy members of diverse ethnicities, wealthy women or transgendered people, wealthy members of the LGBTQ community, and wealthy people who are differently-abled.  Thus, while a person may become sensitized to his or her own experience of oppression and injustice, that person may still remain blind to other structures of violence, in which he or she unwittingly participates.  So, for example, a wealthy white woman may be appropriately upset when she is overlooked for a management position based upon her gender, but she may be completely unaware of the great difference between her life experiences and that of a poor aboriginal woman.  Consequently, while fighting for the rights of women more generally, she may end up adopting attitudes about poor members of First Nations communities that are violent and oppressive.  Similarly, one could be a middle-class health care student, committed to contributing to the health and well-being of others, yet one may also violent and death-dealing attitudes about some members of our society – notably, in this instance, people who are poor.
Therefore, in the few minutes that I have tonight, I would like confront some of the stereotypes that function as self-evident truths within public dialogue on the subject of street-involved young people.  The common perception appears to be that ‘street kids’ are rebellious teens who like doing drugs more than they like living at home.  They tend to be seen as people who would rather be out partying and causing a ruckus rather than learning how to be responsible members of society.  As a corollary of this, the parents of these ‘hooligans’ tend to be viewed as loving and worried adults who ‘just don’t know what to do anymore’ and who are being victimized by their bullying, drug-addicted children.
Of course, that this sort of picture is the one that tends to dominate public discourse should not surprise us.  Parents, as the adults in the situation, tend to have the power, resources and life-skills to manipulate the ways in which others understand what occurs when a youth becomes homeless. Teens, particularly those who have been abused – a point I will develop in a moment – tend not to have the same power, resources, and life-skills and so they become vulnerable to having others impose a particular narrative upon them.  Thus, parents will – like most of us – find ways to justify themselves and their actions (kicking out a child and so on), while simultaneously blaming their child and attempting to control how others view that child.  Add to this the fact that most of us are scared of people simply for looking poor – wearing torn clothing, having dirty hair, sporting work-boots, and so on – and it becomes pretty easy for us to be convinced of the message we receive from the parents.  Not only do we tend to think that ‘scary = bad’ but we then distance ourselves from street-involved teens and never get the opportunity to hear their side of the story.  Of course, this fear is simply one of the manifestations of the economic stereotypes I mentioned, and it demonstrates how these stereotypes are self-perpetuating.  When ‘poor = scary = bad = avoid like the plague!’ then we never get the opportunity to learn about what is actually going on.
Because the fact is that the stories told by street-involved teens, along with the information gathered by social services, suggests a very different picture – and one that directly contradicts common perceptions on this matter.  For example, a study in which I participated with street-involved teens in Toronto, found that over 75% of these teens identified domestic violence as the primary cause of their homelessness.  This fits with other statistics taken at the national level which show that over 70% of homeless youth identify physical or sexual abuse as the cause of their homelessness.  So, here is the truth: the vast majority of teens on the street are there because they were being verbally, physically, and/or sexually abused in their homes by their parents.
Of course, not everybody who is abused ends up being homeless, but this is often because there are other resources or people to whom some can turn when being abused – perhaps another family member, perhaps another caring adult, perhaps a friend’s family, and so on.  However, for those who are being abused and who do not know anybody who might help, the street becomes a valid option.  For example, I am a friend of a young woman whose father used to sell her to his friends for beer money.  If you had to choose between that and a life on the street what would you choose?  Sadly, her story is not uncommon.  I’ve seen the scars from the cigarettes a mother would put out on her daughter’s legs.  I’ve seen the teeth that were missing in the mouth of a son whose father beat him with a hammer.  And on and on it goes.
Of course, it is after this experience of violence that drug addiction and substance misuse often enter into the picture.  Certainly, as with most teens, some recreational drug use may have been a part of their prior life, but addiction and serious misuse only tend to arrive after a young person has moved onto the streets.  This is for good reasons: trying to cope with the fall-out of previous physical and sexual trauma is hard enough, but trying to cope with these things while facing all the challenges of street-life is extremely challenging.  Spending a night on the street can be scary – especially when you are new to the streets – and so drugs like crack and crystal meth become appealing because they give a person the energy they need to stay awake and a much needed sense of self-confidence and courage.  Similarly, dealing with the nightmares and flashbacks of traumas is exhausting and drugs like heroin and other opiates can offer a much-sought-after rest and sense of numbness or peace. 
