Canada’s Complicity in Christian Cleansing

Susan Korah

May 23, 2018

A future Canadian prime minister might one day apologize for our role in the conspiracy of silence surrounding the genocide of Syriac Christians, writes Convivium contributor Susan Korah. By then, she warns, Christ’s followers could be extinct in the very lands where Jesus walked.

A motion introduced in parliament by then interim Leader of the Opposition Conservative Party Rona Ambrose in June 2016 to declare ISIS atrocities against Christians, Yazidis and other Middle Eastern minorities a genocide was defeated 166-139, with the Prime Minister and most Liberal MPs voting agai...

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Freedom in the Law

Rabbi Moishele Fogel

May 23, 2018

While many Canadians spent the long weekend lolly-gagging in the name of a long-gone British monarch, Jews celebrated the feast of Shavuot – Pentecost. Convivium contributor Rabbi Moishele Fogel examines the historical origin and theological complexity of a holiday devoted to the Torah, its rules, and its obligations that give a paradoxical promise of liberty to God's Chosen People.

Shavuot is considered to be the final step of the Exodus when God freed the Jewish people from bondage in Egypt so they could serve Him – through observance of the Torah – and be His people Through the study of Torah and observance of its directives, human beings are able to realize the Divine inten...

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Religion, Freedom, Citizenship

Peter Stockland with Andrew P.W. Bennett

May 22, 2018

In early May, Cardus hosted launch events in Ottawa for its Religious Freedom Institute. Father Deacon Andrew Bennett, CRFI’s director, spoke with Convivium's Peter Stockland about the kickoff and what’s to come for the new institute.

AB: We're here to speak on behalf of, and to support in whatever way we can, all faith communities, and people of no particular religious faith who desire to speak in the public square about what they believe, to live out that public freedom What I saw here in Ottawa was just a tremendous sense of e...

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Serving God and Neighbour

Jason Kenney

May 18, 2018

Speaking to a Cardus-sponsored event in Calgary on Thursday evening, United Conservative Party leader Jason Kenney highlighted the 1774 Quebec Act, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, refugee resettlement, the Canada Summer Jobs program, and the mileage on his Dodge Ram pickup as sources for his renewed vision for Canadian conservatism within liberal democracy.

Now following what our French Canadian friends called Le Conquête, the conquest of New France, the British Crown imposed through the Royal Proclamation an assimilationist policy, an effort to rub out the differences in the former French colony, to marginalize the exercise of the Catholic faith, to p...

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Holy Days of Humility

Breanne Valerie

May 18, 2018

In the last of her series exploring her efforts to live out a different Benedictine rule every month, Convivium contributor Breanne Valerie finds the great saint’s directive for attaining true humility centre simply, but never easily, on how we see ourselves in relation to God.

While pondering Benedict’s Rule for Humility over the past month I have come to realize that without his steps to Humility - focusing first and foremost on God - everything else is done in vain He also understands that to truly embody humility, one must look up and out first to allow the beauty and ...

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Desperates Seeking the Spirit

Brittany Beacham

May 18, 2018

On the Feast of Pentecost tomorrow, Convivium contributor Brittany Beacham writes, Christians celebrate not just the end of the Easter season but the instant when God told his whole Church: “Go.”

Do we wait on the Lord, like the disciples in the upper room, laying at His feet our own brokenness and failures, asking Him to use us and send us anyways? To fill the holes of our broken pieces with His Spirit, with His power and holy fire and send us out?     People who’d felt the glory of Jesus C...

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Tom Wolfe: A Journalist in Full

Raymond J. de Souza

May 17, 2018

Convivium Editor-in-Chief Father Raymond de Souza bids goodbye to a unique writer who used his reporter’s natural curiosity to illuminate our vanities with a bonfire’s light.

The fashionable media and literary class were quite happy for Wolfe to satirize Wall Street and huckster activists, but they found his lacerating of the elite university campus as a place of faux-learning and crude rutting hit too close to home Wolfe of course was accurate in what he reported; now u...

