The Crumbling of the Conservatives
Alberta’s NDP and its recent electoral success -- decimating the governing Progressive Conservatives ---- has surprised the country more than it should have. The reason for the defeat is far more prosaic than many of the commentators would have you believe. The reason is basic: Alberta’s PC party has had its day. Its reign lasted forty-four years. Enough. (Click on the blog's bold title to read the whole.)
Faith in the Council Chamber
The small, treed city of Saguenay in northern Quebec, has about 143,000 citizens. Recently it became the focus of a high controversy it never expected: every member of Canada’s Supreme Court, nine in all, ruled against a practice by Saguenay’s 20-member city council. (Click on the blog's bold title to read the whole.)
What an Experience
Kenneth Pennington, a highly respected scholar of the law and its history -– he’s authored many books and is on the faculty of The Catholic University of America — wrote a highly insightful essay a few years ago. Its title is “Innocent Until Proven Guilty: the Origin of a Legal Maxim.” It came back to me the other day. (Click on the blog's bold title to read the whole.)
There’s Israel and then there’s Canada
A friend of mine -– an academic with an earned doctorate in theology -- once began a sermon with a quotation drawn from the so-called “God is Dead” movement which came and went in the 1960s. “If God died,” my friend said, “He probably died trying to solve the middle east problem between the Israelis and the Palestinians.” (Click on the blog's bold title to read the whole.)
There’s prejudice, and then there’s ISIS
Never since the rise of fascism has a deepening fear entered the lives of almost everyone living in democratic countries. Since the seeds of this new cancer are set in Islamic states, mainly Iraq and Syria, it has, in addition to fear, fueled the confidence of the world’s growing secular movement, which sees all religions not as part of the answer but part of the problem. (click on the blog's bold title to read the whole)