This will be my last regular column for Christian Courier. I was recently elected as a municipal councillor in my hometown, and I am cutting back on some of my other commitments to focus on representing my constituents, including this column. I wanted to take an opportunity to say goodbye. I wrote my first article…
The show The Good Place is one of the most remarkable things to ever appear on television. It is a show about the afterlife – and behind the all-star cast was an all-star team of PhDs who loaded the scripts with quotes and ideas from moral philosophy. In one scene, an angel named Michael muses…
Older people have complained about younger people since the beginning of history. Socrates once wrote about how young people no longer respected their elders and were running amok in Athens. The 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause showed teens as emotionally confused, angry and disrespectful – a theme that has woven its way through lots…
There are many ways to tell you’re getting older. You hold your phone farther away to read it. Or you hear a song on the radio and don’t recognize the singer (that one counts as two – young people don’t listen to the radio). For me, it was a retirement. This year, the last person…
In February 14’s issue I wrote about how some politicians define “freedom” as the ability personally to do what you want (like disobeying masks and vaccine mandates) while also being able to restrict what other people do (like teaching about race in school). Since that column appeared, many new rights-restrictive bills have appeared in US…
In 1983, ABC showed a made-for TV movie called “The Day After,” which told the story of Kansas families caught in a nuclear war between the USSR and NATO. A lot of us kids watched that movie and were traumatized. I’ll be honest – I didn’t even have the guts to watch it. Kids in…
I met James in 2008 when I interviewed him for a job. He was about my age. He had a son about my son’s age. He was recently divorced, too, just like me. He liked politics, Star Trek, old movies and NFL football, and I liked three out of four of those things, too. It…
At some point, it became all about “freedom.” I first noticed it about 20 years ago, just after 9/11. George W. Bush was addressing a joint session of congress. Answering why terrorists hate America, Bush said: “They hate our freedoms.” In the 20 years since, protecting “our freedoms” has been the foundation of a lot…
Medieval Christmas traditions would seem a little weird to most of us. In fact, the kind of Christmas that my ancestors likely observed in the fishing villages of Medieval North Holland probably looked a lot more like Halloween than Christmas. Take caroling, for example. We think of caroling as a joyful, cheer-sharing pastime meant to…
Canadian anti-vaccination activists have been throwing a tantrum. They’ve been blockading hospitals. During the election they were throwing gravel at political events. Yelling and swearing at candidates. Vandalizing candidates’ personal property and election signs. They say it’s because they’ve been “pushed too far.” They say that the government is limiting freedom. They claim they want…
Movies make political campaigns look dramatic. There’s always some veteran campaigner with rolled up shirtsleeves and a loose necktie running a “war room,” yelling at junior staffers, throwing papers around and smoking cigarettes. There’s always a huge scandal, and the chief strategist has a brilliant idea that turns the whole election around. I’ve been on…
It’s election season again in Canada. You can tell, because the robocalls have started, the requests for donations are more urgent, and politicians across the country have bought some new shoes for door-knocking. This should be a happy time for Canadians. We are champions of “peace, order and good government,” which is why having a…
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