When it comes to anthropology, the rubber hits the road in both relationships and politics. This week, we tackle what happens when anthropology enters the political arena. This won’t be easy, because our politics have a way of getting into the air we breathe. It shapes the news we consume, the conversations we avoid, the assumptions we make, and sometimes even the way we see the people sitting across the table from us. Disagreement can start to feel less like disagreement and more like danger. Before long, politics is no longer just helping us think about justice, policy, or the common good. It starts to quietly teach us who to trust, who to fear, and who to dismiss. This Sunday, we continue our series by asking what the Jesus Path might offer in a polarized age. What happens when politics begins to function like a salvation story? What happens when our convictions become a ladder that lifts us above our neighbours? And what might it look like for a church to tell the truth, seek justice, confess its own limits, and still refuse to let contempt have the final word?

This Sunday at Nexus, we continue our series on anthropology by asking what may be the most practical question of all: what do we expect from the people we love? Anthropology can sound abstract until you are married to someone, raising kids with someone, building friendships, joining a church community, or assembling a gazebo with your spouse and discovering that “marital harmony” apparently has a Rona assembly fee. Much of relational life happens not only in what people do in relationships, but in the story we tell ourselves about why they did it. When people disappoint us, forget things, get defensive, act strangely, or fail to become the people we hoped they would be, what story do we tell? This week we will explore how a low anthropology may not make love less possible, but more honest, more merciful, and perhaps more able to carry the ordinary weight of real human relationships.

Friends, this Sunday we keep moving through our anthropology series by asking a deceptively simple question: what if the "self" is not something to be found, but something to be formed? As we start to explore the real-world implications of the anthropology we hold, I want to explore the tension between cultural aphorisms like “be yourself” and “you do you” with Jesus’ words “deny yourself.” Can you be yourself, or do you, while denying yourself? There is a tension here between the modern quest for authenticity and the strangely different path Jesus offers. So, our anthropology journey continues with a look at the "self" and why it may be less coherent and stable than we often assume, and why that might actually be good news! Along the way I want to explore the story of Peter denying Jesus, his dinner invitation to Zacchaeus, and why the movie Downhill (starring Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) might offer us a clue as to why performing the "self" can come to feel less like freedom, and more like a burden. So, this Sunday, we’ll consider the possibility that grace begins not when you finally find your truest self, but when you discover something better.