2011‑2022, and is preserved here for archival purposes.
Father Raymond J. de Souza's continuing survey of religion, culture and public life.
LeBel explained that while there was no hierarchy of rights, over time certain rights have emerged as more central or more important in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence Alluding to the last words of Saint Thomas More, whose image Scalia had included in his official portrait at the Supreme Court, Fa...
In Rémi Brague’s Le règne de l’homme: Genèse et échec du projet moderne, Graeme Hunter finds the most thorough illumination of how progress became the abolition of man.
By the 19th century, it was fashionable to look at all of human history as an experiment, or as the totality of what John Stuart Mill called “experiments in living Humanism, once considered a secular ally of the Church in her attempt to improve human life, has gone wild and dark ...
University of Lethbridge political theorist John von Heyking reads in Saint Augustine the stark warning that the violent will always bear it away among broken human beings. The good news? That’s the start of peace.
As deficient as the political societies are that human beings organize themselves into, and as monumentally difficult (if not impossible) it is for human beings to get control of the instruments of violence, Augustine did acknowledge that the small differences among regimes (small in comparison to t...
Modern secularism attributed to Europe’s infamous Wars of Religion really rests on 19th century myths that ignored the State’s provocation of bloodshed, writes historian Kevin Flatt.
In what kind of Christian society could auto-da-fé, meaning “act of In our secular age, a more common reading of the Wars of Religion runs something like this: After the Reformation, religious passions ran amok and led to great bloodshed, until finally political authorities banished religious disput...
In her most recent collection of essays, The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson once again proves to be one of the most important voices for Modern North America. In "Fear," she provides a timely analysis of the pervasive fears smothering American culture. Rather than give in to the alarmism, she reminds us that the best antidote to fear is not more security and higher walls, it's more faith, hope, and love..
If the point of American yearnings for our past is to recover a religious culture that was uniquely ours, how do we deal with the many pasts that have come with immigration or that we have accepted as our share in a part of Western history? Must we not be a little careful about proceeding without in...
We had just brought together for April-May essays on the roots of religious violence, centred on the thinking of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and his remarkable recent book Not in God’s Name “This Convivium is an invitation to resist those urges to isolate and marginalize and, in the face of violence, ...
In the 1990s, Bruce Myers was chasing political news stories as a member of the national press gallery in Ottawa. As of May, at age 43, he will be an Anglican bishop in Quebec, pastor of a small flock spread across hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. Myers tells Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland that, like a good reporter, he is confident he’ll be in the right place at the right time as Quebecers overcome their violent reaction to organized religion and let God into their lives again..
I think he’s helpfully named how we’ve gotten to this place we’re in, especially in the Quebec context, where the Church in many ways has lost its traditional place in society and where there’s much that the Church has traditionally taught and offered that people aren’t willing to accept or aren’t n...
Most Albertans – whether they realize it or not – have heard of Fr. Lacombe. A quick Internet search reveals that this saintly missionary priest has had a neighbourhood, nursing home, hotel, park, school, Catholic men’s guild and even a town named after him.
Inside reverent silence is required as you are standing on holy ground; it is here that the good heart of Father Albert Lacombe rests alongside numerous students of his Midnapore School, many of whom were laid to rest during the last major tuberculosis outbreak ...
Greg Humbert is on a hunt to document the living link between faith and health care. Read about his work at Catholic Health Alliance of Canada.
Since he began the Catholic Hospitals Digital History Books Collection for what is now the Catholic Health Alliance of Canada, Humbert has acquired and scanned, page by page, 300 books “documenting the legacy and contribution of the Congregations of Religious Women in Canada, their mission in health...
On Tuesday, B.C. Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal rose in the House of Commons to invite all Canadians to join in celebrating Vaisakhi and Khalsa Day. Prime Minister Trudeau had just reminded Canadians the day before of the deplorable Komagata Maru incident, and vowed to make a formal apology in the House of Commons for the bigotry and mistreatment it embodied.
Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal rose in the House of Commons to invite all Canadians to join in celebrating Vaisakhi and Khalsa Day ...
So, in this case, the Court of Appeal of Nova Scotia was being asked to consider whether the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society (the “NSBS”) acted properly and within its authority in refusing to recognize law degrees from TWU because of the latter’s view and position on marriage and sexuality, just li...
(Might federal Conservatives, who dropped the term Progressive from their name when it became unfashionable a decade ago, ponder renewing old nomenclature at their May convention in Vancouver?) Conventionally, party conventions were idea factories for future elections References to aboriginal spirit...
A diverse group of Canadians explore the complexities of the Middle East.
Clair line in Toronto) that passes through East and West Jerusalem, joining Arab and Jewish sections both beyond and within the disputed borders of the city But because wherever we travelled, people wanted to know about this unusual group and how life in Canada enabled us to imagine the possibility ...
At the recent Broadbent Institute conference in Ottawa, progressive icon Gloria Steinem dropped a clanger that rates high among the fatuous pensées of this addled decade It’s a conceit so powerful that it can attract even self-styled fiscal conservatives who insist vociferously that there is no poli...