Unfortunately, what begins as a coping mechanism often turns destructive and, although drug use may not have led these teens onto the street, it does trap many teens there.  That said, we need to remember that the problem here is not the drug use, but the traumas that made drug use turn into addiction and a harmful form of misuse.  The solution, then, is not to criminalize youth who use drugs, or stigmatize street-involved teens; rather, the solution is to begin to address those underlying traumas by developing loving personal relationships and supportive social structures, while also doing much more to address the massive amount of domestic and family-based violence that occurs in our society.  Furthermore, rather than simply focusing on this-or-that abusive parent as the problem, we need to look at the ways in which things like domestic abuse are related to broader social structures and matters of wealth, poverty, colonization, and privilege.   It is not surprising that a Canadian study found that 63% of street-involved youth identified as coming from a family that struggled to maintain housing.
So, the most important thing to remember is that violence is the greatest cause of homelessness amongst youth.  Three other significant causes should also be mentioned.  The first is the sexuality of youth.  Again, in the survey done in Toronto, 40% of the youth interviewed identified their sexual orientation as a primary cause of their homelessness, and this figure is pretty close to other national studies done in the US and the UK.  A good many of these people were simply kicked-out when they ‘came out’ to their parents.  Others were beaten and abused because of their sexual orientation (hence the overlap with the statistic regarding violence) and then chose to leave.  Again, when the choice is the streets or your father kicking you down the stairs and calling you a faggot, what would you choose? 
The second cause that should be mentioned cuts to funding for programs for people with mental health concerns.  This had a much greater and much more devastating impact upon adult populations, but it continues to impact street-involved teens because it adds a further barrier to services and a further challenge to be overcome when trying to exit street life.  Thus, a person in psychosis or experiencing the symptoms of some sort of chemical imbalance will have a more difficult time transitioning from being street-involved to living a different kind of lifestyle.  This is only further exacerbated when we recall the violence experienced by street involved teens, and studies that suggest a connection between childhood violence and trauma and certain mental disorders (like dissociative identity disorder or borderline personality disorder).
Finally, one should also mention the foster care system and the removal of children from their families, from their place of heritage, and from their languages and cultures.  One Canadian study shows that 40-47% of homeless people in general identified as having been in foster care or a group home, but another study focused solely on youth places that number as high as 68%.  Of course, when one looks at the disproportionate number of aboriginal youth now placed in care – not to mention the disproportionate number of aboriginal people experiencing homelessness –one can’t help but wonder if this shift in numbers simply reflects the ways in which foster care has replaced residential schooling.  After all, what we often see in foster care (despite the good things that can happen there) is the traumatic separation of families, coupled with – once again – quite a lot of violence and lack of accountability.
So, enough of the stats.  I have mentioned four major items that contribute to youth homelessness.  These are: (1) violence in the home; (2) ongoing prejudices against any form of sexuality that is not hetero; (3) inadequate supports for people with mental health problems;  and (4) the violence that appears to be ingrained in our foster care system.  All of this paints a very different picture than the one offered to us in popular opinions about irresponsible teens who like to party, get high, and rebel against their parents.
By way of conclusion, I will share some of my own story with you.  My story is unexceptional – it’s a pretty average sort of story, and I’m a pretty average sort of person, and that’s the point.  The experience of homelessness as a teen is something that can happen to anybody.  If a few things had gone down differently in each of your own lives, you could also have ended up on the street.
My story is that I grew up in a home with a father who was mentally unstable, emotionally manipulative, and sometimes physically abusive.  I inherited a pretty sensitive disposition from my mother and so this was fairly traumatic for me and, when I recall my childhood years, I mostly remember being afraid and anxious.  Because of this, and because of my conservative Christian upbringing, I tried hard to be a ‘good kid’.  I was an honour student, I stayed out of trouble, I got my first job when I was thirteen, and my social life mostly consisted of hanging-out with the youth group at my church.  The sort of thing that got me knocked around was if a church event ended up going later than planned.  Suffice to say, I wasn’t a particularly rebellious young person!
