2011‑2022, and is preserved here for archival purposes.
In our current era, religion is presumed to be personal. Politeness is warped into shallowness; substantial sentiments are risky and may offend. Publicly, Christmas is nothing more than a seasonal holiday. Its religious roots are tolerated only because deny...
December is upon us again, and with it, the holiday season. It’s a time when many gather with friends and family, when many give and receive gifts, when sales of the latest smartphone, tablet, and other personal computing devices ...
The water, in this case, is “a secular age.” And Rose seems to think the question is whether we should swim in it, when the real question is how.
In his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, the novelist David Foster Wallace began with a little parable:
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But it’s a bit disingenuous to say the culture wars were just hyperbolic posturing of an entire generation held hostage by their metaphors. And I often wonder about how important it is to remember the “culture wars” within the larger context of the real wars out of which they’ve grown. If anything, the past hundred years have been one bloody reminder after another that ideas really do have legs, the worst of which can—and have—run roughshod over millions.
In a century scarred by two world wars and continuously haunted with the threat of a third, it’s little wonder we often opt for martial metaphors. We kill time, pick our battles, work in the trenches, and raise the white flag in resignation. And it’s no dif...
Now while it might seem that North Koreans have much more to worry about on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs than the fine arts, it’s telling that the Kim leadership not only knows the importance of the arts, but maintains a heavy bureaucratic stranglehold upon them. Case in point: a wrongly chosen metaphor meant to exult the leader might result in years of hard labour in a concentration camp, or possibly death.
How might we imagine something new? How might we even begin?
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How can we better engage across cultures? At the Transatlantic Christian Council last month, Cardus executive vice president Ray Pennings spoke with Father Sirico about how to have conversations about faith that can span cultures.
"Very often," says Acton Institute co-founder Father Robert A. Sirico, "even believers and even people who would agree on certain cultural issues speak past each other, or they hone in on parts of the debate and make that as though it were the whole debate....
There was the former American first lady addressing an Ottawa luncheon crowd at the Canada 2020 event in the gushing tones of progressive politics: a glorious future awaits all who eagerly rush forward to embrace the times. Yet very early in her 35-minute talk yesterday, the secretary of state, who logged more than a million miles visiting 112 countries in four years, began using Cardus language: the prudential need to renew underlying social architecture.
Any Cardus supporters attending Hillary Clinton's speech to Canada's self-proclaimed leading progressive think tank might have simultaneously felt at sea and at home.
There was the former American first lady addressing an Ottawa luncheon crowd at the...
There was a certain look students had when they would come to my office a few days into a new semester to confess that they were "dropping down" from University Prep English. Rather than soaring on to academia after their senior year, they were now trundlin...
At the Transatlantic Christian Council in Washington, D.C., this month, Ray Pennings asked Os Guinness about this topic. Guinness is the author of nearly two dozen books, most recently The Global Public Square: Religious Freedom and the Making of a World Safe for Diversity and Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times. "I think we should be persuasive—publicly accessible—as St. Paul was," argues Guinness. "So when he's in a synagogue, he preaches from the Torah. When he's on Mars Hill, he quotes Cretan poets and philosophers. We should have that adaptability and flexibility."
When ought we to share what we believe, and when are we just picking a fight?
At the Transatlantic Christian Council in Washington, D.C., this month, Ray Pennings asked Os Guinness about this topic. Guinness i...
I don't want to be the turkey taking a potshot at the eagle to climb the totem pole; but I disagree with our captain here. Satire is healthy for democracy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In the latest Comment magazine, our inimitable editor-in-chief makes the case that Jon Stewart, ...
Detail from Maulbertsch's The QuackIt's not too hard to look back at some of these bizarre rituals and beliefs and to hold our noses up in disdain at such ignorant understandings of the world. With our sanitation systems and medical acumen, our iPods and our Weather Networks, we know so much more ... right?
There were times when people would give children large doses of morphine just to calm them down; rub mercury into cuts as a way of healing; and even bathe themselves in urine and excrement to increase cleanliness.
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A few years ago, my brother and I were driving from Texas to Ontario and on the way we stopped in Kentucky where—long story short—we "ran into" Wendell Berry. He was giving a talk to a group of Louisville...
