Death

• 

  Whispering in Public

  Brian Dijkema

  August 2, 2012

  We're inclined to consider funerals private affairs. They are usually not open to the public. They involve family, friends, and loved ones; those, in other words, who have some sort of personal connection with the deceased. I have never heard of someone walking off the street into a funeral. And, with the very limited exception of the very famous—a pope, a prime minister, a princess—they are not broadcast or shared in any public way.

  In a strange way, funerals are at the same time very private, and very public affairs.

  We're inclined to consider funerals private affairs. They are usually not open to the public. They involve family, friends, and loved ones; those, in other words, ...

  Read more...

• 

  Our Only Comfort

  Ray Pennings

  July 30, 2012

  Thankfully—and this is true at all times, but especially realized at times such as this—we are not alone. Where our own words falter, we can stand on the shoulders of the ancestors of our faith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  There are times in life when all our tasks, our plans, and our peculiar occupations take a back seat to our fundamental humanness and the deep questions of life that we all share. This past weekend we at Cardus were brought face-to-face with one of those mo...

  Read more...

• 

  A society watching The Dark Knight Rises has something wrong with it

  Peter Stockland

  July 25, 2012

  In this morning's Globe and Mail, columnist Lynn Crosbie takes the case a step deeper and challenges literary creators to respond with essential grace when their creations go damnably wrong. In contrast to the harrumphing galumphers who churn out endless pure political commentary, she works from the assertion that the electoral, parliamentary, and policy cliques are to our lived meaning as WWE wrestling is to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot: a bombastic sideshow relation to the authentic theatrical absurdity of contemporary life.

  My Cardus colleague Josh Reinders makes a brilliant argument in yesterday's blog for literature's powerful formative role in creating a culture of saving grace.

  In this morning's Globe ...

  Read more...

• 

  Speaking Credibly of Hope

  John Sikkema

  July 16, 2012

  But in order for the Gospel to begin to change anything in our secular culture, I suggest that Christians must find ways to convince others of how great our sin and misery are. Maher's causal point about religion, of course, is itself a non-starter—religion being "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe." We are all by nature religious creatures; being human means forming such beliefs.

  To come to a saving faith in Christ, one must be convicted in his heart of "how great my sin and misery are" (Heidelberg Catechism, LD 2).

  But in order for the Gospel to begin to change anything in our secular culture, I suggest that Christians must ...

  Read more...

• 

  The Highway of Death

  Peter Menzies

  July 11, 2012

  Most of you will never have heard of Highway 63, which runs north-south for about 400 kilometers from Fort McMurray and the Athabaska Oil Sands to just northwest of Lac La Biche, Alberta. And, with the exception of the occasional passing lane, it is just two lanes wide.

  ...

  Read more...

• 

  Retrograde Fantasies

  Peter Stockland

  July 6, 2012

  Did I say complement? Perhaps I meant antidote. For if the embarrassing neediness of the Canadian need for summer evenings ever needed anything, it is Greene's lugubrious fidelity to the torments of Christian joy. As Canadians, our identity is as a winter people. Even as urbanites, we accept the painful limitations of our natural snow-bound state.

  There are fewer better complements to a Canadian summer evening than sitting on the front porch absorbing the mournful Catholicism of a Graham Greene novel.

  Did I say complement? Perhaps I mean...

  Read more...

• 

  Taking the Heidelberg Catechism to Work

  Brian Dijkema

  June 21, 2012

  But what does it mean to be a witness of Christ? Where do we look for evidence of this kind of witness?

  Peter Stockland's excellent blog this week reminds us that "we are called to engage in the political life of our country not to win but to witness. We are called as witnesses o...

  Read more...

• 

  Salvation from Medical Suicide

  Peter Stockland

  June 19, 2012

  The judgment was, of course, morally horrifying, intellectually fraudulent, and politically destructive of Canadians as a self-governing people. Nor should we feel warmed by the court's fantastic assurances that supposed safeguards will prevent us sliding down the so-called "slippery slope" of ever expanding forms of medical killing.

  No surprise I was in an outraged funk this past weekend over the B.C. Supreme Court's decision striking down federal laws against medically delivered suicide.

  The judgment was, of course, morally horrifying, intellectually fraudulent, and politically...

  Read more...

• 

  Debating the end of debate

  Peter Stockland

  June 12, 2012

  Like most Canadians, I long ago wearied of the intractable abortion debate as a debate. For example, there is currently something called the "New Abortion Caravan" crossing the country seeking to persuade a majority that Canada's absence of any legislation governing abortion is unacceptable. The old debate is new again, it seems. The new initiative has reportedly even prompted the Canadian Auto Workers to threaten to mount counter protests everywhere the CCBR's wheels come to a stop.

  ...

  Read more...

