Social Justice

  • Humanitarian Crisis Adds to Burdens of Afghan Religious Minorities

    Humanitarian Crisis Adds to Burdens of Afghan Religious Minorities

    Susan Korah

    February 4, 2022

    Media attention may have shifted away from Afghanistan, but suffering families and religious minorities remain in the country. On-the-ground relief efforts are in dire need of support, writes Susan Korah.

    For Fawzia Shah, (not her real name), a middle-aged Hazara (Shia Muslim) woman from Central Afghanistan, the words “democracy”, “freedom,” and “women’s rights” mean nothing. 

    Those were the stirring slogans with which political leaders in Canada, the...

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  • Christian Women Doubly Vulnerable to Persecution

    Christian Women Doubly Vulnerable to Persecution

    Susan Korah

    December 6, 2021

    On a day that will live in infamy to mark violence against Canadian women, Susan Korah reports on a global study of gendered religious persecution.

    Aid to the Church in Need, a global Catholic charity has released a groundbreaking—and heartbreaking— report. 

    With the launch of Hear Her Cries—the first comprehensive report on gender-specific religious persecution—Aid to the Chur...

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  • Climate Change Making Eden a Wasteland

    Climate Change Making Eden a Wasteland

    Susan Korah

    November 17, 2021

    Yesterday, Peter Stockland queried the usefulness of the COP26 conference. Today, Susan Korah reports on the urgency of saving the Garden from climate calamity.

    “We have inherited a garden, we must not leave a desert to our children.”

    — Statement signed on October 4, 2021 by Pope Francis and 40 faith leaders

    Two countries that were consistently in th...

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  • We Cannot Abandon Lebanon

    We Cannot Abandon Lebanon

    Susan Korah

    August 4, 2021

    Susan Korah reports on the desperate state of the former Mediterranean oasis one year after the blast that decimated Beirut.

    One year ago today was a night of splintering glass and splattering blood. 

    On August 4, 2020, as the last hours of pre-sunset daylight illuminated Beirut’s skyline, a cataclysmic explosion shook the city like the blast of an atomic bomb. It turned o...

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  • Unmasking the Match Lighting Mob

    Unmasking the Match Lighting Mob

    Don Hutchinson

    July 23, 2021

    Don Hutchinson asks who has fuelled church burnings across Canada, and notes Indigenous leaders from coast to coast have been most stalwart in condemning the two dozen arson attacks.

    Mainstream media lit a fuse, and churches are burning. Nearly two dozen to date and a greater number have been vandalized with graffiti, paint-dipped handprints, and splatter.

    Some congregations have accepted acts of vandalism as a visual lesson on t...

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  • Downing a Fighter for Indigenous Kids

    Downing a Fighter for Indigenous Kids

    Alan Hustak

    June 18, 2021

    Alan Hustak reports on the removal of a statue honouring the 19th-century priest who suffered a nervous breakdown battling Ottawa over its abusive residential school system.

    The statue of a priest whose Indigenous students were originally taught in Cree, and who fought forced removal of Indigenous children from their parents, is slated for removal from a Saskatchewan cemetery.

    The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Regina has...

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  • Questions Unasked About Indigenous Deaths

    Questions Unasked About Indigenous Deaths

    Peter Stockland

    June 4, 2021

    Peter Stockland brings a journalist’s mindset and hometown origins to his analysis of media coverage around the finding of Indigenous children’s bodies in Kamloops, B.C.

    Melissa Mollen-Dupuis and I don’t know each other but we appear to share similar thoughts on the journalism around Kamloops, B.C. and the discovery of an unmarked grave containing remains of Indigenous children.

    In an interview with Montreal’s Le...

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  • How Sanctions Cheat Children

    How Sanctions Cheat Children

    Susan Korah

    February 12, 2021

    Leading voices are urging Canada to rethink Middle East sanctions that make daily life a struggle just to get daily bread, Susan Korah reports.

    “Economic sanctions that afflict the poor must be lifted. I stress the word ‘poor,’” Archimandrite (head of a monastery) Georges Masri said in an e-mail from his home base in Syria. He was responding to my request for his views on the unfolding humanitarian...

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  • The Spiritual Connection of Violence

    The Spiritual Connection of Violence

    Robert Joustra

    January 15, 2021

    Robert Joustra writes that last week’s violence at the U.S. Capitol isn’t a phenomenon of lone nutters but the toxicity of radicalized communities persistent even among religious faithful.

    In 2015 I spent my summer months hosted by St. Ignatius University in the central Belgian city of Antwerp. We were studying religious radicalization, and Antwerp was an auspicious setting. 

    At the time, the number of European Muslims leaving to join ...

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  • An Unlikely Alliance Against Porn

    An Unlikely Alliance Against Porn

    Jonathon Van Maren

    January 14, 2021

    Jonathon Van Maren reports on the teamwork of a socially conservative Alberta MP and liberal feminist senator from Montreal to combat the Canadian-controlled smut giant Pornhub.

