From Bud to Bloom: B.C.’s Growing Independent Schools

Lloyd Mackey

October 19, 2018

Convivium contributor Lloyd Mackey was at the release of Cardus data on West Coast educational innovation this week as program director Beth Green explained what the numbers reveal. The news is good. The challenges are real, Green says.

Green and her fellow researchers concluded that independent education is a "public good" because graduates of such schools are "just as likely – and often are more likely – than their peers in the non-religious public sector to cultivate diverse social ties The baseline, Green said, was the public s...

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The Sacred Journey of Caregiving

Stephanie Schoenhoff with Colette Halferty

October 19, 2018

The Henri Nouwen Society will host a full-day retreat Oct. 27 in Ottawa aimed at helping caregivers care for themselves. Courage for Caregivers aims to identify challenges and gifts by offering new spiritual practices to sustain long-term self-care. Convivium contributor Stephanie Schoenhoff spoke with the Society’s Colette Halferty about hopes – and prayers – for the event.

 CH: True caring can be difficult, and caregivers must also learn how to be care receivers if they are to be nourished and have the physical, emotional and spiritual energy and resilience necessary to remain healthy while they accompany and care for others  Nouwen's wisdom reminds us of the support ...

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The Writing on the Wall

Peter Stockland

October 18, 2018

The subterranean (and perhaps metaphorical) walls of our cities are teeming with the words of would-be prophets, but we’re being made oblivious by the meaningless. Peter Stockland warns that truth is getting jumbled—right under our noses.

If it’s simply a matter of the existing reality that animals are, in fact, food for both animals and people, then the exhortation might have been meant prescriptively, even imperatively By a perfect alignment of random peas on the cosmic plate, it happened to be International Food Day, and I had jus...

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Marijuana Legality and Morality

Raymond J. de Souza

October 17, 2018

Father Raymond de Souza explains how marijuana use remains immoral even if governments across the country have made it legal today.

Alcohol consumption becomes immoral when it compromises our reason, that rational faculty which makes us distinctively human “With the exception of cannabis use for medicinal purposes, consuming marijuana violates the virtue of temperance and should be avoided,” said Monsignor Frank Leo, general sec...

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Tomorrow Looks Bright for B.C. Schools

Lloyd Mackey

October 16, 2018

Convivium contributor Lloyd Mackey talks to Cardus’ Beth Green about “exciting” educational data she’ll release Wednesday at Surrey B.C.’s Pacific Academy.

Public school graduates, who have the same trust in civic institutions as their peers, but are less likely to be engaged with such institutions than their peers who graduated from independent schools Their school also forms graduates who attend church, observe religious disciplines, and strengthen t...

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Religious, Not Holy

Peter Stockland

October 15, 2018

Patti Smith—the punk poet laureate—identifies Christ as an artist, crafting his ideal of salvation with imagination. Smith’s own art and imagination, writes Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland, is a cry against the modern mania for “God usurped by Goal.”

In addition to the music and the touring, Smith published The New Jerusalem earlier this year, and added new material for her breathtaking Devotion, originally brought out by Yale University Press in 2017 and re-released last month in paperback In his introduction to Patti’s Smith’s gloriously stran...

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Shredded Suite

Rachel Feddema

October 12, 2018

Famed street painter Banksy’s sneak attack on his own freshly auctioned work may seem like hanky-panky for philistines, but Convivium’s Rachel DeBruyn contends it’s of a piece with the artistic urge to create, destroy and m’oeuvre it on over again.

Last week, Banksy pulled a stunt that left the world buzzing and my family theorizing across the turkey and stuffing In that same Instagram video, Banksy wrote: “The urge to destroy is a creative urge,” attributing the quote to Picasso For Picasso, creative destruction was a means of breaking the ar...

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Papal Holiness

Raymond J. de Souza

October 12, 2018

Father Raymond de Souza travels to Rome for the canonization of Pope Paul VI, which he notes is part of a 21st century uptick in papal sainthoods.