• 

  Death and Getting Better

  Peter Menzies

  June 4, 2012

  The Globe and Mail announced earlier this spring after consultations with union representatives that some of its employees were going to be given the opportunity/asked to take unpaid furloughs for the summer to help the company manage costs and avoid permanent staff reductions. Given that the size of a newspaper is generally dictated by the volume of advertising purchased for it and that summer months constitute weak advertising and readership volumes, this appears to be a sensible solution. Unless of course you are a 35-year-old newsroom employee with a family to support who has been asked to take two months of unpaid leave. In that case, you may wish to spend those two months retraining or otherwise preparing yourself for the post-print journalism era.

  Recent events continue to confirm that media in Canada is undergoing a fundamental transformation away from dominant legacy platforms into an era of diversity and competition that should and could enrich the culture.

  The Globe and Mail announc...

  Read more...

• 

  Responding to the Wreckage Around Me

  Peter Stockland

  May 16, 2012

  Not, I must quickly add, the sophomoric, pseudo-theological questions of our era's anti-theists who witlessly insist that corrosive doubt can paradoxically fill the existential void in their lives. Nor, for that matter, the sincere questions of the serious faithful who labour under the misconception that a finite amount of Scriptural textual explication is the key to unlocking the eternal Word. In the words of Father Julian Carron, who led our exercises: "There will be no faithfulness unless there is the question to which Christ is the answer. We can repeat Christ's name over and over for the rest of our lives, but the experience we will have is not Christ."

  At the annual spiritual exercises of the Catholic fraternity to which I belong, we spent the weekend oscillating between questions and Christ.

  Not, I must quickly add, the sophomoric, pseudo-theological questions of our era's anti-theists who witless...

  Read more...

• 

  Wiebo's War

  Robert Joustra

  May 3, 2012

  Wiebo Ludwig, a Christian Reformed minister from Ontario, may not have shared MacIntyre's nascent Aristotelian-Thomism, but he more than shared his feelings of unease. Unlike MacIntyre, more in fact like Wendell Berry, Wiebo retreated with his family and others to the remote tundra of northern Alberta. There they forestalled the powers of a modern age, clinging to their blue Psalters, and to a more rural, agrarian way of life. "Our true religion" writes Wendell Berry, "is a sort of autistic industrialism." Wiebo's work was the recovery of another, true religion.

  At the end of After Virtue, after a long argument about the cultural state of modern society, Alisdair MacIntyre says we are waiting for a new—albeit very different—kind of St. Benedict. Modernity and its institutions have ushered in a new dark age f...

  Read more...

• 

  When Reality Overwhelms Satire: What The Hunger Games Reveals

  John Seel

  April 20, 2012

  We've all used the excuse, when a joke's recipient takes a cutting remark meant in jest as fact. Somehow the excuse is supposed to remove the sting. But in fact all such jests always have a modicum of truth thinly veiled in the humour. It is sometimes worth examining the truth that the humour exposes.

  "I'm just joking."

  We've all used the excuse, when a joke's recipient takes a cutting remark meant in jest as fact. Somehow the excuse is supposed to remove the sting. But in fact all such jests always have a modicum of truth thinly veiled in the hum...

  Read more...

• 

  I Heard Some Horrible Things Today

  Dan Postma

  April 16, 2012

  The terrified "I think I may have just lost our baby," and the clinical "This is Mother Nature's way of making sure only healthy babies are born." Bookends of breathless agony on a day of dull waiting, dull memories.

  I heard some horrible things today. "Mothers have a sense for these things, you know. They just know." And she was right, the sonographer. As I asked, "What? What does that mean?", my wife already had her hands over her face.

  The terrified "I think I...

  Read more...

• 

  Losing Canada's humanity

  Peter Stockland

  April 3, 2012

  They will deliberately inject the dying, the depressed, and the distraught with lethal drugs as a form of legislatively approved medical treatment. The malfeasance of the elected officials responsible is breathtaking. More shocking still is the response of the public, which can be accurately described as no response at all.

  Within 14 months, Quebec doctors will almost certainly begin intentionally killing their patients across the province.

  They will deliberately inject the dying, the depressed, and the distraught with lethal drugs as a form of legislatively approved me...

  Read more...

• 

  Does Canada have Social Conservatives?

  Robert Joustra

  March 30, 2012

  The term social conservative is beginning to lose integrity in Canada, if it ever had any. In many ways, like evangelical and conservative, it's a term which is coloured almost beyond utility by the American context. None of these labels mean the same things across the border. Or across many borders, as The Economist wrote recently about Rick Santorum's social conservatism.

  With Ontario's provincial, and now Canada's federal budget tabled, there is the inexorable rush of commentary, lobbyist posturing, and interest group press releases. At least some of those will fit into the mould of what many have come to call social con...

  Read more...

• 

  From the Personal to the Public to the Political

  Richelle Wiseman

  March 19, 2012

  I attended his lecture at the University of Calgary. He was in the city to collect this year's Calgary Peace Prize, awarded by the university's Consortium for Peace Studies. His name is Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, though he is more commonly known now as "the Gaza doctor", whose life was shattered when the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) shelled his home during Operation Cast Lead in 2009, killing four family members.

