I’ll be retiring next summer.  People ask me “why now?”.  Lots of reasons, probably: let someone younger have a place at the faculty table; family responsibilities; health; fatigue; out of synch with the culture; “work is done,” “new things to do,” generational stage of life; and so on.

The following comments were transcribed from opening remarks by Professor Ephraim Radner delivered at Morning Prayer in the Wycliffe College Founder’s Chapel, on Thursday, Dece

This blog post is the first in a series, in which Wycliffe theology professors consider the COVID vaccination debate. In the following, Ephraim Radner, Professor of Historical Theology asks, “How did the issue of vaccination so divide the church?”

The pandemic has brought forth many questions about how we conduct our lives. We have been forced to re-examine our patterns of living, attitudes, and behaviour and begun to think anew about the very nature of work and its concomitant, recreation, or leisure.

My wife Annette and I own several charcoal and wash drawings by a wonderful artist, Churchill Davenport. We acquired them when we were married in the late 1980’s.

The ventilator may well come to be one of the sorrowful symbols of the time of the Virus. We will associate it, as even now we do, with intense suffering, loss, and even death.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Who was St. Patrick, and what example does his life and mission have for us today? First, a few pertinent facts. We know that Patrick was born in the late fourth century in Roman Britain, the son of a deacon, and grandson of a priest.

Who should you listen to?  Who do you trust to learn something from?  These are important questions for students, obviously.

I often tell my doctoral students that if they have an outside job of more than 10 to 15 hours per week, the chances are that their dissertation will be the worse for it, or that it might not get done at all. Experience seems to confirm this advice. But not always.

You may be familiar with Rev. John Newton (1725-1807) as the author of the famous hymn, Amazing Grace. What you may not know is that he came to have an important ministry as a spiritual director, primarily through letter writing.

“[Wycliffe] College has balanced change with tradition, the building itself reminding faculty, trustees and students alike that they did not start Wycliffe, that each new generation stands on the shoulders of all who have been there before, that to become part of the College is to be received

Life is hard for most people. Not just for a moment, or in moments—an illness, a lost job, a death of someone we love. Rather, life is hard in a continuous way, as a kind of passage over time. To get from birth to death is difficult. 

In an online course I taught some years ago, I posted a message in the class discussion forum containing the text of a parishioner’s interpretation of something that had been spoken in tongues in his church the previous Sunday.

I once heard a priest address a congregation with a question: “What is the complaint I hear most from parents?” Then he answered it by saying: “they lament the fact that their grown children have stopped going to church.”  The priest went on: “Do you know what I tell them?

Shaun Christopher Brown will go down in the history books as Wycliffe College’s first successful conjoint PhD graduate in Theological Studies.

People today know less about history than previous generations did, writes Wycliffe College's Adjunct Professor of Church History and Theological Librarian, Thomas Power, and that is to our detriment.

Witthaya Phuttharaksa is a PhD student at Wycliffe College, Toronto and a Langham Scholar. Now entering his second year of New Testament studies, his eventual goal is to help strengthen the Church in his homeland of Thailand.
 

In the wake of the mass killing in Toronto yesterday, journalists are - like all of us - struggling to make sense of the senseless. Most Canadians reacted to the news of yesterday’s tragic events with shock, disbelief, horror.

It began with self-deprecation but quickly moved to raw anguish.