However, as I got into the middle years of high school, I found that I was getting bored in class and I learned that I could maintain high grades without attending most classes.  So, I began skipping a lot of classes and, like any respectable high-school student, I learned to do an excellent imitation of my parents’ signatures on the notes I would forge.  At this time, I also started standing up to my father’s abuse and manipulation more than he liked and so our relationship was quite strained.  Consequently, the shit hit the fan when I eventually got busted for all the classes I skipped.  I went home from school that day, and my father sat me down and said: “You have one hour to get your things and leave.  Anything you leave behind will be thrown out.”  When I asked if he wanted me to phone or anything, he replied: “No, just get out of my life.”  An hour later I was walking down the street with a couple of garbage bags and a backpack.  I did some couch-surfing but mostly ended up living with a close friend of mine and his mom.  Of course, they had their own issues and he would sometimes get kicked-out and on those nights, I felt uncomfortable staying at his place.  Instead, a few of us would get together and just walk the streets all night, or try to crash on the jungle-gym at a suburban park.
As for drug use, I think that I had recreationally used alcohol on one occasion prior to being kicked-out, and I think I used marijuana once before as well – this level of use, I should note, is well below the recreational drug and alcohol use practiced by non-street-involved teens.  So, this was how a pretty timid, bookish church-kid (who wanted to be a missionary for Jesus), ended up as a street-involved youth.  That’s a pretty far-cry from the stereotypical things we hear about street kids.  But really, in my own life, that’s what I’ve seen.  Are street-involved people any different than anybody else?  No.  Everybody has their issues and their areas of brokenness, and everybody has something breathtakingly beautiful about them.  This is just as true of a street kid as it is of the people gathered here tonight and I hope that we can remember that, not only in the ways we treat one another, but also in the ways we interact with those who know a lot more about poverty, violence, and loneliness than a good many of us.  Not only that, but perhaps we can also move beyond isolating and blaming individuals in order to engage in more systemic and structural analyses in order to ensure that the next generation of kids will not have it just as bad as the previous generation and, just as importantly, in order to ensure that we are not contributing to the abuse and oppression of others, despite our best intentions.
Thank you for listening.  I enjoy a reciprocal exchange more than just talking at people, so I’ll stick around afterwards if anybody has any questions or comments for me.

Since a lot of people are talking about Haiti these days, I thought I would highlight an important article.
This describes exactly what I thought would happen as soon as I first heard about the earthquake in Haiti.  The United States and Canada have a long history of attempting to overthrow Haitian efforts to achieve democratic self-rule and I knew that the earthquake would be used as an opportunity to stage a military take-over under the guise of providing international aid.  While the earthquake was absolutely devastating, I suspect that we will make sure that the Haitians are paying for this for many generations.
Once again, Naomi Klein’s theory in The Shock Doctrine is confirmed.

So there is a (semi?) regular event that occurs in Vancouver every year called “Missions Fest” which is hosted by an international Christian corporation that travels around the world hosting these events and trying to connect Christians to various ‘mission’ opportunities around the world.  This year’s event happened about a week ago and the keynote speaker was a fellow from International Justice Mission (which is, according to their website, “a human rights agency that secures justice for victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression”).  Oh, and the event was hosted in a megachurch — it has a multimillion dollar budget, building funds the run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, that sort of thing.
Anyway, a friend of mine who runs a local community-based social justice-oriented group called Streams of Justice was invited to come and do a workshop at this event.  Although this sort of thing is a bit outside of their usual sphere, some people from the group decided to go ahead and take a stab at it.  So, they did a presentation on some of the factors that create and perpetuate poverty, oppression, violence, and slavery in Vancouver.  As a part of their presentation, a homeless fellow who struggles with an addiction was invited to come and share his story.  The presentation went well enough, I guess.  They received the standard sort of Conservative Christian response (i.e. one fellow stood up and said: “But don’t you think that the real solution to all of these problems is a personal relationship with Jesus?”).
