Peter Stockland
Peter Stockland is a Cardus Senior Fellow and Publisher of the Catholic Register.
Bio last updated April 4th, 2022.
Articles by Peter Stockland
Link by Link
By Peter Stockland
December 18, 2012
Last night, I was passing the TV room in our house when I overheard Canada's own helium-filled news guy, Peter Mansbridge, actually say this: "The people of (insert name of latest town distraught over its dead children here) are asking for their privacy But I have known since being directly involved myself in coverage of the École Polytechnique shootings in 1989 that there is something profoundly creepy, ghoulish, ultimately deeply dysfunctional about turning a slaughter of innocents into media ritual
-
In the place where the NHL's heart should be
Peter Stockland
December 11, 2012
Hockey is that kind of game, but the NHL is not that kind of hockey league There comes a point, often a very sharp point, in almost every adult North American male's life when he clues in to what the women around him have known since childhood: that screen in front of you where those players are pla...
-
Joy: The Emergence from Suffering
Peter Stockland
December 4, 2012
In mid-November, I was blessed to live the joy of looking into the freshly dead face of a loved one to find the reminder that the true meaning of life is the moment From childhood, I have ferociously loved the words of the Hail Mary "Holy Mary/Mother of God/pray for us sinners now/and at the hour of...
-
A Cloud of Gas
Peter Stockland
November 28, 2012
A story on the Calgary Centre by-election reported, to cite a representative example, that Liberal hopeful Harvey Locke "took a slim lead" over Conservative candidate Joan Crockatt but that the "Tory MP moved ahead soon afterward" and never again relinquished the victory margin ...
-
The Default Scapegoat of Blame-Shifters Everywhere
Peter Stockland
November 20, 2012
Then, tailgating hard on those two perilous pastimes, comes navigating a road under construction in Quebec Transport Quebec, which is responsible for the road building part of the fiasco, blamed the whole thing on a communications mix up ...
-
Judging From a Distance
Peter Stockland
November 13, 2012
" The instantaneous leap is then made to condemning the Globe for wanting to condemn special needs children to lives of learning disabled misery The negative response of readers to this argument reflects a debilitating democratic dyslexia in which the letter of the law is confused with the laborious...
-
Pseudo-Historic Patriotism
Peter Stockland
November 6, 2012
So, is it that the 1812 celebration has naught to do with the turning of the calendar page, and everything to do with the federal Conservatives' fetishistic ardor for the Union Jack, Westminster, and other such sepia-toned Britishisms? If true, why not say so forthrightly rather than futzing around ...
-
Publisher's Letter: The Ultimate Ends of Advent Memories
Peter Stockland
November 1, 2012
Is not childhood the time in our lives, replicated perhaps only at the very end of life and at moments of deepest spiritual awareness, when meaning actually comes before information? Don't we, if we are Christians, know the crucial importance of a Baby Jesus even if we're unclear on the logistics of what a Baby Jesus is or where to find him?
Even if such comrades have never borne the Baby Jesus up the aisle of a church on Christmas Eve, surely they carry the meaning of Christ in their hearts and, as children, are not far from the kingdom And is not childhood the time in our lives, replicated perhaps only at the very end of life and at m...
-
Crimes and Smiley Faces
Peter Stockland
October 30, 2012
What does cause me deep concern, however, is the brush with subtle corruption I experienced when in a city police station when I went to fill out the report that is a pre-requisite to filing an insurance claim ...
-
Whatever is Left of Him
Peter Stockland
October 23, 2012
Yet there, yesterday, was the character named Rope who, when I last imagined him, was kneeling face down on a downtown sidewalk with his eyes full of broken glass, slowly bleeding to death to end a short story called "Orange and Peel ...
-
Rory's Keeper?
Peter Stockland
October 2, 2012
There are enough holes to fill a golf course in Rory McIlroy's excuse for almost missing his Ryder Cup tee time So why would even those dull enough to care about golf wonder why some multi-millionaire 22-year-old kid couldn't get himself to the church, errr, course, on time? ...
