COVID-19

  • COVID in a Lifeboat

    Chantal Huinink, Jasmine Duckworth, and Keith Dow consider the ethics of disability in a time of pandemic crisis.

    “Pandemic ethics.” This might not have been a phrase you expected to be familiar with only a few short months ago. As with lifeboats and “lifeboat ethics,” pandemics are not situations we expect to find ourselves in. Now, however, it’s popping up in news ...

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  • Let Commonality Grow

    A car dealer, a psychologist, and a doctor. Three comically different individuals, one harmonious view of the current circumstances. Peter Stockland unpacks a story of community right under our noses.

    As we all chase the bright elusive butterfly of release from infernal social isolation, it seems natural to regard what the pandemic has wrought as a curse to be, well, cursed.

    Yet since mid-March, when our lives became bounded by the walls we live b...

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  • COVID-19 and Common Humanity

    Convivium contributor Brian Bird writes that even within the pain caused by the pandemic we can recover our fundamental shared identity as human beings and the universal dignity embedded within it.

    Restrictions that were imposed to slow the spread of COVID-19 are starting to be relaxed in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. For many places, the next chapter of this pandemic is beginning. As we enter a new stage of this extraordinary moment in hum...

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  • Futility in the Face of Pandemic

    How can we carry Christ to others when we might also be carrying the virus that infects them with COVID-19? By discerning that love requires seeking new approaches, Daniel Gilman writes.

    In a dangerous and selfless act of love, two of my friends flew to the city of Cremona, which is located in the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic in ...

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  • The Necessary and Essential Difference Between Essential and Necessary

    Of all the things the COVID-19 crisis has meant, Travis Smith argues, its means to distinguish between what we necessarily need and what makes us essentially human.

    Like many families across Canada this year, my family celebrated Easter alone at home, the three of us gathered together around the table. Attempts to compensate for the current situation were made via email, telephone, FaceTime, and Zoom, but those convers...

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  • Working Out Well-being

    Losing a job is about more than a loss of income, because work is about more than money, writes Cardus researcher Johanna Wolfert. Governments must keep the non-monetary aspects of work in mind as they try to support those rendered jobless by the COVID-19 pandemic.

    COVID-19 has ravaged Canada’s labour market. Staggering unemployment numbers and ...

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  • Shadow and Light in the Post-COVID Church

    Two long-time journalistic and personal friends, former CRTC commissioner Peter Menzies and Convivium's Peter Stockland, weigh the future of faith life in a Canada where churches have been shuttered by government order.

    Peter Menzies: Sequestration of Church by State

    Each of us, when and if this is over, will retain our own COVID-19 pandemic memories, preserved as still images in the mists of our minds.

    Mine will include portraits – black and...

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  • Unmasking the Benefits of Globalization

    COVID-19 has sparked calls to recover domestic production of goods from pharmaceuticals to personal protective equipment. Raising a contrary voice, Matthew Lau argues for recognizing globalization as the good that comes from economic interconnection.

    There has been, as Sean Speer noted recently in the National Post, a broad consensus in most countries on the benefits of globalization – th...

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  • A Meeting Place of Meaning

    Rabbi Reuven Bulka reminds us that the very search for meaning in crises such as the current pandemic gives expression to our shared humanity.

    A short while ago, as I was exiting from a funeral sparsely attended due to the COVID-19 restrictions in place, one of the attendees blurted out a remark that is surely on the minds of many: “Where is God now?” or words to that effect. It could have been sp...

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  • Celebrating Nurses from Crimea to COVID-19

    This May marks the 200th birthday of Florence Nightingale and the start of a nursing-led health care revolution, reports Convivium contributor Susan Korah.

    Today, our world needs healing and to be rekindled with Love.     Once, Florence Nightingale lit her beacon of lamplight to comfort the wounded.     Her light has blazed a path of service across a century to us --...

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  • A Sailor's Hour at Home

    Amid the danger and chaos of the pandemic wave that has overturned our lives, music lifts the spirit to lead us home, Peter Stockland writes.

    To lift a line from an old James Taylor song made famous by Emmy Lou Harris, my father was a sailor who blew in off the water. 

    In fact, he was shipwrecked off the coast of Newfoundland as a y...

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  • Mercy From an Unrelenting Lent

    COVID-19 isolation caused Convivium’s Rebecca Darwent to give up even giving things up for Lent. It helped her understand what the Apostle Matthew missed.

    I’ve heard people refer to this season as the Lentiest Lent that ever Lented. At the beginning of the 40 days of Lent, having been through a wringer of a winter, I decided to not take on a huge feat, but rather stick to simple practices of prayer, fasting a...

