Peter Stockland

Peter Stockland is a Cardus Senior Fellow and Publisher of the Catholic Register.

Bio last updated April 4th, 2022.

Peter Stockland

Articles by Peter Stockland

  • Solitude

    Photographer Peter Stockland is struck on his rush hour commute by a figure of stillness and solitude along the canal's edge. 

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  • Our Absurd Niqab Problem

    Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland says all sides in the great niqab debate are making a lot more noise than common sense. 

    It’s nonetheless preposterous to argue that because the majority of Muslim women eschew the niqab, the State therefore has some business interfering in the haberdashery choices of those who prefer it There is apparently an expectation in Quebec, for example, that the niqab ban will apply to women wi...

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  • Poverty Needs More Than Just Policies

    Peter Stockland sits down with Andrea Mrozek and Peter Jon Mitchell to discuss Cardus research showing that exclusively pursuing policy options misses critical elements in combating poverty.

    For Andrea Mrozek, program director for Cardus Family, Milke’s research paper is launch pad for broadening the Canadian discussion around poverty and inequality “That wrongly assumes a material remedy for a nonmaterial development that has its origins elsewhere: a decline in faith, changing morality...

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  • Recovering Civil Encounters

    Peter Stockland examines his colleague Andrew Bennett's compelling testimony to a House of Commons committee, wherein Bennett argued Canadians must let diversity be difference rather than a slippery euphemism for forced homogeneity.

    “The built environment can at best provide us with a fitting stage for human life and positive forms of civic involvement, social interaction and mutual support” Hardy concludes “And the fixing of our built environment – the wise redevelopment of our cities, the retro-fitting of our suburbs, the rec...

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  • When Silence Screams

    Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland contends the things said during the Rachael Harder debacle were bad enough. Much worse was the thinking revealed by the silence.

    Without naming names, Coyne wrote that he had witnessed ­­– and I have no reason at all to doubt this – people making the argument “that nominating Harder for chair of status of women is like giving a Holocaust denier responsibility for promoting religious tolerance Not “how” as in the emotionally r...

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  • Democratic Magic

    Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland visits a municipal election campaign in Montreal to discover small moments of magic in the cards.

    I slipped his card into my pocket, imagining I’d done so with magically nimble fingers, fitting since it belonged to Mario le Magicien, star of children’s birthday parties in this long ago deindustrialized commuter arrondisement of Montreal Oddities into the bargain, municipal politics has a quality...

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  • Privileged Conversation

    North American politics are consumed by new variations on the old debate about privilege, and consequent inequality and oppression. Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland and Andrew Bennett, program director for Cardus Law, sat down in Ottawa’s Moscow Tea Room to hash out the meaning of the words.

    Andrew Bennett: Another part of the current challenge we face around this denigration of privilege, or assuming that someone who's privileged is not worth engaging in discussion with on certain issues, comes back to again that central reality of our Christian faith : an understanding of human dignit...

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  • Trump’s Dangerous Game

    Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland delivers a sterling defence of sports and citizenship amidst the verbal clash between NFL players and U.S. President Donald Trump.

    Trump, of course, set the sports world aflame this weekend when he verbally abused NFL players whom he accused of showing disrespect to the American national anthem during pre-game ceremonies While he stood stalwart behind what he called the “brotherhood of sport,” Wilfork characterized Trump’s comm...

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  • Countdown to the Mitchell Literary Prize

    Judges for the $25,000 Faith in Canada 150 Mitchell Literary Prize have their short list ready to announce today. Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland spoke with contest director Doug Sikkema about what the high quality of the entries means for Canadian literature.

    Doug Sikkema: David Adams Richards noticed this sort of dynamic in the literary community in Canada years ago:  the one group you can sort of still be bigoted against or prejudiced against is people of faith, people who believe Convivium: How does the Canadianness of both the poetry and the stories ...

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  • Patti Smith’s Faithful Devotion

    Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland reviews the venerable Patti Smith's new book Devotion, drawing out the profound themes of love, light, and freedom found therein. 

    Inspiration, for Smith, is a portmanteau of the “activist mystic” Simone Weil’s gifted discovery that “faith is the experience that the intellect is enlightened by love Because of Smith’s profound experience of grief that gives way to the intellect enlightened by love, it would be understandable if ...

