The Table is being simultaneously hosted across Canada, so keep track of those time zones!

In the schedule below you’ll see the times listed for Ontario (Eastern) and Saskatchewan (Central) folks. Scroll over to the right to find the conversion for other time zones.

Neal DeRoo - As the kids say: Viewing Deconstruction through the eyes of Christian University students

In this talk, I draw on my 15+ years of experience as a professor at Christian universities to try to shed light on the cultural phenomenon of “deconstructing faith.” The talk begins with a brief elaboration of the philosophical basis of deconstruction. There, we will see that deconstruction refers to a way of paying attention to small, seeming insignificant or marginal details in a text or institution that, upon examination, are shown to be symptoms of deeper problems (the way cracks in the drywall can actually signal a shifting foundation of your house). 

The second part of the talk seeks to show the relevance of this for Christianity, mainly by drawing on the stories and experiences of the students I have taught at Christian universities. Most of these students grew up in heavily Christianized cultures, many of them having attended Christian elementary and secondary schools before coming to a Christian university. The seemingly small things that bother or trouble them (like the treatment of women or Indigenous people) ended up opening for them much larger, structural problems concerning the way Christianity had been complicit with all kinds of other forces, beyond the spirit of God. 

The talk will end by explaining the various outcomes these students encountered in regards to their faith, from some who doubled down on Christendom, to those who walked away from their faith altogether, and various points in between.  I will suggest that we are best served by treating those ‘deconstructing’ their faith as offering a prophetic word about the state of contemporary Christianity that we would do well to listen to seriously. 

Cynthia Tam - Re-Reading Romans from a Disability Perspective

A traditional reading of Romans views it as Paul’s theological elaboration of the gospel of justification by faith, emphasizing personal salvation through faith in Christ as God's grace for eternal life. In this workshop, I adopt various new perspectives on Paul, arguing that when we read Romans in its first-century context, we see Paul’s focus as both pastoral and ecclesial. Paul wrote to the Roman Christians to address the issue of disunity among the Roman house churches, particularly the division between the “Strong” and the “Weak.” Their inability to accept one another violates the gospel’s inclusive demand.

By examining this inclusive understanding of Romans in light of the experiences of people living with disabilities, we see a parallel issue of disunity between those who consider themselves “abled” and others as “disabled.” Drawing from Paul’s teachings in Romans, I will explore how judgmental attitudes, rigid adherence to church traditions, lack of welcome, and misuse of power and privilege contribute to exclusionary practices within the church. Paul’s message calls us to surrender our claims of privilege to the lordship of Christ, recognizing that every person is someone for whom Christ died and must be welcomed into the community, just as Christ has welcomed us (Rom 15:7). A united and loving family, expressed through our ecclesial life, is the “living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God” (Rom 12:1).

Nikayla Reize - What biblical voices can be our guides through a season of institutional deconstruction?

In the book of Daniel, a colonizing King has a dream that brings him great uncertainty about the future of his own reign, and he has no one to interpret it for him. He gathers his colonized dream-interpreters, but cultural genocide has severed them nearly irreparably from their ancestral and embodied wisdom. Belteshazzar (known by his people as Daniel), interprets the dream. He tells the King about the King’s own body – made of gold and silver and bronze. The King is inspired to project this image of his own golden body onto the collective imagination of goodness and purity. The King does not only colonize the minds of the masses, forcing them to dream his dream of the Good Body, the King threatens a fiery hell to all who refuse to submit to the colonial project of goodness and truth. Canadian church leaders ought to re-member the story of Daniel in 2024 through the lens of the Indian Act and the Christian history of forced assimilation on Turtle Island. As our congregants and students begin to wake up from the colonial dream and ask questions about innate and embodied goodness, and as they begin to re-call their own sacred connection to their body and their body’s body, the living land, the leaders of Christian institutions might re-consider using the threat of eternal damnation to keep control of the future of its reign. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of the book of Daniel for settler-descendant leaders in the midst of deconstruction, decolonization, and dehumanizing agendas.

Xenia Chan & Justin Tse - Lingering in the Fragments: Listening to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha toward Transpacific Deconstruction

This paper revisits Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s work, life, and death as a study of what we call ‘transpacific deconstruction.’ Her novel Dictée occupies an unequivocal canonical status in transpacific literature. Told in nonlinear fragments, Dictée details the shattering experiences of Japanese and American colonialism on the Korean Peninsula, especially as it splintered the narrator’s mother’s experience of Catholicism, as brought to Korea by French missionaries. Our interest in Cha is because the impact of Cha’s fragmentary prose and harrowing death continues to be felt in post-Christendom Canada, with Asian Canadian writers—such as Madeline Thien and Ruth Ozeki—taking on Cha’s mantle to write about the violence that Asians have experienced and continue to live with in our journeys between and through the Pacific. In contrast, we contend that transpacific deconstruction offers a corrective to typical post-Christian discourses of white evangelicals becoming aware of their complicity in colonialism and seeking to divest from Christianit(ies). Deconstruction in Cha, and other transpacific writing (including in Asian Canada), is written from the perspective of the colonised, whose lives were deconstructed by white supremacy attempting to strip them of agency in the transpacific region. Further, we suggest that Cha’s work and legacy offers a pastoral reflection in such a deconstructed context. Rather than moving quickly to reconstruction, a transpacific deconstruction opens opportunities to sit with the shattered fragments of a deconstructed life and to narrate them precisely as shattered fragments. In such ways, evangelical deconstruction might avert a reconstruction that is even more white than what came before and recognise instead its dubious place in transpacific histories as a longstanding deconstructing force.

Erin Wildsmith - Visual Art as a Language At The Margins And Its Value for the Canadian Church

In times of upheaval people often turn to the arts. Throughout human history and across cultures art has functioned as a language which helps to express things that cannot easily be said because they exist in the margins and ambiguities of life. Yet the Western Protestant Church has often struggled to come to terms with the arts, particularly with visual art and has feared its destabilizing capabilities. In an era of personal and institutional deconstruction when it seems many have grown tired of the Church’s words, visual art may present new opportunities to communicate the heart of God to a watching world. This paper will offer some reflexive observations from the perspective of practical theology on ways visual art may “speak” to our present Canadian context, especially in areas where words fail. By exploring how visual art can lend fresh perspective to the biblical text or speak to deep personal or social pain, this paper hopes to shed light on how visual resources might offer fresh opportunities for the Canadian Church.