That's not to say it isn't important or can't be effective. Washington, 1963. Gdansk, 1981. Tiananmen Square, 1989. Arab Spring, 2011. Mass people presence with chants and placards can make a difference and change history. But this needs to be kept in perspective. The fact that some protests are effective doesn't make every protest effective.
Although I've done it a few times, carrying a placard in a public protest really isn't my thing.
That's not to say it isn't important or can't be effective. Washington, 1963. Gdansk, 1981. Tiananmen Square, 1989. Arab Spring, 2011. Mass people presen...
Last month a piece broke from Newsweek, launching a richly reported accusation against an activist superstar in the development field of h...
"All the world is strange," said the Quaker to his wife, "except for me and thee. But even thee I wonder about." Western democracy is the offspring of a marriage of ideas between Christian social thought and the enlightenment. In different contexts, the particular features of democracy remind us more of one intellectual parent than the other, but only a conscious attempt at ahistorical forgetfulness would deny democracy's DNA.
"All the world is strange," said the Quaker to his wife, "except for me and t...
Whether you celebrated Canada Day earlier in the week or are celebrating Independence Day today, this is usually the time of year when the flags are unfurled, the fireworks lit, and national narratives reinforced. If, like me, you're from Canada, you likely...
Alas, while the Sun TV host is irrepressible at scouring the nation for nuggets ignored by the mainstream media, he was again on the wrong side of history this week. Unable to get with the program, Ezra criticized the decision as a violation of free speech and the epitome of intolerance, not to mention a blatant breach of contract. He was particularly piqued about a motion to protect the Vancouver Island city from any risk of having such a group granted permission to rent civic facilities in future.
The indefatigable Ezra Levant has again dug up another under-reported story for Canadians, this time out of Nanaimo City Council, no less.
Alas, while the Sun TV host is irrepressible at scouring the nation for nuggets ignored by the mainstream media...
In its nominal renunciation of culture, camping puts a lot of undue pressure upon many would-be-Thoreaus who want to participate in world-preserving by getting back to this wild "state of nature." Such glamping comes with an interesting shame-factor: the more of civilization you take with you the more guilty you are meant to feel.
Why shirk off millennia of cultural progress to run around in the woods and sleep in something that separates us from a prowling black bear by only the thinnest layer of nylon? It's ridiculous.
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Feenan's point was that the rise of these Nietzschean supermen (ubermenschen) are using social media—and, well, guns—to extend their will-to-power. In a way, the superman or, literally translated, "over man" Nietzsche foretold was meant to be a source of optimism for a world where God was dead. Nietzsche's hope, delivered by his prophetic persona, Zarathustra, was that we could become like so many gods. No God was no reason to despair, it was a cause to rejoice, and embrace the this-ness of life in all its fullness. His vision, as Calvin would have noticed (and Dostoevsky did), might not have properly accounted for the heart's affinity for deceit. Could any man or woman really handle the godlike powers Nietzsche wanted them to grab hold of?
In a recent piece at The American Scene, Matt Feenan was one among many trying to make sense of another senseless shooting that left another community reeling in its wake. Canadians haven't been immune from this either, as the recent tragedy in Moncton so s...
When my wife and I were in Tanzania for about five months in 2008, we had the pleasure of meeting and working with Margaret Njugu, a leader of ...
I've seen some controversy online recently surrounding the poignant but overly dramatic "Look Up" video that appeared on YouTube a few weeks ago and now has close to 36 million views. The video besee...
The Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC), the regulatory body which licenses lawyers to practice law in Ontario, has just voted against accrediting graduates from Trinity Western University's (TWU) future law school to practice law in Ontario. The vote, which...
The individual today is the measure and the mark of almost all of our public life. The most vociferous debates in our law revolve around individuals. In Canada, at least, the question of selling, ending, or controlling one's body is settled on the question of what limits, if any, are appropriate to place on the individual, whose freedom to choose is presumed to be—because of our constitution—the highest end of political life.
The Lenten season can sometimes make one feel a bit self-absorbed. Do we really have to spend all that time denying ourselves, searching our hearts, repenting, praying?
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Doug Sikkema writes on how the anticipation of spring, Easter, and March Madness all tell us a little bit about who we are by kindling, albeit subtly, some of our most basic desires.
March is a month of anticipation. We await the end of winter with the arrival of spring, the end of Lent with the arrival of Easter, and the end of a sport's drought with the arrival of NCAA's March Madn...