2011‑2022, and is preserved here for archival purposes.
It can, however, prove immensely useful if we understand some of the important features of the data landscape and it may, under the right kinds of analysis, help us sort out some of the puzzles we face Data and the analysis that makes sense of it has important differences in texture, purpose, and po...
I watched from a few feet away—and silently cheered madly—as she ate Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney alive during an impromptu press conference on the tarmac at Mirabel Airport when the two clashed over South African sanctions I remember watching the eyes of the Canadian delegates there and, ...
How many depict real life? Last week, Shauna Niequist wrote in RELEVANT about the internet being full of partial-truths, images without context, particularly in social media ...
The wonksters are not the occupiers, or the greenies; their ideology is not thick, but variable and pragmatic, pivoting on a political slogan not unlike "the boomers screwed us ...
In addition to guiding two pieces of legislation through Parliament to help combat human trafficking legally, Smith is active in a network of safe houses set up across the country to give victims a place they can go for security, shelter, food, clothing, and eventually education Unfazed by the inces...
Apart from leadership campaigns, there are few notions of democracy left in our political parties ...
Financial repression (manipulation of interest rates below the inflation rate) is entering its fifth year and has only provided governments and their citizens around the world with the increased capacity to continue gorging on savers and investors So while we are looking across the pond at the disas...
So when dementia began to influence him a couple of years into his post-Premier life he would stand, hesitantly and most of the time alone at the fringes of public functions in rooms where no one remotely resembling Martha or Henry could be found Many words have and will continue to be written about...
Governor General David Johnston meets Convivium’s editor-in-chief in Rome to discuss faith, diplomacy and a new pope
RJS: Pope Benedict, now retired, spoke on the eve of his election about the contest between proposing Christian truth and the dictatorship of relativism, and he spent most of his life on university campuses before he came to the Holy See DJ: One thing is to reinforce the spiritual life of Canadians:...
Jason Zuidema’s continuing study of Canada’s religious orders
Finally, if religious were key figures in pre-Vatican II understandings of evangelization, how do they now function? If they were essential to a previous stage in evangelization, that is the "old" evangelization, is there a way in which religious are no longer necessary for evangelization? Is there ...
Time and eternity
This mysterious shading of the finite and infinite, of time and timelessness, was a chiaroscuro thematic during the papal conclave that brought us Pope Francis, and it is in the April/May issue of Convivium as well "The conclave refuses to accommodate itself to the world outside, even if the fruit o...
Father Raymond J. de Souza reports from Rome on the election of Pope Francis
So it is possible to recall with admiration the decision of Blessed John Paul II to suffer to the end and, at the same time, to admire Pope Benedict's humility and courage in laying down, for the good of the Church, the office entrusted to him While the public reaction of cardinals and bishops has b...
An excerpt from Ryan Topping’s new book, Rebuilding Catholic Culture: How the Catechism Can Shape Our Common Life
Eliot observed in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, "there is an aspect in which we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people Thus Catholic culture refers to that excellence in thought and manner of life that properly accrues to a people, namely the Church In this excerpt fr...
A classic essay by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel aids Dr. Nicholas Newman to frame Quebec’s plan to kill hospital patients
For the past several years, Quebecers have been subjected to a propaganda campaign to persuade them—and the doctors who provide them with medical care—that euthanasia and assisted suicide are a natural and favourable social evolution whose time has come It is a question particularly pertinent to Mén...
If truth equals reality, then relativism is the wrong answer, Richard Bastien argues
For example, Hans Kelsen, a prominent Austrian jurist who played a major role in the development of 20th century Western jurisprudence and public law, argued that because of the multiplicity of religious and moral beliefs, the only appropriate attitude in building the legal framework of a modern soc...