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With the arrival on my front steps of a cardboard box of Shifting Stats Shaking the Church: 40 Canadian Churches Respond, a huge, sprawling project came to a close for me and for my friend and co-author Patricia Paddey. It was a marathon ...

Shifting Stats Shaking the Church: 40 Canadian Churches Respond (World Vision Canada, 2015) was a wonderful project written with my friend and co-author Patricia Paddey.

Last night I sat in a packed movie theatre in Oshawa watching The Drop Box. It is, of course, the inspiring story of Pastor Lee Jong-Rak who installs a dropbox in the outside wall of his Seoul home for unwanted babies. The ...

I am reading a book written for people who can't handle the real book which this book is about -- and I'm finding this book hard. The book about the book (the one I am actually reading) is called How (Not) To Be Secular: ...

So there I sat in a little cozy room at the Royal York hotel in downtown Toronto, chatting to Franklin Graham and his entourage about Eliza Doolittle. Yes, Eliza Doolittle. Part of my very sophisticated pre-interview warm up strategy involves small talk. ...

Read this fascinating interview I had the honour of doing with Andrew White, the Vicar of Baghdad. "My motto is simply, “Don’t take care, take risks.” It is risky business. Without taking risks, we can’t achieve anything. We just remain safe. There ...

This article on embedded seminaries, and how they can work well, appeared in In Trust magazine. You can read more here.  The Oxford dictionary defines embedded as “fixed firmly and deeply in a surrounding mass.” Thirty-six percent of members of the Association ...

THE OFFICE OF ALAN HAYES, director of the Toronto School of Theology, boasts a beautiful, leafy view over Queen’s Park, an urban forest in the heart of downtown Toronto. Silver maple, northern red oak, and an equestrian statue of King Edward VII ...

There is going to be a big snow storm tonight, and so that means our writers group is meeting again. That's just what happens. But who cares about the weather outside when inside a cozy, art-filled room there are writers inspiring each other? This ...

Let's Protect Our Children: 18 National Faith Leaders Speak Out, edited by Karen Stiller and Doug Blackburn This collection of reflections on child protection issues was published in 2014 by World Vision Canada. It was a meaningful project to work on.

As an editor I have had writers push back on edits. I've been amazed at times how angry and defensive some writers get, and how uninhibited they are in expressing it. It's not that they can't push back, it's just that they ...

Bliss. I just finished a huge article. The topic was unwieldy: how boards of embedded theological schools (those that live and breathe on a university campus) can best guide their schools to success. Or kind of. That was kind of the topic. ...