In time, he was canonized as a sort of rebuke in the flesh to the corrupt Renaissance papacy, the first pope in nearly three hundred years to be declared a saint October 11th is, in fact, the liturgical feast day of Pope John XXIII, canonized in 2014 along with Pope John Paul II ...

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Religious Diversity is Good Business

Ray Pennings

October 11, 2018

Cardus Executive Vice President Ray Pennings says the Quebec government’s planned public service ban on symbols of faith is out of step with growing awareness about the positive presence of religion in the workplace.

It’s also out of step with the growing awareness among the business community that religious diversity deserves respect in the workplace Even if it doesn’t, perhaps the business sector can show there is a better way to do things by respecting and making room for religious diversity in the workplace ...

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Pause and Effect

Peter Stockland

October 10, 2018

Today, Peter Stockland explores how the act of running is not some Olympic-level commitment to all-in exhaustion. Rather, this discipline creates space in our lives to move away from stress and towards a fuller sense of health and goodness.

My favourite moment in Havey’s book, however, is a very short section in which she shows how simple it is to make running, and its complementary awareness, part of everyday life Yet finishing the 29th run of that leap year affirmed for me a deepening conviction that one of our terrible cultural conf...

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Becoming Counterculturally Quiet

Karen Stiller

October 9, 2018

In Vancouver writer Ken Shigematsu’s new book, Karen Stiller finds kindly guidance on how to walk the path from drivenness to grace (without stopping incessantly to check her phone).

Then I hit them over the head, as devotional leaders should do, by telling them what pastor Ken Shigematsu does first thing every morning, according to the Vancouver-based author’s latest book, Survival Guide for the Soul: How to Flourish Spiritually in a World that Pressures Us to Achieve Shigemats...

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Thanks, But We’re Tired of Giving

Stephanie Schoenhoff

October 5, 2018

Moving past Thanksgiving into the crescendo of pre-Christmas appeals, Stephanie Schoenhoff reports, charities find potential donors growing weary and wary. A solution, she says, is recognizing that those who give also have needs to be met.

Charities are abandoning the question of how to sell their work to donors, and have instead begun to ask: “How can we help people be generous?” “What barriers need to be broken in order to assist people in living generously Annan implores us to resist the breakneck pace of charity in today’s age, wa...

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Sick of Work

Raymond J. de Souza

October 4, 2018

Father Raymond de Souza finds recent concerns about people working themselves into mental illness, on Parliament Hill and elsewhere, have an ancient, Gospel solution.

This week’s Hill Times, the parish bulletin for those who work, lobby, or lounge about Parliament Hill, includes a nine-page special report on mental health I recall about a decade ago being at a dinner in a restaurant near Parliament Hill, about eight or 10 of us, several MPs and Hill staff One of ...

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The Lost Art of Asking

Peter Stockland

October 2, 2018

Whatever happened to saying “I just don’t know”? Today Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland shares concerns, in light of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation debacle, about troubling changes to public dialogue and the growth of political tribalism. Words are used to impress others with a willingness to think as they think—rather than to express thought.

On Monday, the second friend weighed in not to further inveigh against journalistic opinion mongering but to question why – and when – so many journalists began to assume it is critical to their professional life to have opinions in the first place But as my friends articulate so well, there are equ...

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The Fires This Time

Susan Korah

October 1, 2018

With the annual Parliamentary Forum on Religious Freedom being held in Ottawa this evening, Convivium contributor Susan Korah reports on film-maker Jordan Allott’s documentation of Iraqi Christians “caught between two fires” and threatened with extinction while Canada looks the other way.

With diminishing financial support, Ashti 2, the last church-run camp in Erbil available for Christians, was dismantled in early September, leaving the internally displaced who had not already left for Jordan with virtually no option but to return to their home towns such as Quaraqosh It has extingu...

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