Convivium Magazine

Kiwi COVID Containment Bears Bad Fruit

Robert Joustra

August 18, 2020

New Zealand is feted for its pandemic lockdown, but Robert Joustra says the awkward truth of Auckland’s approach is it raises irrational fear even as we’re being fleeced economically.

What does it mean for our own careful reopening of schools and businesses this fall? I think it means no matter how economically suicidal certain policies may appear, uncertain short-run security concerns – that we might get sick – may win the battle for hearts and minds Medium to long range economi...

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The Motivations of Missionary Martyrs

Natalie Morrill

August 15, 2020

Reviewing Joan Thomas’ historical novel Five Wives, Natalie Morrill wonders what moral calculus contemporary readers can bring to evangelizing engagement with vulnerable populations.

In 1956, five Christian missionaries attempting to evangelize the “uncontacted” Waorani people set up camp in Waorani territory in Ecuador He’s a character for whom the Christian missionaries are as alien as the Waorani warriors who killed them: “He had no idea how to talk to these people,” he reali...

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Liberalism’s Moody Blues

Robert Joustra

August 14, 2020

Anne Applebaum’s new book eulogizes the global ruin of classical liberalism as an empty table at a dinner party that former friends refuse to attend, reviewer Robert Joustra writes.

Who can’t name a friend, a family member, a work colleague, that we once knew, laughed with, loved, that is now lost? Those losses hang heavy over Anne Applebaum’s new, beautiful memoir, a long lament for a lost liberalism A certain kind of political animal will find Applebaum’s book a tasteless mem...

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Bidding Loyola a Long Goodbye

Peter Stockland

August 13, 2020

Paul Donovan’s retirement as president of Montreal’s Loyola High School ends his 39-year association with the historic Catholic institution, which included a major religious freedom victory in the Supreme Court. Peter Stockland reports.

Paul Donovan, the recently retired president of Montreal’s Loyola High School, stands by the graduating class photo that contains his father Kevin, who was also a student at the storied Jesuit high school When he was promoted to president from principal of Loyola five years ago, in the aftermath o...

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The Moral Pandemic of MAiD

Christina Lamb

August 11, 2020

Afflicted by the ideology of the right to die movement, Christina Lamb writes, Canadians are losing the sense of human dignity that unites us in bearing each other’s suffering.

While death consists of a loss and may involve a prelude of suffering, which can be substantially relieved by ethically proportionate pain control and holistic care measures, all the Canadian euthanasia movement affirms is that Canada is quickly losing a sense of the significance of suffering as par...

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Finding the Right Helping Hands for Beirut

Susan Korah

August 10, 2020

Canadian NGOs are meeting the challenge of keeping aid dollars from disappearing into corrupt pockets after the explosion that shredded the Lebanese capital, Susan Korah reports.

The Beirut explosion seems like the denouement to the unfolding tragedy of Lebanon, a country where high unemployment, an economic meltdown, burdensome taxes, staggering inflation that left its currency virtually useless, and covid-19 were already taking their toll Catholic Near East Welfare Agency ...

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Canada Must Boycott Beijing Olympics

Don Hutchinson

August 6, 2020

Ottawa lawyer Don Hutchinson says it’s “beyond belief” Canada would participate in the 2022 Winter Olympics given the Chinese regime’s reprehensible persecution of religion.

Just before Parliament adjourned in June 2008 for summer break the Religious Liberty Commission (RLC) of The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada released a report called Broken Promises: The Protestant Experience with Religious Freedom in China in Advance of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games The invitatio...

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Why WE Wouldn’t Listen

Robert Joustra

August 5, 2020

From historic military meltdowns to last week’s barbecuing of the Kielburger brothers by a Commons committee, being too nice to ask hard questions invariably risks organizational catastrophe, Robert Joustra writes.

WE is really a case study in problems that plague organizations of their kind: they are routinely victims of their own groupthink, saddled with high likeability, mission fidelity, and cultish devotion The paradigmatic case study is, after all, the Bay of Pigs; funding and outfitting a violent coup i...

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Yazidis Refuse to Become Yesterday’s News

Susan Korah

August 4, 2020

Northern Iraqi religious refugees who fled ISIS-generated genocide six years ago fear Ottawa is turning the page on its promise to help them heal, Susan Korah writes.

The Canadian director of the international advocacy organization Yazda said intense media focus on 2018 Nobel Prize winner Nadia Murad failed to produce long-term support for Yazidis They are slowly learning that Canada is actually part of the coalition fighting in Syria and Iraq but they are astoun...

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Drafting on Milton Friedman's Heroics

Matthew Lau

July 31, 2020

Matthew Lau explains why the late eminent economist remains his personal hero. Hint: it has to do with letting individuals decide whether to wear army boots.

Contrary to popular belief, the cost of staffing the military, Friedman showed both in an essay in the New York Times Magazine in 1967 and in his regular columns in Newsweek magazine, was not made cheaper by conscription Shortly after his inauguration, Nixon appointed a commission of 15 people, incl...

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Hospice Stands Firm Against All-Out Assault

Peter Stockland

July 29, 2020

The current board of the Irene Thomas Hospice in Delta, B.C., is fighting to stay true to its Christian roots and remain “an authentic palliative care facility,” writes Peter Stockland.

The board of the Irene Thomas Hospice hoped faith alone could stop the onslaught of MAiD at the 10-bed palliative care facility on Vancouver’s southeast edge In fact, Angelina Ireland adds, it’s been clear for months the whole goal of a social media-driven membership campaign was to build the number...

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A Time for Holy Wisdom

Robert Joustra

July 28, 2020

As Turkey reconverts the Hagia Sophia from secular museum to mosque, it risks a deal with the devil by turning religious devotion to political purpose, Robert Joustra writes.

On the other hand, the move by Erdoğan, under an ostensibly secular Turkish state, seems motivated to catalyze a religious nationalism, one out of step with Turkey’s avowedly secular recent past, but very much part of a larger global trend State funding is a significant cause of corruption in religi...

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When Mass Kneeling Replaces Faith

Peter Menzies

July 27, 2020

A generation raised without religious faith is suddenly dropping to its knees to plead its causes. Peter Menzies asks whether it’s the spirit moving – or another triumph of marketing.

As we all know, our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defied every health care order in the country to not only take a knee but to do so within a mass gathering/protest The same scene takes place every Sunday in hundreds of churches across the country and - let’s face it - in a great many churches those...

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Keep Politics Out of Procurement

David McKernan

July 21, 2020

Government support for disadvantaged groups is morally worthy but has no business trumping best value as the basis for purchasing public goods and services, David McKernan argues.

Despite its many flaws, the competitive process upheld by Public Services Procurement Canada has always sought to determine fair and objective measures of evaluation upon which a company can or cannot do business with the government The designers of the Shared Services RFP must have a moral compulsi...

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Deciphering WE and Democracy

Peter Stockland

July 17, 2020

What questions didn't get asked, wonders Peter Stockland, when a 36-member cabinet assessed a $900 million plan with a mega-charity linked to the Prime Minister and his family?

Or else what? Do you really want a collision with Daddy? It’s has the ring, at least, of being a Canadian political reminder that, to borrow Anne Applebaum’s phrase, “sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe the bull – it’s to make people fear the bully Wilson-Raybould, of course, is the for...

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