Anyway, my friend ended up taking off shortly after the presentation was finished and he caught up with the homeless fellow a few days later and asked him what he thought of the event.  Well, it turns out that the homeless fellow got kicked out.  After the event, he began to go around collecting empty pop cans (this is how he makes money).  While doing so he was confronted by some sort of staff member (either of the church or of the conference, it’s unclear which), who told him that the cans were the property of the church and who then required him to leave.
Yep, so here we have a bunch of rich Christians dropping thousands of dollars on a conference about missions and justice, and the one homeless guy who is invited to attend gets kicked out because, dammit, the church is going to get the money for recycling those cans.  Sadly, while this is atrocious, I don’t find it altogether surprising.

Well, I’ve written about books and about music, so I thought I’d write a post about the top five movies I watched last year.
The movie that jumped out at me the most is a documentary that first aired in 2003 called “The Origin of AIDS“.  This documentary tells the story of how the AIDS pandemic was quite likely created by a Polish-American doctor who was experimenting on African populations in the 1950s in order to try and win the race to create the best Polio vaccine.  This doctor, Hilary Koprowski, did in fact create the vaccine that was used to eradicate polio and he has been treated as a hero in the medical community.  Naturally, then, there has been a lot of controversy around this documentary, but I find it’s thesis — and the evidence is presents — compelling.  It’s all quite devastating.  Not only did Western colonialism create deep poverty in Africa but it quite possibly created the AIDS pandemic (the same pandemic it refuses to address seriously, given the way Western pharmaceutical companies continue to hold on to the copyrights of medication that can be used to properly treat HIV/AIDS).
The second film that jumped out at me was “Hunger” (2008), which tells the story of Bobby Sands, a member of the IRA who led a prison-based hunger strike in 1981, in an effort to have the IRA become recognized as a political (and not criminal) faction.  There is some really fascinating dialogue in this film, including one long uncut conversation that occurs between Sands and a Catholic priest.  I almost never watch movies multiple times, but I watched this one three times last year.  It’s a very moving portrayal of a person whose commitment to life — and life for all — leads him to embrace death (Sands starves to death along with several others).  Further, the portrayals of others involved — like one prison guard who appears to be the guy designated to beat the prisoners — is one that refuses to take sides, but portrays the humanity of everybody involved.
Another documentary that I found interesting was “Born Rich“.  It also aired in 2003 and was created by Jamie Johnson, the heir to the Johnson & Johnson Inc. empire.  Jamie is friends with other young people who grew up amongst the super-rich — heirs of giant media, sports, or real estate empires, members of European royal families, and so on.  It’s a fascinating glimpse into the brokenness, loneliness, opulence and even guilt experienced by those who grow up in this rather limited social circle.  In fact, I even found myself feeling some sympathy towards a number of the young people who appear in this film.  It would be very interesting for a discussion group to watch this film in conjunction with the more famous documentary, “Born Into Brothels“.
Finally, my fourth and fifth picks are “Darkon” (2007) and “Guys and Dolls” (2007).  Both of these films look at groups of people who, in one way or another, have created a ‘fictional’ world full of alternate relationships, and wherein they find their deepest sense of meaning and identity.  So, in “Darkon” we follow group of “Live Action Role Players” (i.e. LARPers) — everyday people who go off questing in the woods on the weekend dressed like wizards, warriors, and amazons (I know, right?  It doesnt get much better than this!).  It is as these characters, the the members of Darkon are able to truly live life.  Similarly, in “Guys and Dolls” we encounter some men who have developed relationships with “Real Girl” sex dolls (which sell for around $10,000).  It is these relationships that these men experience as the most fulfilling aspect of their lives.  I found both of these documentaries to be entertaining and fascinating and they led me to ask questions about the ways in which all of us structure the world in which we live.  I mean, are these people really doing anything different than Christians who go to church and undestand themselves to be ‘beloved children of God’?  Or, to pick another example, are they different than corporate business people who go to yoga classes in order to affirm their internal goodness and transcendence (despite the brutal material actions they take in their day-to-day jobs)?  Maybe, maybe not.  A conversation worth exploring.

