As I’ve been reading about different Indigenous wisdom traditions from across North America, searching for areas of common ground and essential difference between them and my own Christian tradition, I’ve been particularly curious to see how the idea of vocation, which I wrote a lot about at the start of the summer, might manifest itself … Continue reading Wisdom and Generativity: Personal Vocation in Indigenous Traditions
As a general rule, Christians are considered to be a rather severe bunch, people who tend to take ourselves and world pretty seriously. While there is definitely a positive aspect to this — we do only get one chance to live this life so it’s important to make the most of it — it has … Continue reading Subverting Expectation: Humour, Tricksters, and Transformation
In Sunday’s post on Thanksgiving, I talked about a constellation of closely related ideas —gratitude, respect, reciprocity, and generosity — in terms of their close relationship in Indigenous belief systems and how they connect to Christian teachings. All of these ideas are grounded in understanding one’s place in the world. If the world is a … Continue reading Walk Humbly
Here in Canada, today is Thanksgiving Sunday. It’s a commemoration that, depending on how one chooses to interpret it, can be either a tremendous ally or barrier to decolonizing Christian theology here. In the churches in which I grew up, it was unmistakably a harvest celebration, thanking God for the land as the source of … Continue reading In Everything Give Thanks: On Gratitude, Respect, Reciprocity, and Generosity
So far in this series, I’ve explored the possibility of using shalom, peace, as a guiding metaphor for Christian theology and life, and how this would frame ‘faith’ as a peace-making lifestyle. I showed how these ideas are both profoundly biblical and also resonate with common Indigenous ideas about right living, and so could provide … Continue reading ‘All Our Relations’: Christianity and the ‘Community of Creation’
Matthew Root 