Diversity

  • The Hard Truth About Reconciliation

    The Hard Truth About Reconciliation

    Andrew P.W. Bennett

    October 7, 2021

    Healing wounds inflicted on Indigenous people by Canada and its churches means facing what’s wholly true, not what’s politically appealing, Father Deacon Andrew Bennett writes.

    Let’s discuss truth and reconciliation in their fullness. How do we tell the truth, the fullness of the truth? How do we achieve true reconciliation? Both are two-way streets.

    Firstly, what is truth? Pilate’s question to Christ at his passion rings d...

    Read more...

  • Cancelling Wisdom’s Colour

    Cancelling Wisdom’s Colour

    Daniel Dorman

    July 19, 2021

    Daniel Dorman argues that the phenomenon of cancel culture emerges from a black and white vision of the world that forgets the vivid hues moral struggle brings to life.

    “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscilla...

    Read more...

  • Indigenous Women Ascending

    Indigenous Women Ascending

    Peter Stockland

    July 9, 2021

    Peter Stockland sees the appointment of Mary Simon as GG, the election of RoseAnne Archibald as AFN National Chief, and Jody Wilson-Raybould’s political courage as hope for Canada.

    Thursday’s fifth ballot win that made RoseAnne Archibald the first ever female National Chief of the Assembly of First...

    Read more...

  • How MAiD Aids Ableism

    How MAiD Aids Ableism

    Keith Dow

    February 25, 2021

    Bill C-7’s expansion of medical aid in dying encodes into law discrimination against disabled Canadians by treating them as less worthy of life than the able-bodied, Keith Dow writes.

    Complex networks of roots stretch several times beyond the radius of each tree’s canopy, drawing nutrients and water far from its origin. While we may quickly observe the location of a trunk, or the reach of extended branches, these roots are often invisibl...

    Read more...

  • Saying “Non” to Potpourri Pluralism

    Saying “Non” to Potpourri Pluralism

    Robert Joustra

    December 7, 2020

    There’s much wrong with increasingly closed secularism in France and Québec yet both societies understand diversity requires strong ground rules, Robert Joustra argues.

    Unity and civility can be abusive demands when placed on us by the powerful. But diversity and pluralism, likewise, are also not self-evident goods. The hallowed middle ground – a modest unity – is the sacred but lost country so many multicultural explorers...

    Read more...

  • The Unbearable Whiteness of Jesus

    The Unbearable Whiteness of Jesus

    Don Hutchinson

    August 27, 2020

    Questions about the Christian Messiah’s skin colour offer a fascinating complex of archeological, historical, migratory, linguistic and theological answers that ultimately won’t matter, Don Hutchinson writes.

    Questions about the whiteness of Jesus, White presence in Bible times, and the whiteness of the North American Church have become widespread in public debate during recent months. It’s not that there wasn’t already discourse about these points, but discussi...

    Read more...

  • China's Imperial Brutality

    China's Imperial Brutality

    David Kilgour

    January 16, 2019

    The death sentence handed to a Canadian convicted of drug smuggling reminded the world that China is the world’s top state executioner. But as former MP and veteran human rights observer David Kilgour tells Convivium readers, Beijing’s vicious persecution of its own minority populations rivals Maoist-era inhumanity.

    About 20 million Muslim and Turkic-speaking Uyghurs, who make up the largest community in China’s far-west province of Xinjiang, are facing brutal repression by police and others acting on behalf of the Beijing government.

    After Mao Zedong occupied X...

    Read more...

  • Giving Thanks, Living Faith

    Giving Thanks, Living Faith

    Raymond J. de Souza

    November 22, 2018

    Father Raymond de Souza sees in the kerfuffle around U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s claim to Native heritage an example of truth being an act of faith for which we should be thankful.

    On this American Thanksgiving, as our neighbours reflect upon the blessings of their bountiful land, and their debt to those who went before them, it is a fitting occasion to ask what we know about our own ancestors. What we know is an act of faith, and tea...

    Read more...

  • Building Better Christian Bridges

    Building Better Christian Bridges

    Andrea Mrozek

    October 23, 2018

    In a recent talk for Ottawa’s Theology on Tap speaking series, Cardus program director Andrea Mrozek examined myths and misunderstandings that divide Catholics and Protestants. She reminded her audience of C.S. Lewis’ admonition that we are faithfully waiting, not sullenly camping, until unity is restored.

    Picture a little girl in a pink dress and black patent shoes. She’s almost five years old. Something of significance has happened, though she isn’t really sure what. It’s the day of her baptism. Someone would have told her what baptism is. But she doesn’t f...

    Read more...

  • The Peterson Protests

    The Peterson Protests

    Raymond J. de Souza

    March 12, 2018

    Father Raymond de Souza was at a speech given by Jordan Peterson, perusing the foreword to the best-selling author’s latest book, when the mob erupted outside the hall at Queen’s University in Kingston.

    It’s sometimes hard to distinguish the show from the sideshow. Both came to Queen’s University last Monday, in the person of Jordan Peterson and those who profess outrage at the professor. 

    The show was the inaugural installment in a new law school l...

    Read more...

  • Religion's Perception Gap

    Religion's Perception Gap

    Peter Stockland with Ray Pennings

    November 16, 2017

    With today's release of the fourth major Angus Reid Institute polls on the state of religion in Canada, Cardus Executive Vice-President Ray Pennings says the biggest identifiable gap is between Canadians' positive lived experiences of faith and their negative perceptions arising from narratives about spiritual belief. 