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  • Easter in Our Own Upper Rooms

    Finding ourselves in isolation without the usual traditions and celebrations to mark Holy Week, our Easter this year is similar to that of the first, when Jesus left the Apostles, writes Mirjana Villeneuve.

    I was waiting until Holy Saturday to buy tulips from the Farmer’s Market. Over the years as a student in Kingston, I developed this little tradition for myself, as a final preparation before the Easter Vigil. Of course, this year is different. In my fifth a...

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  • Who Will We Be After COVID-19?

    Looking at how her parenting style shifted in mere weeks, Brittany Beacham wonders how different life will look after this pandemic, and recalls that God will be with us no matter the circumstances.    

    “You’re different.” 

    My husband looked at me from across the room, where I sat on the floor, tugging at the scratchy velcro of my daughters boots. 

    “You’re different than you were a week ago.” 

    A receipt had prompted the comment a few w...

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  • Passing Over Difference

    Rabbi Reuven Bulka says no one celebrating Passover can be indifferent to the difference the COVID-19 crisis will bring. What matters, though, is what endures.

    My first thought before any other is to express the hope that you are all well, and that you and the entire world will get through this crisis of existence.

    On Passover, coming up soon, the marquee event is the Passover Seder. It is a time when famil...

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  • Saving Graces: Week Two

    While COVID-19 sweeps darkness across the world, the Convivium Team is scouring the web for stories of hope to share with our readers. We are pleased to offer this selection of good news stories, hoping they will be a source of saving grace for all.

    The decline of the house sparrow in British gardens appears to be ...

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  • Corona of Thorns

    The model of Christ’s solitary suffering on the Cross can bring us through COVID-19  isolation to renewed love of community, writes Cardus' Andrew Bennett.

    Isolation is hard. There is a strange paradox in the isolation and distancing of our present moment. Am I isolating and distancing myself simply because the State tells me to do so? While the civil authorities are right to tell me this to slow the COVID-19 ...

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  • Going Viral and Not Going Back

    Fr. Raymond de Souza considers the ways in which our public spaces may change as they've now moved online due to COVID-19.

    Going viral.

    That term doesn’t sound quite the same as it did a few months ago, when it was the aspiration of everyone who posts, reacts or publishes online. That viral tweet, post, or column was the desideratum. Now that an actual virus has shut dow...

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  • Love Your Neighbour: Stay Home

    Churches keeping their doors firmly closed to prevent COVID-19 in their congregations is an act of obedience and love for one another, contends Mathew Block.

    In what has turned out to be strange timing given the spread of COVID-19, I wrote an article a few months ago regarding the limitations of mo...

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  • Returning to Laughing Together

    Rebecca Darwent discovers there is love in a time of coronavirus – even if it can only be expressed for the moment through social media.

    There is something about going through a common experience together that unmistakably connects us, whether we realize it or not at the time.

    Sometimes, the connection comes from experiences that are literally play: games, sports, theatre. Other bonds...

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  • A New Meaning for Cancel Culture

    COVID-19 has unleashed an epidemic of event cancellations, including the historic National Prayer Breakfast in Ottawa and a speech by Cardus’ own Milton Friesen. Peter Stockland finds good news behind the closed doors.

    COVID-19 is giving cancel culture a whole new meaning.

    Barely a month ago, it meant political agitators pressing institutions to call off public appearances by speakers who agitated them.

    Enter the pandemic, and it means cancellation e-mails o...

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  • Saving Graces: Week One

    While COVID-19 sweeps darkness across the world, the Convivium Team is scouring the web for stories of hope to share with our readers. We are pleased to offer this selection of good news stories, hoping they will be a source of saving grace for all. 

    Loblaws is temporarily ...

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  • Beethoven, Spring and Nature

    As spring has sprung, Fr. Raymond de Souza reflects on how the Kingston Symphony’s melded-together performance of two vastly different compositions show that while man and nature often collide, God’s creation is still a garden.

    It’s springtime. Let the crocuses – but not the viruses – bloom. And if it is not possible to get outdoors to enjoy the spring in this coronavirus season, why not listen to it? I did just that six weeks ago, courtesy of the Kingston Symphony.

    The ver...

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  • Hope on the COVID-19 Front Lines

    Pam Mulder, a registered nurse at a long-term care home in Ontario, tells Cardus’ Johanna Wolfert how small acts of courage and optimism keep fear at bay for staff and patients.

    Johanna Wolfert: How long have you been working in long-term care?

    Pam Mulder: I have been in LTC for about 15 years, holding various roles as a registered nurse. I started as an RN on the front line before moving al...

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