2011‑2022, and is preserved here for archival purposes.
We live in a world stranger and more enveloped in mystery than what the post-modern consensus of our culture can imagine.
The dream about my father playing with funeral wreaths had nothing to do with any real danger Even after Nan, as we called her, had a debilitating stroke that left her profoundly cognitively disabled for the last seven years of her life, I don't think her perceptions were dimmed My paternal grandmot...
Looking to ethical monotheism to challenge our feelings-based culture.
How do we reconcile relativism with the knowledge that some behaviour must never be tolerated? If you find your authentic self in a system with no hierarchyof morals, values and ethics, no obligations or con comitant responsibilities, what does that say about the authentic you? The modern quest for ...
As March Break looms and Canadian families by the thousands prepare for the pilgrimage to "America's Sistine Chapel," aka Disney World, I advise looking beyond the idealized vision of American capitalism to experience the basic human need to be enchanted.
This rubbish-free world, filled with fireworks, parades and permanent smiles, might be thought of as the happy ending to the American story—where nostalgia, technology and optimism fuse together to remind us that "there's a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day" (lyrics writte...
Discovering deep meaning in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.
But more significantly the movie also frames this meditative recollection with cinematic explorations of the Beginning (of the universe and the subsequent evolution of life on earth) and of the Beyond (the transcendent divine presence that interacts with a soul as it becomes immortal and journeys to...
Theologian photographer, Christophe Potworowski makes the church newly visible in the world.
The more complete pictures, the ones that included the elements of human presence, were in answer to my desire for a more complete understanding, just as they were an answer to the desire for knowledge, for the truth and for the beauty of the church The technique and the composition were dominated b...
When Quebec politicians are assaulting religious freedom in private schools, daycares and even private assemblies it's time to get off our knees.
The Minister of Education, Leisure and Sport decided on her own, with no apparent reason, that a Catholic high school following a Jesuit teaching philosophy was unable to deliver the equivalent of an Ethics and Religious Culture program according to ministry norms The implementation of the Ethics an...
If the Quebec government is compelling school kids to invent fantasy religions, is the endgame to have us all worshipping the state and nothing but the state?
Wouldn't it be much wiser, then, and a better expenditure of our tax dollars, to set our youth the task of seeking something of greater public utility? To wit, a new religion of the State? I say "new" because even the so-called secular State, if Quebec is anything to go by, does seem on closer inspe...
In the 60th year of Queen Elizabeth II's reign, there is value in reflecting on the importance of dynamic symbols in societies where freedom of religion, cultural diversity and civility still matter. While I have written books and articles that engaged issues such as civility and its underpinnings, one of my most significant exposures to its instrumental worth occurred during Her Majesty's visit to Canada in 1959.
Who knows what that gesture meant to other communities, faiths, ethnicities, economic subgroups and everyone else this young and beautiful Queen came into contact with? That she is the head of the Commonwealth as well as the Head of State of 16 of its member countries and has visited consistently ac...
No one can ever accuse Father Raymond J. de Souza of being a member of any Jack Layton fan club. From his remarkably harsh column in the National Post on Layton's funeral to his comments on Layton in the first issue of Convivium (October 2011), there is a definite lack of ambiguity in the arguably hostile caricaturing of Layton's life and death.
My primary counterpoint is directed toward the claim, made in both the National Post column and in Convivium, that by defeating me for the leadership of the NDP in 2003, Layton defeated not only Bill Blaikie "but the social gospel roots the ordained minister represented," a tradition "that Layton di...
Any Canadian hearing Rex Murphy speak would guess at once he is from Newfoundland. No one treated to his upper-register vocabulary and literary phrasings would be surprised to know that he was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. The combination is perhaps why the journalistic icon remains almost shockingly personable and engaging.
His most famous line was 'Who speaks for Canada?' I love the idea that Trudeau pressed, and pressed very hard, for the things that bind us together; the things that give us common energy; the things that if something happens in Bonavista, a small town on the east coast of Newfoundland, it should mea...
An eclectic and ecumenical roundup of incidents, events and oddities that catch our editor's eye.
In a long whine against the federal government's emphasis on the Crown in Canada, she longs for the days when Adrienne Clarkson called herself the "head of state" and served deliciously cosmopolitan fusion cuisine at the sort of Rideau Hall dinners Charlotte Gray got invited to In a long whine again...
Even on his death bed, the anti-theist crusader could not see the power that being changed can give.
In companion essays, Farrow, professor of Christian thought at McGill, and Zucchi, chairman of McGill's history department, maintain that the Quebec government is forcefully imposing a strict secularist religiosity on all strata of life in the province, threatening the very ideal of religious freedo...
The hospital seems to indicate that it is a baby if it dies and the mother experiences grief and loss, but a fetus when the mother has made a choice to end the pregnancy There is the term "fetal demise", "missed abortion of 12 weeks or less," "pregnancy remains/tissue", "pregnancy/baby's remains," a...
So, too, the private justification of public lies produces not only the articulation of absurd political untruths but also the inability over time to recognize the corruption of that interior place where falsehood must first be challenged ...
In the first part of this series on "God for Artists and Artists for God" I suggested that the nature and purpose of art and the vocation of the artist is one that is given by God and is justified in a particular understanding of God's presence in creation and command to us as co-creators An artist ...