-
How Many Days Did You Actually Live?
Peter Stockland
September 18, 2012
Yet there we were, immobilized on an off-ramp of Highway 20, trying to make our way down a detour while Lucille (Lou) Pacaud awaited us downtown. Lou turned 105 in August. Even the digital clock in the dashboard seemed to be ticking too loudly.
Such "unstoppability" is among the reasons my wife and I were there to interview and photograph her for the book we're doing on 15 Quebecers whose lives testify to the power of committing to the days available to us ...
-
Whoa, Monarchy. Whoa.
Peter Stockland
September 12, 2012
A news report this week, however, had me spouting not the words of the greatest Bronx-Brooklyn Jewish rabbit of all time, but those of his irascible mustachioed nemesis, Yosemite Sam ...
-
Twists and Turns, Webs and Elections
Peter Stockland
September 4, 2012
Evenings on my front porch, that very light illuminates the miraculous works of spiders and webs that leaves a favoured place to take a cup of tea transformed into a complex of eerily silent industrial projects, construction sites, war zones ...
-
Publisher's Letter: A Blooming Danger
Peter Stockland
September 1, 2012
Killing education with Ontario's Bill 13.
Yet as Andrew Fuyarchuk writes in his essay commemorating the silver anniversary of Closing, Bloom had the conviction of a true believer that the intellectual malfeasance inflicted on—and through—the North American educational system from the 1960s forward had become a devastation Designed to curb b...
-
Citizen Bossy Boots
Peter Stockland
August 22, 2012
Madame Marois, as is her wont, immediately heightened the absurdity by insisting that Quebec's ancient symbols of religious patrimony such as public-space Christmas trees—a 19th-century import from Prussian Protestants popularized by the British Royal Family—and the Cross in the provincial legislatu...
-
Overdoing the Olympics
Peter Stockland
August 14, 2012
How many of us really care about any of it? How many, like me, felt an overwhelming need to comb their cats or change the oil on their pianos when the conversation turned to the Olympics, much less when TV coverage of the games monopolized hour after hour on channel after channel? How many, like me,...
-
A society watching The Dark Knight Rises has something wrong with it
Peter Stockland
July 25, 2012
"One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being," Orwell writes in Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali Rather, both press for the cultural clarity to see art as so powerful and so foundational that, at t...
-
Human Common Ground
Peter Stockland
July 17, 2012
Blue chips from General Motors to Tim Hortons, and lesser financial powerhouses such as the Hamilton Tiger-Cats football team, are turning to Disney trainers and seminars to learn what customer service really means, according to Monday's Globe and Mail On my one visit to Disneyland, I received an un...
-
-
Retrograde Fantasies
Peter Stockland
July 6, 2012
I cite the Stampede not because it is unique but because it makes the perfect general argument for the sobering benefits to be had spending a summer evening on the front porch with a novel's worth of Graham Greene's mater dolorosa dourness Menzies feels an annual compulsion to promote the mythology ...
-
Publisher's Letter: Days of Faith
Peter Stockland
July 1, 2012
Convivium is not an expressly political magazine in the narrow sense of process, strategizing and marketing that has come to define what we think of as politics. But it most definitely does concern itself with the polis—the city—with that shared space where the common life of citizens is lived out.
That is why we need faith in common life, and also why we need to engage in political life to express our faith that common life is possible But I have spent my adult life covering politics as a journalist and writing opinion columns about political issues ...
-
Seeing and Believing
Peter Stockland
June 26, 2012
Even those of us who remain people of faith have become habituated to turning that faith to text, liturgy, preaching, understanding the Word through words, that is, through theology "I don't want the people who work at the museum imposing their stories on me ...
-
Salvation from Medical Suicide
Peter Stockland
June 19, 2012
In fact, in my outraged funk, it struck me that disengagement from political life is the only sensible option even for an ordinary citizen in a country where morally horrifying and intellectually fraudulent judicial fiat reigns supreme By ruling that existing full prohibitions against medically deli...