2011‑2022, and is preserved here for archival purposes.
Fiction from Randy Boyagoda
"And you know what, sir," Lawrence said to my grandfather, "you see Adam over there, his wife is expecting their sixth child! You should see her, so big! And when my little brother goes home tonight and tells her he got lucky at work today, she'll be so happy for him Lawrence Litvack believed that a...
Before there was Wonder Woman (1941), there was Batman (1939). After both of them, there was Spider-Man (1962). But before all of them, Travis Smith informed Convivium Readers in 2013, the world marvelled at Batmessiah and Spider-Mensch.
Whereas the order that the modern technological project seeks to impose would absolve individuals of the need to practise personal and interpersonal responsibility, responsibility is the central theme of Peter Parker's story When the widowed Aunt May's new fiancé, Nathan Lubensky, and Peter first sp...
The Evangelical Fellowship’s Don Hutchinson on speaking faith in the public square
DH: The court has taken hate speech out of the jurisdiction of ‘you said something awful that hurt my feelings' and into the jurisdiction of ‘your statement would cause society generally to detest a group of people with which I as an individual am associated Instead of focusing on its weaknesses and...
John Zucchi reflects on his personal friendships with two of the cardinals who might have become pope
It was seeing the Church come alive in the souls of Marc Ouellet and Angelo Scola that drew me to them and allowed me to enter these friendships, which have lasted as a great gift even though I rarely get the chance to see them now Frustrated, I once turned to Père Marc for an explanation of why peo...
Manitoba law professor Donn Short wants to “queer” Canadian schools to make them safe for gay pupils. Albertos Polizogopoulos considers the Charter implications for religious freedom
Following a cursory consideration of the controversy over Ontario's Bill 13, the Accepting Schools Act, and its mandated implementation in Catholic separate schools as well as non-sectarian public schools, Short argues that the common understanding of denominational education rights set out in the C...
Pushing and pulling to political extremes
As the debate unfolds within these pages about conservative or liberal interpretations of our common life, we must be careful not to slide into extremes, in society and in the churches, of libertines and reactionaries But when liberals become libertines and conservatives, reactionaries, we are in da...
The "chatter" of this class, I take it, is the constant din of commentary on everything: the need to analyze, dissect, explain, and predict ad infinitum But the situation of incessant commentary and distraction begs for Pascalian analysis: we have Twitter feeds to hide from the disturbing questions ...
But the idea of structuring government involvement in foreign aid so that it coheres with foreign policy and trade objectives, while increasingly relying on non-governmental relief organizations to provide relief to those in need, is one that compels me ...
When Tiger bottomed out at 58th place in the world standings, and was stuck in the muck of his own making, John emphatically declared him "finished" as a force in golf In golf, there are hackers, there are inept fanatics (hi, mom!), there are very good amateur players (Peter Menzies, call the Cardus...
One of the points of collective bargaining—indeed the key point of collective bargaining—is that it is intended to replace the patchwork of individual employment contracts in a workplace with one contract, negotiated by the union, on behalf of all employees If the collective agreement focuses too mu...
Might a union movement which seeks social, political, and financial power, rather than seeking human flourishing and fulfilment in work, be dead before it even begins? Perhaps what is needed is less talk about how to expand or maintain power, but a re-evaluation of why we work and why it's good for ...
and Rethinking Faith, categorizes our children as falling into three distinct groups: prodigals or those who have lost their convictions, nomads or those who are disaffected from the church, and exiles or those who are increasingly living their callings with tension And perhaps, just perhaps, this k...
Long before "The Hockey Song" propelled him to Canadian earworm status, I was an apostle of Stompin' Tom Connors and a fierce advocate of the late, great Prince Edward Islander's elevation to poet laureate Can you name one literary artist in Canadian history who would have the sheer guts—never mind ...
What more can be said when a state wishes to stomp on even the green shoots of humanity in the face of death? It would appear that suppression is not just saved for those wanting democracy; Iran's suppression of the grief that arises from a fate to which we are all bound is a suppression of somethin...