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  • Rebel Engagement

    Convivium publisher Peter Stockland knows the media world inside and out – knowledge he uses to dissect the latest bone-shaking controversy involving Ezra Levant and The Rebel, as well as the journalistic response to it.

    In recent years, I’ve watched as Original Ezra left the house, to be replaced by Kinda Kooky Cartoon Ezra, an automated ideological variant of the very knee jerkery he used to skewer so zestfully But journalists vetting media outlets for political suitability? Journalists deciding image-appropriate ...

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  • Entering In

    To follow in the footsteps of the faithful who have come before shapes our path to glory. 

    Like faith, you enter into it, drawn inexorably forward by the its unusual shape that has the pews flanking the nave in parallel rows rather than branching off it at horizontally ...

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  • Dunkirk, The Enemy, And Us

    Convivium asked Calgary scholars, Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe to watch Dunkirk and then talk about its effect on them. Here's what they had to say.

    Some would answer that the enemy is silent because it’s greedily watching a movie called Dunkirk that Hollywood’s finest marketing minds have manipulated it into seeing So, I had to see this as an existential phenomenon, a sense that it is epitomizing human experience: an extreme experience of rescu...

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  • Gay Pride Meets Jewish Orthodoxy

    As Ottawa heads into one of the last Pride weekends of the summer in Canada, Convivium publisher Peter Stockland interviews Daniel Jonas, an Israeli LGBT activist trying to balance contemporary interpretations of human rights and identity with his devout commitment to the timeless truths of Orthodox Judaism.

    Daniel Jonas is the chairperson of Havruta, a religious community that works for tolerance of LGBT people in Orthodox society in Israel C: But isn’t the Orthodox community abroad, in the diaspora, even more conservative than the Orthodox community in Israel? Why would that be? Is the focus of your w...

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  • Summer Sweet

    Today our Convivium Team takes you on a wander through the summer archives of years gone by as Publisher Peter Stockland captures the contradictory reality of our summers. 

    These are the days when it is given to us to try to hold hard to the impossible slip of summer warmth, time, memory "Canadian summer, as all Canadians know who've lived here for at least two years, is like a wall mural that shifts from exuberant colours of joy to shades of muted melancholy in a hand...

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  • Debating Data on Gay Marriage

    Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland reveals a new direction in the recently released family Census data.

    On the positive side, the outcome is exactly as gay marriage advocates predicted: a decade of over 60 per cent growth still leaves same-sex marriage short of peeping over the one per cent mark for all Canadian couples The paradox is that the new data gives equal validity to those who opposed the cha...

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  • God Promises More

    Wally Buono defines success in the Canadian Football League. He is the winningest head coach in league history. He has won five Grey Cups as a coach, two more as a player. But the current head coach, general manager and vice-president of football operations for the B.C. Lions is also a devout Christian who says true success is God changing your heart. 

    I wasn't a church goer at that time, and then through certain things that occurred I started to look at the relationship with Christ slightly different and I started to see it as a more personal relationship C: The heart of the Christian faith is the recognition that human beings are capable of nail...

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  • Start the Revolution Without Me

    Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts features a summer exhibition, Revolution, paying tribute to the 1960s. Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland drops by and finds the only thing missing is the whole truth about that often dangerously demented decade. Did they forget how to spell Charlie Manson's name?

    Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts is a major institution in Canada’s only real city, which is why its summer Revolution exhibit is such a serious let down So what do we do? How does one of Canada’s finest art institutions in its only real city respond? It Photoshops him out of history, then drags and d...

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  • A Ban on Muslim Cemeteries is an Attack on us All

    Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland reflects on the impact that the vote against the creation of a Muslim cemetery in Saint-Apollinaire, Quebec has on all Canadian citizens. 

    As my colleague Andrew Bennett, Canada’s first and last ambassador for religious freedom, puts it so eloquently: the freedoms of religion and conscience are and must be the first freedoms to which all others are bound Only digging deep into the truth underlying the ugliness will bring us face to fac...

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  • Accounting for Khadr

    Convivium Publisher Peter Stockland argues Canadians deserve better from the Khadr case than sketches of fact becoming caricatures of truth.

    It does mean there remain a myriad of questions that journalists, and the Conservative official opposition, must start asking so Canadians have the whole Khadr story, not just selective parts that suit preferred images of good and evil It’s applicable to Khadr because, harsh as this might seem, the ...

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