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Tracks of Life
November 13, 2018
The tracks of life through the midst of buildings, framed by metal fence links.
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Parliament without a Resolution
Susan Korah
November 12, 2018
Convivium contributor Susan Korah reflects on the Parliament of the World’s Religions that drew an estimated 10,000 people to Toronto last week. What, she wonders, is the benefit for those outside the religious tent or, worse, those who fall prey to the darker side of faith?
But the question remains: how can these messages reach and touch the hearts and minds of people who were obviously not present at this festival of interfaith fellowship, who politicize and distort the teachings of the world’s spiritual traditions and unleash orgies of violence and destruction on the...
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A Flare for Science and Faith
Peter Stockland
November 9, 2018
Convivium’s Peter Stockland dropped by the Canadian Science and Policy Conference in Ottawa today where Cardus’ Program Director Milton Friesen diplomatically called on scientists and faith leaders to work together for the public common good.
At the 2017 Canadian Science and Policy Conference, Governor General Julie Payette drew stinging criticism from people of faith and secularists alike for her remarks that many considered scornful of religious belief and practice ...
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Silent Promise
November 8, 2018
White stretches as far as the eye can see. Even the sky is that grey-white that speaks to clouds heavy with snow that will be brought to earth momentarily.
Black tendrils of trees, reach to both earth and sky ...
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Frosted Fingertips
November 8, 2018
The fingers of the evergreen tree reach out towards me with a startling directness.
Each needle contributes to the finger of a branch, a cluster to an arm, an arm to a tree ...
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Bright Presence
November 8, 2018
Northern Cardinal. How majestic you are.
Oh to carry this delight of creation, this beholding of bright sacredness ...
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Engage Vigorously
Gideon Strauss with Heath W. Carter
November 8, 2018
Convivium contributor Gideon Strauss enquires into how historian Heath Carter, recently named Redeemer University College’s 2018 Emerging Public Intellectual, engages church and world.
Church buildings evoke so many questions: What kind of community was it that first imagined and invested in this space? What did it mean for them? What values shaped its design, not to mention its ongoing use? And how did this building end up here, in this particular location, instead of somewhere e...
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The Great War’s Great Failure
Raymond J. de Souza
November 8, 2018
This Sunday will mark, Father Raymond de Souza writes, 100 years since the guns fell silent to stop the catastrophe of mud and futility that was the First World War. It was the end, too, of Europe’s game of thrones and the fall of Christendom’s altars.
Why the pointless fighting in those last hours? There were more casualties on Armistice Day 1918 than there were on D-Day 1944 The war to end all wars did not even end after the armistice was signed that dark French morning Armistice Day 1918, so earnestly awaited and so ardently desired, was yet an...
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Uber or Later
Peter Stockland
November 7, 2018
The Ottawa Senators are in for awkward times after team members mocked their coach in front of the watchful eye of an Uber camera. But the conversation buzzing today is a chance to rethink the ride-hailing services many of us don’t give a second thought, argues Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland.
The full-bore hostility of the taxi horns clued me in immediately that the offending fancy-schmancy was an Uber, which had taken a fare from cabbies parked in pre-dawn darkness for who knew how long awaiting arrival of Train 51 from Montreal Indeed, Uber did begin as a putative market solution to pe...
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A Richer Way To Kiss Dating Goodbye
Peter Jon Mitchell
November 6, 2018
Reviewing a documentary about Joshua Harris’ best-selling book on Christian courtship, Cardus senior research Peter Jon Mitchell regrets that it misses the abundant wisdom of Scripture.
Harris’ book, published in 1997, with its marketable title landed on fertile ground previously tilled by Christian sexual abstinence and purity campaigns, which Harris suggests influenced his writing Harris warns that popular Christian approaches to partnership, sex, and marriage are often construct...
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Tangible Eulogies
Alan Hustak
November 6, 2018
So often, lives are lost as they journey the roads across our country. Alan Hustak reflects on the shrines that sit as visible reminders of lives.
Sometimes, when someone is killed in an automobile accident, a simple white Cross is planted in the ditch by the side of the road to mark the spot where they died ...
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Faith To Combat Division
Susan Korah
November 5, 2018
Convivium contributor Susan Korah is at the week-long Parliament of the World’s Religions in Toronto where an expected 10,000 attendees are getting a message about finding common ground through diverse faiths.
Karen Hamilton, ex-officio General Secretary to the Canadian Council of Churches, reinforced the call to action by people of faith and conviction, arguing that that their combined voices would form a potent force to build a more just, peaceful and sustainable world ...
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Forgiveness and Evil
Raymond J. de Souza
November 1, 2018
Confronted by mass murder that is also sacrilege, our faith is both tested and reconciled, Father Raymond de Souza writes.
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Do 11 Good Things
Hannah Marazzi with Rabbi Reuven Bulka
October 31, 2018
Rabbi Reuven Bulka, prolific writer, communicator and leader in the Jewish community, talks to Convivium’s Hannah Marazzi about the impact of the Pittsburgh synagogue murders and how to honour the 11 people killed at prayer.
We can control that by our attitudes, by saying not only are we condemning the anti-Semitism that kills people but also the anti-Semitism that, in fact, attacks people and insults them, and ridicules them and reviles them and makes them seem repulsive to the community at large Hannah Marazzi: When d...