I was chatting with a good friend the other night and he made an interesting statement.  Having spent the last 20 or more years seeking to practice hospitality by sharing his home with others (i.e. he was living in a ‘new monastic’ community, long before that term was coined), he has become increasingly dissillusioned with the efficacy and value of this model.  Instead, he and his wife will be selling their home and will begin living below the poverty line (perhaps in a squat, or in a van, or somewhere else).  When reflecting upon this, he stated that he has come to the conclusion that hospitality can only be practiced within the context of justice.  Living as we do within the context of deeply rooted injustices, he concluded that hospitality is not possible.  Therefore, we agreed that talk of hospitality needs to be reframed around the concrete practice of mutuality, just as talk about charity needs to be reframed around the concrete practice of solidarity.  I think such a reframing has potential.  Any other thoughts?

Well, a lot of people and places were busy posting lists of top songs and albums of 2009 over the last few weeks.  For the most part, I found 2009 to be a slow year in music but there were a few albums that really grabbed me — “Hospice” by The Antlers (which now ranks amongst my top albums of all time) and “Dragonslayer” by Sunset Rubdown.  However, instead of posting album reviews, I think I’ll just put up some links to my five favourite songs from last year (limit of one per band).  As is usual for me, the way I connect with the lyrics of songs plays a very large role in how much I enjoy those songs.  I think that the lyrics to all of these songs are fantastic (the first two were literally breath-taking for me) so you may want to look them up.
1. “Epilogue” by The Antlers.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQwkbRVqqxU]
2. “Nightingale/December Song” by Sunset Rubdown.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eh6jWLmKcc]
3. “Daniel” by Bat For Lashes (she’s singing this song for me, ya know?)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfWzmSelCis]
4. “Rocking Horse” by The Dead Weather (I’m not usually a fan of Jack White and his many projects, but this song is fantastic).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtoL7y9jEyQ]
5. “1 John 4:16” by The Mountain Goats.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KocfvqK_4yM]
And one honourable mention — “The Economy is Suffering… Let It Die” by Anti-Flag!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-NqzIRmQjc]

About a week or so ago, my wife asked me: “Have you lost your faith in humanity?”  The question caught me off guard but what really surprised me was the realization that I have gone through a major paradigm shift in this regard.
You see, I used to believe that people were fundamentally good and, more importantly, loving.  I used to think that many of us were wounded or deceived or ignorant… but I believed that these were all things that love, patience, and truth-telling could fix.  Therefore, as I woke up to the deep injustices in our society — and to the absolutely unecessary sufferings of many — I wanted to do something to address those things and I assumed that others would want to do this as well.  In particular, I assumed that others with similar worldviews to my own (Christians) would be keen to be better lovers of others once they realized what was going on in the world and right under their noses.  Thus, as I began to journey alongside of those in exile, I also began to speak and write a great deal about these things.
However, as I have done this over the years, I have realized that most people (and most Christians) aren’t actually particularly interested in loving others or doing much of anything about the injustices that define our lives.  Despite my various efforts to appeal to their intellects, to their emotions, and to their values — despite all my arguing, cajoling, begging, and provoking — most everybody remains untouched and keeps on doing what they’re doing without much concern for their neighbours.
This used to frustrate and anger me quite a lot… but I’ve realized that it frustrated and angered me because of the expectation I had for others — I had assumed that people were generally good and generally desiring to love others.  I have since had to let go of this expectation.  And it is this ‘letting go’ that could be described as my loss of faith in humanity.
Now I have come to believe that most people won’t change all that much over their lives and most people won’t ever give much of a damn about most others or about what goes on in our world.  For now, I have learned to accept this.  I don’t hold it against anybody.  It is what it is.  Instead of anger and frustration, I have learned resignation.  I no longer expect much of anything of anybody.  And maybe that’s what it means to practice grace.
(Oh, and I’ve also learned not to expect much of myself either.  That might be what it means to practice humility.)