Dear Angela, Happy New Year to you, your family and creative writers team. Attached is a 1971 article from the Vancouver Sun that my son dug up: “Pulse Beats for Youth: Group Shares Art, Religion as Commune.” It brought back memories. That entire project was funded by a federal arts grant. Some of the projects…
“Something new and strange has happened in Canada,” the voiceover says gravely, “something we haven’t seen before. An entire generation of youth now say they will never be able to afford a home. This is not normal for Canada.” It’s Housing Hell: How We Got Here and How We Get Out with host Pierre Poilievre…
Within the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), the last two years of bickering about the Human Sexuality Report (HSR) have been exhausting and disillusioning. For all the discussion, all the words that have been written, and all the time and energy invested by hopefully well-intentioned people on all sides of the conversation, we have accomplished very…
I was carpooling a long distance with a university administrator, and as the hours passed, she shared details with me about her recent difficult divorce. “I gave myself to that marriage,” she said, her face getting dark. “I trusted the notion that you give yourself to the relationship. But I got badly burned.” She paused,…
I didn’t see the Twin Towers fall. I didn’t even hear about it until September 12, when my mom called our tiny Moscow apartment at 6 a.m. local time with a horrible update: terrorists … planes … the world has changed. Word-of-mouth news. We didn’t own a computer and it would be another decade before…
I dug out some of my journals from high school recently. One page had the title “The Life of a Grade Twelve.” It was just two lines: “I can’t say anything. I’m too busy doing homework.” In another section, I describe babysitting a sack of potatoes for a week to practice being a parent in…
It sounds like a Dickens tale. Born poor and orphaned at age 12, John Fawcett survived by apprenticing to a tailor. He became a Christian in his teens, married at 25 and began pastoring a small rural church for pennies – sometimes potatoes, if that’s all his parishioners had. It was 1770, Wainsgate, England. There’s…
Last week, our friends were excitedly planning for the upcoming youth convention. Then we heard the news. The 2023 All Ontario Youth Convention (AOYC) scheduled for this month was cancelled at the last minute because of objections to the main speaker Kevin Makins’ view of same-sex marriage. He wasn’t going to speak about or mention…
There was no possibility of meeting in person that day. The pandemic had brought with it risks so new, and an uncertainty so deep, that gathering the lectio divina group in the same room was now out of the question. A few minutes before 8:30 a.m., I settled my infant daughter and her toddler brother with their…
A few years ago, I was on Council as an elder at our church. This was before the pandemic; our congregation at the time was fairly large, around 700 professing members. I am not a numbers person but I would get a copy of the budget, like everyone else. We would vote on a few…
Could you tell if this editorial was written by a robot? I started asking this question in mid-December right around the time my husband, Jakob was spending his evenings talking to something (someone?) who wasn’t human at all. He had discovered ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI, a company co-founded by Elon Musk….
The miraculous healing of a 12-year-old girl brought the French army to a standstill in 1656. The girl was Marguerite Périer. She was Blaise Pascal’s niece and a boarding student at an abbey just outside of Paris called Port-Royal-des-Champs. Marguerite was suffering from an incurable physical ailment: an eye abscess. Several doctors had examined the…
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