Throne Speech is a Matter of Confidence

Don Hutchinson

September 23, 2020

Convivium contributor Don Hutchinson sets up resumption of Parliament by explaining the historical significance of the Speech from the Throne – and its potential political pitfalls for Justin Trudeau.

Will Trudeau use the Throne Speech to recalibrate in an effort to buy time, perhaps even for a winter walk in the snow like his father 36 years ago? Will he try to snooker one or more opposition party leaders into unfastening themselves from their parties’ notable political proposals so Liberals can...

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Staying Home for School

Andrea Mrozek

September 21, 2020

COVID-19 concerns could open parents’ eyes to the crucial benefits of kitchen-table learning, developmental psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld tells Cardus’ Andrea Mrozek.

The idea of parent-led home education has become markedly more popular in the pandemic, but it is still an uncomfortable idea to parents steeped in the view that going to school is the gold standard for their children’s development socially, emotionally and academically Published earlier this month,...

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The Perils of Facing Down Facebook

Peter Menzies

September 15, 2020

Canada’s federal Heritage Minister needs a better grip on who he’s dealing with before shaking his fist too often at Mark Zuckerberg’s social media colossus, Peter Menzies writes.

Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault is determined to pick a fight with Facebook in his bid to find a way to fund failing newspaper publishers - a battle that may end with news media being blocked from access to global social media audiences A preview of what awaits us is already playing out in Austr...

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Hamilton is in the House

Russ Kuykendall

September 11, 2020

Russell Kuykendall says the musical dismissed by some as white bread civics lite brings hip hop attitude to U.S. constitutional history.

The musical Hamilton poses the question of how the American Revolution might have unfolded had the principals been people of colour That said, again Miranda has done a public service, introducing a generation who may not have been exposed to the American narrative of civic republican government ...

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The Tent of Abraham

Amanda Achtman

September 9, 2020

Catholic Priest Father Noel Farman brings his “universal heart” to Calgary from his native Nineveh, Amanda Achtman reports.

“With time I established close relationships with eminent journalists and readers, and the articles signed by the Christian name Noel were a specific mission (i.e Noel says that, “During the first year after the fall of Saddam Hussein, we were mistaken in thinking that the Americans came to liberate...

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Blueprints for God’s Hotels

Peter Stockland

September 7, 2020

Raymonde Gauthier, co-curator of a current exhibit at Montreal’s Hôtel Dieu museum, explores with Peter Stockland how the 19th century partnership of Bishop Ignace Bourget and architect Victor Bourgeau shaped the city’s spiritual landscape.

What is known is that over the course of his years crafting churches at Bourget’s behest, Bourgeau gained such architectural stature in Montreal that he was ultimately able to spurn the Bishop’s greatest commission The succeeding 36 years constituted a whirlwind of ultra-montane Roman Catholic expan...

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The Everlasting G. K. Chesterton

Peter Stockland

September 4, 2020

Retiring this summer after 46 years as editor of the Chesterton Review, Father Ian Boyd tells Peter Stockland why the great Christian journalist has such enduring appeal and importance.

“(George Bernard) Shaw said that the world Chesterton was interested in was in the future rather than the past,” Father Boyd says The confession draws surprisingly little surprise from Father Ian Boyd, the world’s leading expert on the great Catholic apologist, and founding editor of The Chesterton ...

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Sharing Memory Matters

Peter Stockland

September 2, 2020

Energy wasted defending or toppling statues should instead power a national conversation about what, why and how we collectively commemorate our pluralistic pasts, Peter Stockland writes.

For her book Talking Stones: The Politics of Memorialization in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland, Elisabetta Viggiani mapped 157 publicly visible sites of Troubles commemoration in Belfast “The first casualty of peace is often the memory of war,” Ulster historian Jane Leonard writes in an essay publis...

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Driving Ms. Chrystia

Matthew Lau

August 31, 2020

Matthew Lau argues Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s weakness is not her lack of qualifications but her insistence she can steer the economy while wearing sunglasses at night.

However, what Chrystia Freeland has proposed to do as finance minister – to reorganize the Canadian economy so as to make it more green, equitable, and inclusive – is an undertaking for which she is certainly not qualified It would, in fact, be a strong indication that Chrystia Freeland is well-suit...

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Regaining Lost Educational Ground

Joe Woodard

August 29, 2020

In part two of his essay on the damage done by a century of “revolutionary” pedagogy, Joe Woodard foresees the power of independent schools and parental choice for returning education to its natural purpose.

The real issue in the Pedagogy of Liberation is the theory of happiness as self-discovery, self-expression, self-esteem, self-satisfaction – self, self, self By the 1990s, parents were deliberately choosing language immersion schools for their tighter discipline, and charter schools were reinstating...

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The Lost Common Good of Education

Joe Woodard

August 28, 2020

As parents send their kids back to school plagued by the new peril of COVID-19, Joe Woodard argues the real classroom risk remains an outmoded pedagogical revolution that turned education against its true nature.

For three generations, public education itself had eroded our behavioral norms, artistic tastes and popular pieties, in celebrating the Technocrat as the ascendant cultural archetype The Pedagogy of Community, the commitment to a cultural Common Good and shared virtue, had already been undermined by...

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The Unbearable Whiteness of Jesus

Don Hutchinson

August 27, 2020

Questions about the Christian Messiah’s skin colour offer a fascinating complex of archeological, historical, migratory, linguistic and theological answers that ultimately won’t matter, Don Hutchinson writes.

Questions about the whiteness of Jesus, White presence in Bible times, and the whiteness of the North American Church have become widespread in public debate during recent months Does it matter to the mission and ministry of Jesus and his Church whether Jesus was White? Does the gospel change based ...

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Can We Talk?

Peter Stockland

August 25, 2020

Will the strong showing of Leslyn Lewis in the Tory leadership race revitalize a socially conservative conversation in Canada? Peter Stockland isn’t placing a bet on it.

That means bye-bye-birdie from the federal scene for MacKay, who set off the leadership race last year by criticizing Andrew Scheer for allowing social conservative issues to “hang around his neck like a stinking albatross” during the 2019 campaign Theoretically, that should in turn leave room for a...

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Making Book on Chrystia Freeland

Robert Joustra

August 24, 2020

Newly minted Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s best bet for sussing out his Liberal foes is putting his money down on the newly appointed Finance Minister’s eight-year-old manifesto, Robert Joustra writes.

The pandemic opens an opportunity for just the kind of bold agenda that the Prime Minister and Finance Minister Freeland see as necessary to pry open Canada’s Book of Gold before it is set in stone Chrystia Freeland, in her 2012 book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of ...

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The Cardinal’s Diplomatic Dressing Down

Peter Stockland

August 20, 2020

Quebec’s mistreatment of faith groups during the COVID lockdown drew a Cardinal’s ire in words high on diplomacy and inspiring, says Canada’s former ambassador to the Vatican. Peter Stockland reports.

The whole of the statement is a relentlessly polite evisceration of the Quebec government’s ill-mannered and anti-democratic exclusion of the Church, yes, but also all faith communities in planning, executing and communicating around the COVID crisis But Father Piotr’s words were also a localized ma...

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