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Fulmination Fantasies

Peter Stockland

May 16, 2018

Recent attacks on a Conservative MP’s factual declaration push Canada closer to the dangerous edge where wishes and truth are one and the same, writes Convivium’s Peter Stockland.

In 1989, in the immediate aftermath of Morgentaler, the government of the day introduced in the House of Commons legislation re-asserting the federal prerogative to control abortion through the Criminal Code For where, facing such a legislative fact, would the “right” to abortion have been had C-43 ...

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Love That Wrestles the Imperfect

Karen Esau

May 16, 2018

For humans in this snow-globe of a planet, where war-shaken cultures are being rapidly dispersed across the continents, to love means to keep re-engaging with each other, writes Voices contributor Karen Esau.

This is how I greet the world every morning, and they, in return, teach me about life, love and forgiveness Then they’re moved on to the tougher tier of math and science classes before they’re tested by the fire of English Literature and essays (complete with Shakespeare) and social studies – full o...

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Ted Falk's Turning Point

Douglas Farrow

May 15, 2018

McGill Professor Douglas Farrow finds a moment of clarity in a Conservative MP’s shout across the House that abortion is “not a right” in Canada. But whether that will lead to clearer understanding, or only further obfuscation, remains to be seen, Farrow says.

Irene Mathyssen, the NDP MP for London-Fanshawe, demanded to know when the government was going to get serious about upholding “safe and equal access to abortion [as] the right of all Canadians The PM then spoke approvingly: “We on this side of the House, along with the NDP, understand that women un...

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Only God Never Breathes Goodbye

Leah Perrault

May 15, 2018

In the aftermath of war’s horrors and accidental tragedy, Saskatchewan writer Leah Perrault finds warmth in the God who grieves with us.

I am grieving the loss of a part of the prophetic vision and voice the Benedictine brothers have faithfully offered from this prairie corner of the world In the throes of April, labouring feebly toward spring, Prairie people have forced breath onto frosted windows our whole lives ...

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When The World Is Weeping

Rev. Marie-Louise Ternier

May 15, 2018

Rev. Marie-Louise Ternier, rector of All Saints Anglican and Redeemer Lutheran in Watrous Saskatchewan, reflects on the need to turn to church when tragedy shatters the world into a million pieces.

The numerous bonds of affection formed over these 13 years are only deepening as I join the local clergy in providing pastoral support in this time of community shock and grief ...

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Speaking Up for Marriage

Peter Jon Mitchell and Andrea Mrozek

May 14, 2018

New poll numbers show more than half of Canadians no longer believe marriage is necessary. But as Cardus Family’s Peter Jon Mitchell and Andrea Mrozek point out, leading Canadian voices backed by impeccable social science research are debunking that destructive myth.

Given the expert testimony and the availability of scholarship on the matter, what the survey results show is that a majority of Canadians hold views about marriage that are at odds with the research In spite of the fact that marriage is still the most stable relationship choice, we hesitate to enco...

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Finding Resurrection

Brittany Beacham

May 14, 2018

For several panic-inducing hours this Easter season, Convivium writer Brittany Beacham feared she may lose the unborn child that she and her husband have waited more than three years to welcome. Then came the reminder that God will swallow up death forever.

Faith comes in the trust that for every time death wins in the here and now, the life of Christ will win out in victory forever - when the Saturday stretches long and there is uncertainty of Sunday ever arriving this side of heaven, it is the trust in the beauty of Christ’s resurrection, and the kno...

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A Toast to Monsieur Macron

Raymond J. de Souza

May 11, 2018

Ending a week that saw the launch of the Cardus Religious Freedom Institute and hosting of the National Prayer Breakfast in Ottawa, Father Raymond de Souza notes the French president seems a better friend of faith in common life than Canada’s own prime minister.

Perhaps while in France, Trudeau had occasion to talk with French President Emmanuel Macron about the place of faith in our common life Last month, Justin Trudeau became the first Canadian prime minister to address the French National Assembly, celebrating Canada and France’s historic friendship and...

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