    Convivium: The results coming out today are from the fourth Angus Reid Institute polls done on the state of faith in Canada. What’s the most important finding, and how do these results fit with those that have come before?

    Ra...

    Read more...

  • Home Schooling’s Lessons For Education

    Home Schooling’s Lessons For Education

    Beth Green and Deani Van Pelt

    September 13, 2017

    Cardus Senior Fellow Deani Van Pelt, and Cardus Education Program Director Beth Green, contend that proponents of misperceptions about home schooling should read up on the ample evidence of its benefits.

    Back-to-school means different things for Canada’s five million school-age children. For an increasing share of students in almost every province, it means something other than attending a neighbourhood public school. Homeschooling, while still small in ove...

    Read more...

  • Distinctly Quebec Education

    Distinctly Quebec Education

    Beth Green

    June 8, 2017

    Analyzing data from the Cardus Education Survey, program director Beth Green fills Convivium readers in on the “distinct, positive advantages” of religious schools in Quebec. Find the link to the original research in the article. 

    Analyzing data from the Cardus Education Survey, program director Beth Green fills Convivium readers in on the “distinct, positive advantages” of religious schools in Quebec. The full report is available here...

    Read more...

  • Perpetuating Homeschool Myths

    Perpetuating Homeschool Myths

    Ray Pennings

    October 31, 2016

    The Globe and Mail ran a story on the dispute between the Alberta government and the Wisdom Home Schooling Society of Alberta, which has been shut down due to alleged financial irregularities. The story was framed around the story of Bari Miller, a 23-year old Masters student in the University of Ottawa’s political studies program. Ms. Miller was home-educated in the Wisdom program from grades 2-12 and clearly doesn’t think much of what she was taught. The lack of oversight and standards were among the reasons that “at 17, Ms. Miller ran away from home, escaping her mom and the education program she deemed shoddy.” From that single anecdote, the Globe constructed a narrative about homeschooling that goes far beyond any alleged financial irregularities in one particular situation in Alberta.

    Homeschooling is back in the news, but as usual, the tone of the coverage is negative. I suspect that’s due, in large measure, to journalists simply being unaware of what a wealth of research has shown about the value of homeschooling. Allow me to explain b...

    Read more...

  • Challenging Trinity Western University: When the Law is Inconvenient

    Challenging Trinity Western University: When the Law is Inconvenient

    Albertos Polizogopoulos

    April 12, 2016

    Think about that: $10,000 per hour to argue a case which is almost identical to a case decided by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2001. The issues were the same. The questions were the same. In fact, one of the parties, Trinity Western University (“TWU”), is the same.

    I was in Halifax last week for the appeal hearing on Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society v. Trinity Western University et al. The hearing, which went from Wednesday through to Friday, included three main parties, ten interveners, five Court of Appeal j...

    Read more...

  • Time for a national conversation on parental choice in education

    Time for a national conversation on parental choice in education

    Beth Green and Ben Woodfinden

    January 26, 2016

    Parents and children should be at the heart of education, not teachers or cumbersome regulation. National School Choice Week, spearheaded by our neighbour to the south, offers a chance to highlight examples of school diversity already on offer in Canada’s provinces and to renew the call for a national conversation on parental choice.

    Written by Beth Green (Cardus Program Director, Education), and Ben Woodfinden.

    Parents and children should be at the heart of education, not teachers or cumbersome regulation. Na...

    Read more...

  • A School and a Church at the Heart of a City

    A School and a Church at the Heart of a City

    Beth Green

    August 18, 2015

    Thriving cities depend on good relationships. People need to be connected to institutional and social resources. Good connections depend on education, transparency, and accountability. As my colleague Milton Friesen wrote, “Faith-based organizations have a unique role to play in knitting together the social fabric of the city.”

    What is it that makes a city? Judging by the ones I’ve visited lately—London, Abu Dhabi, Chicago, Sydney—it is global finance and skyscrapers. When people show off their cities to you, they might often take you to a glamourous, redeveloped dockland and nod ...

    Read more...

  • Common Good & The Classroom

    Common Good & The Classroom

    Milton Friesen, and Beth Green, Brian Dijkema

    August 1, 2015

    Even when closing schools seems an economic no-brainer, communities should fight back.

    Counting All the Costs of School Closures By Milton Friesen

    In a letter to the Ministry of Education in February of this year, Toronto Mayor John Tory waded into the current debate over what to do with underutilized school b...

    Read more...

  • The Conversation: Law, Loyola and the Common Good

    The Conversation: Law, Loyola and the Common Good

    Paul Donovan with Peter Stockland

    June 1, 2015

    Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Canada declared the government of Quebec had breached the religious freedom of Loyola High School, a private Jesuit institution in Montreal. Paul Donovan, who led the seven-year legal battle as Loyola's principal and who became its president in April, spoke with Convivium publisher Peter Stockland about the implications of the decision for Canada's faith in common life..

    CONVIVIUM: I wanted to ask you a first question from your perspective, not as the former principal and now new president of Loyola High School, but as a citizen who's just gone through a very arduous, seven-year legal process. You took on t...

    Read more...

  • School Choices

    School Choices

    Ray Pennings

    January 30, 2015

    In North America, the terms “education” and “public education system” get treated as though they mean the same thing. When we remind people that education is bigger than the public system, it changes the conversation in a big way. Reframing our concerns opens up the options and suggests that a variety of parties—associations, providers, schools, and, even more importantly, families—have a stake in education.

    It’s School Choice Week.

    In North America, the terms “education” and “public education system” get treated as though they mean the same thing. When we remind people that education is bigger than the public s...

    Read more...