I’ve been with the Christian Courier for a year now, and it’s been such a joy. Looking back on this year of columns, including the one the editors wisely rejected, I asked myself what common thread runs through them. It is, simply, the Christian life. It’s a wonderfully inexhaustible topic, if there ever was one!…
On April 20, hundreds of thousands of people will gather on the streets of Surrey, B.C. for the Vaisakhi Day Parade, one of the largest in the world, according to event organizers. The parade commemorates the establishment of the Khalsa, a sacred community of initiated Sikhs. “You have 750,000 people on the street. It’s not…
In the age of music streaming services, listening to an entire album is becoming less common. Albums are structured around singles that will garner as much attention and radio play as possible or risk being forgotten. Paul Simon’s most recent album is the antithesis of such an approach. As noted on his official website, “Seven…
Like the Duggar family I grew up without a TV. Yet their lives, more than mine, have been deeply shaped by television. Over two million people watched each episode of 19 and Counting, a reality show that ran from 2008 to 2015 featuring Jim Bob, Michelle and their very large homeschooling Baptist family. Despite the…
Fifth largest country in terms of territory and seventh largest in population, Brazil has a delicate political system, known for its extreme polarization and the use of religion as a method of raising votes in a predominantly Christian country. In Brazil, voting is mandatory, meaning that all people between the ages of 18 and 60…
A new documentary mini-series on Amazon Prime called Shiny Happy People tells the hidden stories of the Duggar family from 19 Kids and Counting, and it also draws attention to the problems with a particular type of cult-like homeschooling that became popular in evangelical communities in the 1980s and 90s – Bill Gothard’s Advanced Training…
How did it happen that in the waning days of the Roman Empire, a small, often persecuted religious movement that had spent three centuries on the fringes of society, suddenly swept through the Empire’s population, institutions, and power structures until, in Gibbon’s famous words, it “finally erected the triumphant banner of the Cross on the…
“The Qur’an is a masterpiece of language,” my tour guide says, her face radiant. “It’s a miracle.” “I experienced some of that beauty,” I say shyly. “I memorized al-Fatihah.” “You memorized al-Fatihah?” I don’t blame her incredulity. I had cold called a mosque in downtown Oshawa, and my tour guide was the founder’s wife. She…
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…
It wasn’t too long ago that the government of Pauline Marois introduced the Charter of Values in the legislature (Bill 60), which would have prevented public employees from wearing conspicuous religious symbols.
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The world watched in horror as the Cathedral of Notre-Dame went up in smoke in Paris and my thoughts drifted back to my visit to the City of Lights at age 20. The student tour that I was on visited eight countries in the space of eight weeks, with tiny Liechtenstein possibly making for a ninth.
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