  For me, there was one bright light in last week's dismal omnipresent verbal trench warfare in the political sphere.

  I attended his lecture at the University of Calgary. He was in the city to collect this year's Calgary Peace Prize, awarded by the uni...

  Read more...

• 

  Tweeted Sunday after going to church

  Peter Menzies

  March 7, 2012

  Can't quite figure it out. Don't want to say that though. Afraid will look like old fuddy-duddy. And face social exclusion. Worse, euthanized as no lngr prdctv member of society. Stream of consciousness. Know every thought that has ever. Popped into Andrew Coyne's head. Or emerged from Kady O'Malley's fingertips.

  I am a late adapter. To Twitter anyway. Slow learner 4 sure.

  Can't quite figure it out. Don't want to say that though. Afraid will look like old fuddy-duddy. And face social exclusion. Worse, euthanized as no lngr prdctv member of society. Stream of ...

  Read more...

• 

  Publisher's Letter: Will Christopher Hitchens Matter?

  Peter Stockland

  March 1, 2012

  Even on his death bed, the anti-theist crusader could not see the power that being changed can give.

  Novelist Ian McEwan's requiem for his friend Christopher Hitchens is the most revealing of the published farewells to the anglo-American controversialist who died of cancer in December.

  Its revelation lies in McEwan's perspective next to Hitchens as ...

  Read more...

• 

  A Child by Any Other Name

  Richelle Wiseman

  February 29, 2012

  In Calgary's Foothills Hospital, for instance, the "Pregnancy and Infant Loss Program" is described on the website as one which provides information, guidance and "grief support for parents and other family members who have experienced a pregnancy loss (miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, still birth, neonatal death or termination) through individual, couple and group counseling."

  How early does a fetus become a baby become a human being? Our politicians may be loath to debate it, but it seems even our hospitals need more work to get their nomenclature straight. Contradictory practices within single hospitals cannot be serving anyone...

  Read more...

• 

  God for Artists and Artists for God: Part 2

  Kyle David Bennett

  February 27, 2012

  I believe there are artists who are gifted and called by God. Just as pastors, technicians, educators, engineers, and athletes are called to contribute in their unique way to God's kingdom, so are artists. There are those who can taste, smell, see, hear, and feel things others of us can't. They have the insight and skill to clarify when things are confused, as well as the ambidexterity and courage to confuse things that seem clear.

  In the first part of this series on "God for Artists and Artists for God" I suggested that the nature and purpose of art and the vocation of the artist is one that is give...

  Read more...

• 

  Straying from our triangles

  Peter Stockland

  February 22, 2012

  My post should have acknowledged that some of the big boys of print aren't going down without a fight, either. When I say oversized I mean 9x11 format, 156-page colour saturated magazine bling. When I say sumptuous, I mean a book that begins with a spread opener Rolex advertisement and finishes with a back cover for Patek Philipe. And when I say style, culture, and travel, I mean the entire universe of subject matter that can be shoehorned into those very wide headings.

  I blogged here recently about the way small magazines are challenging the pusillanimous acquiescence of mainstream media before the Internet onslaught.

  My post should have acknowledg...

  Read more...

• 

  Ignoring a Key Reason for the Decline of Unions

  Brian Dijkema

  February 16, 2012

  A discussion paper released by the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and the Communications Energy and Paper Workers (CEP) suggests that unions are "fac[ing] an enormous and historic moment of truth." While Canadian unions are known for their overuse of hyperbole, the list of problems they themselves provide suggests the problem is genuine.

  Canada's unions are in trouble, but what is to be done?

  A discussion paper released by the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and the Communications Energy and Paper Worke...

  Read more...

• 

  The Repentance of Thieves and Murderers

  Brian Dijkema

  February 9, 2012

  The long-time Cuban president is responsible for the dispossession of millions of dollars worth of land, cars, cash, and other material goods once held privately by Cubans. He is also responsible for the more heinous crime of dispossession of the dignity and lives of countless Cuban citizens. Hundreds of men and women endure squalid prison conditions because of his policies. Churches, trade unions, newspapers, political parties, free courts, and other green shoots of independence, pluralism, and liberty have been cut down to the nub or choked by Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, and their geriatric posse of communist true believers. But rumour has it that Fidel is contemplating a return to his old faith. As with most news from Cuba, it's difficult to determine the veracity of these claims, but an Italian newspaper quotes his daughter Alina as saying, "Today he is more interested in the fate of his soul than the future of Cuba." Because while it might be true that he is more concerned for the state of his soul than for the future of Cuba, it is also true that a full reorientation of his soul towards God and his rejoining of God's church would be a tremendous development in the future of Cuba.

  Fidel Castro is a thief and a murderer. And he may be returning to Christianity.

  The long-time Cuban president is responsible for the dispossession of millions of dollars worth of land, cars, cash, and other material goods once held privately by Cuba...

  Read more...