This Week at Regent and UBC

For those of you in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia and particularly in the Vancouver area, here are a couple of events this coming week that might interest you.

Both are scheduled for Thursday, November 13.

1. “Must Scholarship Be Justified to the Poor?” I’ll be discussing this question with Dan Oudshoorn,  who has extensive experience with the Canadian streets and their people, both as a worker among them and as a former street person himself. Dan is a graduate of Tyndale College in Toronto and is a fine student here at Regent. He will argue the affirmative out of his reflection on theology and his experience among the poor. I will be arguing the negative, suggesting that God’s mission is not properly construed as being fundamentally about the poor, and therefore some activities, and scholarship in particular, can be justified without reference to them.

We’ll be stating our positions briefly, interacting with each other, and then going to the floor for further comment and question. Everyone is welcome: Regent College, Room 100, 11 a.m.

2. The Graduate and Faculty Christian Fellowship at UBC is sponsoring an event called “Multiculturalism in Canada: What Are We Talking About?” Prof. George Egerton, of UBC’s Department of History, will bring a short lecture on the social and political factors that led to the enshrinement of multiculturalism in the Canadian self-consciousness and the very cabinet of the federal government. I’ll be taking a quite different, philosophical, tack, arguing that the most popular form of current multiculturalist sentiment, what I call “multiculturalism as affirmation,” is incoherent and, ultimately, a severe form of hegemony.

Everyone is welcome: Woodward/IRC Lecture Hall 1 at 4 p.m.