Full of Life

Peter Stockland

August 19, 2016

Kevin Daudlin’s vocation has taught him to seize the day. As a funeral director, he comes face to face with the reality that life is short. That's why his faith means so much to him. Read more here. 

On the contrary, long before he took us his calling dealing with death, Daudlin began living his deep Catholic witness through charitable work as a member of the Knights of Columbus fraternal order Daudlin, a funeral director in Maple, Ontario, says the profession he first pined to join in universit...

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Finding God in Evin Prison

Stephanie Schoenhoff

August 17, 2016

On January 15th 1982, Marina Nemat was arrested at the age of sixteen by the Islamic government in Tehran. She spent over two years in the infamous Evin Prison. We talked to her about how she kept her faith in the midst of torture. 

But to a God who decides to experience suffering himself Marina says, “Ok, then, we have a deal We cannot blame torture on God, she says: It’s a human choice But nonetheless we tend to blame God for a lot of things he has nothing to do with—perhaps we do this because it’s easier than taking the blam...

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Is the Party Over?

Ray Pennings

August 12, 2016

While the degrees and consequences of these various circumstances differ widely, is the incapacity of the political party to survive the absence of coherent foundational ideas at least part of the problem? Canadian journalist Susan Delacourt wrote a book a few years back documenting the shift from t...

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Bringing People Home

Richelle Wiseman

August 3, 2016

Richelle Wiseman tells the story of Sam Kolias, Alberta-based businessman with a passion for giving back. Read about Sam's humble beginnings here.

As the Chairman and CEO of Boardwalk Rental Communities, Sam received the prestigious  2016 Distinguished Business Leader Award, which is presented annually by the University of Calgary Haskayne School of Business and the Calgary chamber From that early experience of his grandfather fixing a broken ...

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Two Wings of One Bird

Stephanie Schoenhoff

August 2, 2016

“Science and religion are two wings of the same bird,” says Dr. Mehran Anvari, a Baha’i Canadian and one of the world’s leading telerobotic surgeons. 

Anvari’s acumen in the medical sciences has been widely regarded across the globe— in the BBC, The Hamilton Spectator, the Toronto Star and more—he is lesser known for his deep commitment to the Baha’i faith Anvari performs surgery on GI emergencies like this routinely—parents in southern Ontario si...

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Publisher's Letter: Signs of Purpose

Peter Stockland

August 1, 2016

Our purpose will always be to provide thinking on faith in common life to which our audience can respond body and soul. For the first time in history, McLuhan contended, human communication became instantaneous regardless of distance ...

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Small Talk

Raymond J. de Souza

August 1, 2016

An eclectic roundup of incidents, events and oddities that catch our Editor's eye.

In the White House of a President Hillary Clinton, the First Lad would be Bill, cruising around with a roving eye and plenty of free time I spent a good part of the summer in Kraków, host city of World Youth Day (WYD) 2016, the international Catholic youth festival (see "Sea to Sea," June-July 2016)...

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The Conversation: Solitary Talks with God

Marina Nemat with Stephanie Schoenhoff

August 1, 2016

As a political prisoner in Iran, where she was kept in solitary confinement and narrowly escaped execution, Marina Nemat says she discovered the reason God is a great storyteller. "He let's us," she says in conversation with Convivium's Stephanie Schoenhoff, "tell our own stories."

If I'm not asked, I would never, ever go up to people and talk about Jesus and God, even though they are the most dear things to me, because I believe one of the most important things in my life is that I know I'm not a prophet How can you be everything and never have been tortured? It just doesn't ...

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Crossing the Media Landscape

Marcel Vander Wier

August 1, 2016

It's no news that newspapers and other print publications are staggering under the weight of debt and plunging readership. But Marcel Vander Wier discovers that Christian publications are showing surprising resilience amid the general decline and fall.

While secular media continue to focus on conflict in a bid to sell newspapers, Mackey said he believes it is a Christian publication's role to bring ideas of reconciliation to the forefront, noting it was Saint Paul who first described members of the faith as ambassadors of mediation Now 76, Mackey ...

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Christianity and the Natives of Turtle Island

Brad Melle

August 1, 2016

When an indigenous girl refused chemotherapy, then died, it sparked a debate over the differences between traditional and Western medicine. But, according to Brad Melle, there are few differences between the two cultures when it comes to matters of faith. And one significant source of accord: Jesus

This brief overview barely begins to uncover the complexities of the story of Christianity among the First Nations of Turtle Island, but it is clear that Jesus continues to be honoured and to captivate hearts across native North America despite the extensive damage caused to indigenous minds, spirit...

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Parenting, Interrupted

Deborah Rankin

August 1, 2016

Just when society has settled in to the reality and implications of surrogate parenthood, the adult children of medical conception are speaking out against it, Deborah Rankin writes

The whole issue of genetic identity rights turns on a profound yet unstated contradiction: although the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, race and other inherited characteristics that constitute a person's genetic identity, donor-conceived people a...

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Art by the Word

Norm Klassen

August 1, 2016

The Canterbury Tales is a pilgrimage, of course, but St. Jerome's University professor Norm Klassen concludes it is equally an homage to art that calls us to live beautiful lives, taking care to define beauty with reference to Christ.

"Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one / When they combine and mingle, bring / A strong regard and awe" – writing in the same Christian tradition as Chaucer, Herbert combines "sentence" (here, "doctrine") with "difference" (here "life") In a chiasmic X structure, Chaucer then flips the order,...

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Vanity and V-8s

Peter Stockland

August 1, 2016

In a wrecking yard south of Ottawa, Convivium publisher Peter Stockland finds cars that people might have cried in coming home from a funeral, giving him a key to one of the most perplexing books in the Hebrew Bible.

In the 50 last words, Shields argues, the epilogist stands on its head not merely the "festival of negation" that runs riot in the previous chapters written in the guise of Qoheleth the sage but the very idea that wisdom is, as Frye and many others would have it, the way out of the forest "The sages...

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Prophet of the Culture of Death

Rebecca Walker

August 1, 2016

Republication this year of Monsignor R.H. Benson's 109-year-old novel Lord of the World, Rebecca Walker says, illuminates our own darkness, in which Man worships Man and medical killing is considered mere technological comfort.

In Benson's book, Communist leader Oliver Brand and his wife, Mabel, illustrate the consequences of relativism, but their beliefs are complicated by the fact that the book is about the Antichrist, Julian Felsenburgh, ultimately seen by the smitten mob as "Lord and God," the consummate expression of ...

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The Personhood of Liturgy

Rebekah Ann Lamb

August 1, 2016

Reading the new edition of Dietrich von Hildebrand's classic Liturgy and Personality, reviewer Rebekah Ann Lamb writes, reminds us why the language of Christian love is also the language of objective truth.

In July 2016, the Hildebrand Project released a new edition of Liturgy and Personality, one of Hildebrand's more popular works, first published in Germany in 1933 and in English in 1943 Both Guardini and Hildebrand wished to impart that the Liturgy, as the heart of Catholic life, feeds culture ...

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