2011‑2022, and is preserved here for archival purposes.
There is much research outside of my own and Cardus's that suggests churches and faith-based organizations are vital to building social capital and increasing resilience in communities (see Putnam) I wasn't surprised that many of my participants were involved in Hughson Street Baptist Church's progr...
Either the fine people at REAL Women of Canada missed that particular memo with its deeply conservative emphasis on constancy and prudence, or they suffered a temporary lapse in memory before issuing a terribly wrong-headed media release last week For while the media shred the air with their obsessi...
We can relate to the plight of the zombie, stuck in a life where to consume is to be happy, and to be happy is to have a better condo, a fancier car, a more expensive purse, a delicious bread-pudding ...
If, somehow, these newspapers manage to survive the ravages of time and Jeff Bezos, this type of thing will one day be recounted as part of the historical record of western civilization: play date brokers and nanny/parent mediators ...
Welby's action on payday loans is yet another piece of surprising evidence of unity in the Church ...
But this American dream of upward mobility and economic stability is shriveling, or at least contracting—subject to a new sort of segregation (noted, for example, in Charles Murray's important 2012 book, Coming Apart) The Equality of Opportunity Project tracked the upward mobility of children born i...
Chua's essay is the failure to meld the power of his subjective impressions about racism into clear argument that guides the reader toward the understanding that racism is discernible in the random facial expressions of strangers as much as in overt acts Last Friday, a young British Columbian publis...
The application of Charter protection regarding freedom of religion and whether that applies only to natural persons or also to institutions (such as a high school based on a religious order) The ERC purpose is straightforward: "The new program, which reflects the preference of the majority of Quebe...
Who knows more about a hare in the end: Dürer or the scientist who dissects a rabbit in a lab? Beauty is knowledge by union and empathy with, not knowledge by disassembly and distancing from Artists everywhere are being called up to the show to remind us of what it means when God said of his handiwo...
Father Raymond J. de Souza reflects on the four magisterial September lectures Pope Benedict XVI delivered during his eight-year pontificate
So why, if that was Benedict's main point, get into Islam at all? Why the incendiary late-14th century quotation from Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus—the one that ostensibly set off riots on the inflammable Muslim street? "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will f...
In the second of our conversations on the consecrated life in Canada, Peter Stockland talks to Michelle Rebidoux of the Sri Chinmoy community
PS: I wonder if it'll ever come here and give the Running Room a run for its money? How do people actually become part of the Sri Chinmoy movement? What's the entrance point? Do they simply start showing up at meetings at the invitation of a friend? Do they have to go through a formal process? Are t...
An excerpt from Robert Ventresca’s new book on the historically controversial pontiff
What if Pius XII had issued a forceful, unequivocal condemnation of Nazism and especially its persecution of Jews? What if the pope had directed his representatives and all European Catholics to resist Nazi policies actively? How many more Jews, and others, might have been saved? Indeed, to the crit...
Gina Rubinsky’s meditation on her mother’s moment in front of Joseph Mengele
My late grandmother, aware of what the significance was of being motioned to the right or left (right meaning life; and left, the gas chambers) turned to my mother, explained what she understood and said to her, "When he speaks to you, try your best to get sent to the right side ...
Guy Gavriel Kay’s fiction takes a quarter-turn to the fantastic. Robert Joustra closes the circle of meaning
His novels move from high fantasy and world building to historical fiction with a quarter-turn from mythology to the religious "In The Lions of Al-Rassan, one of the reasons the book is a fantasy rather than a story about medieval Spain, even though it's very closely modelled on real history, is tha...
Diplomat Anne Leahy warns that Canada’s commitment to religious freedom at home will crown or cripple its efforts to promote religious freedom internationally
Canada's foreign policy and practice of diplomacy have included religious freedom as part of the defence and promotion of human rights for as long as I can remember Advocacy for the rights of people belonging to religious minorities, promotion of understanding in multiconfessional society, and the p...