    For months, the porn industry has received wave after wave of bad news. An Ontario judge decided that Internet companies can be held liable if child porn is hosted on their servers. The New York Times ran an article by Nicholas Kristoff titled “The...

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  • Santa Serves the War-Torn, Too

    Santa Serves the War-Torn, Too

    Susan Korah

    December 21, 2020

    Saint Nicholas lives in the spirit of all who give gifts and life to those in the darkness of violence and poverty, Susan Korah writes.

    Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.

    Thank God! He lives, and he lives forever. A thousan...

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  • Progress Against MAiD

    Progress Against MAiD

    Peter Stockland

    November 19, 2020

    Catherine Frazee, a long-time disability Rights activist and Ontario’s former Chief Commissioner of Human Rights, talked to MPs about pending MAiD expansion recently. It wasn’t enough to make her give up hope, Peter Stockland reports.

    A powerful impetus behind the Liberal government’s push to jam expanded medical aid in dying through Parliament has been the force of proponents arguing it is progressive legislation.

    Yet Catherine Frazee, who testified last week before the Commons c...

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  • Justin Trudeau's Words to the Wise

    Justin Trudeau's Words to the Wise

    Peter Stockland

    November 4, 2020

    The Prime Minister got it right the first time on the limits of free speech. His mistake was backing down in the face of vociferous criticism, Peter Stockland writes.

    As a Westerner who’s lived in Quebec for 20 years, one of my great challenges is using the proper noun Trudeau and the adjective “correct” in the same sentence.

    It was so with the father. So it is also with the son. Yet right is right. It must be sai...

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  • Yazidis Refuse to Become Yesterday’s News

    Yazidis Refuse to Become Yesterday’s News

    Susan Korah

    August 4, 2020

    Northern Iraqi religious refugees who fled ISIS-generated genocide six years ago fear Ottawa is turning the page on its promise to help them heal, Susan Korah writes.

    About 100 Yazidis and their supporters held a peaceful demonstration in London, Ontario yesterday to commemorate August 3, 2014, the day ISIS terrorists unleashed torture, sex slavery and genocide against the religious minority. They were raising their voic...

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  • The Invisible Persecution of Religious Women

    The Invisible Persecution of Religious Women

    Janet Epp Buckingham

    April 22, 2020

    Violent subjugation inflicted on women of faith is a global iniquity that rarely counts because it differs from the persecution of male religious leaders, Janet Epp Buckingham reports. 

    In March, The UN Special Rapporteur on Religious Freedom issued a report on gender-based violence in the name of religion, which it said occurs everywhere in the world. 

    “Gender-based violence and discrimination is being perpetuated both in the publi...

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  • Two Kinds of Peace

    Two Kinds of Peace

    Josh Nadeau

    December 12, 2019

    In the second of a two-part series, Josh Nadeau examines a way to engage with people who think differently, as well as come together to heal our polarized society.

    This article is the second of a two-part series. To read the first part, please click here: Desperately Seeking Civility.

    We live in a polar...

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  • God in the Chaos

    God in the Chaos

    Samantha Dignam

    February 6, 2019

    Overcoming her doubts about the mission, though not the message, of the Church, the University of Ottawa’s Samantha Dignam discovers at the Urbana18 conference how acknowledging the faults of Christians is key to carrying the Gospel to the world.

    I first heard about Urbana, a triennial global students missions conference, in 2015 when I was a first year International Development student at the University of Ottawa. I heard about it mostly in passing and honestly, I d...

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  • God in the Chaos

    God in the Chaos

    Samantha Dignam

    February 6, 2019

    Overcoming her doubts about the mission, though not the message, of the Church, the University of Ottawa’s Samantha Dignam discovers at the Urbana18 conference how acknowledging the faults of Christians is key to carrying the Gospel to the world.

    I first heard about Urbana, a triennial global students missions conference, in 2015 when I was a first year International Development student at the University of Ottawa. I heard about it mostly in passing and honestly, I d...

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  • 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...

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  • Beaming At The Vatican

    Beaming At The Vatican

    Raymond J. de Souza with Edward Burroughs

    June 15, 2017

    Editor in Chief Father Raymond J. de Souza reports on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's recent visit to the Vatican, delivering an insightful reflection on judgement, truth, and values. 

    Three weeks ago, Justin Trudeau knelt in the Sistine Chapel before The Last Judgement, Michelangelo’s depiction of the Risen Christ returning in awesome glory to render final judgement upon the saints and the damned. It is both sobering and salutar...

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  • Rethinking Christmas Charity

    Rethinking Christmas Charity

    Ray Sawatsky

    December 1, 2015

    Christmas ought to be a time for thoughtful giving, not giving that is easy or benefits the giver.

    The generosity of people at Christmastime is amazing. There is something about the season that, well, warms the hearts and leads us toward generosity. It is, after all, the celebration of the gift of the birth of Jesus, which led to the greatest single act ...

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