Discipline
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God In My Everything
September 6, 2017Struck by the conviction of those around her that Ken Shigematsu’s book God in My Everything should be required reading for the contemporary Christian, Convivium’s Hannah Marazzi set out to have a conversation with the West Coast pastor and author.
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Celebrating Ordinary Time
February 1, 2017Jessica Walters, co-founder of the magazine Vigil, brings us a beautiful reflection on the marking of Ordinary Time as a part of our Cross Canada Convivium series.
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Stories of Subsidiarity
April 21, 2015For more on subsidiarity, consider my colleague Milton Friesen's excellent work on the subject over at our Social Cities page. There are ways to form a thriving society that don't necessarily rely on traditional political labels.
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It Really Is All About You
April 17, 2014The individual today is the measure and the mark of almost all of our public life. The most vociferous debates in our law revolve around individuals. In Canada, at least, the question of selling, ending, or controlling one's body is settled on the question of what limits, if any, are appropriate to place on the individual, whose freedom to choose is presumed to be—because of our constitution—the highest end of political life.
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Cardus Daily's Greatest Hits of 2013 - Part 2
December 31, 20135. In August, Cardus senior fellow John Seel took a look at beauty and the arts. Opportunity … requires the foundation of a home and family that provide security, support, and an education in virtue, which in turn enable children to achieve success in school. - Families, Flourishing, and Upward Mobility 3. And Brian Dijkema wrote about the importance of good parenting as well:
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Seeking Empty Stomachs
December 3, 2013So, to those who prefer a calm stomach to one churned by the useless product of the day, allow me to offer an ancient prescription.
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Take the Tough Medicine Now
December 2, 2013In layman's terms, central banks have printed enormous amounts of money and driven interest rates to historic lows. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Let Me Fall
November 22, 2013When you're seven, you know that you won't fall—but actually, we could have. And subliminally, this was part of what made it so exhilarating.
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The Upside-Down Moral Economy
November 11, 2013Toronto mayor Rob Ford promised to end the gravy train at city hall, but no one imagined a train wreck like this.
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After the Scrutiny, What Good Remains?
October 28, 2013But institutions of faith are hardly unique in showing concern about their employees' off-duty conduct, or their students' sexual behaviours. And employees (or students) at such institutions are hardly the only ones who agree to restrictions on their personal autonomy.
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Wendell Berry: Seeing the Earth as Sacrament
October 11, 2013Yet it would be years that I was first introduced to a writer who undertook the task of clearly articulating how a love of the creation could inform and be informed by a love of the creation and its Creator. This Kentucky farmer and man of letters, Wendell Berry, made real for me the complex interplay of religion, literature, and agriculture in informing a holistic way of life—in other words, towards shalom.
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Proximate Justice, Again and Again
October 1, 2013Making peace with proximate justice?
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Not Entirely Convinced
August 6, 2013The source of Steven Chua's article was an event in a downtown Vancouver pub. Another patron sitting near Mr. Chua glowered at him, as did the waitress. Mr. Chua inferred the hostility came from him being with a Caucasian companion. "That's the thing with racial tension in places like Vancouver, it's so subtle," Mr. Chua writes. "No one goes out in the open denying service or slinging disparaging remarks at anyone."
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Remembering How to Innovate
July 31, 2013For instance, Newton's Principia may not help you build a faster processor, but the story of Hans Neilson Hauge (cf. Cam Harder) can help you gain vital perspective on your difficult social innovation labours.
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Holding Onto Relics
July 23, 2013She has been wreaking a clearing and cleaning path since mid-June, making landfall in the overcrowded slum of our laundry room just before the solstice, then churning her way up the coast with lightning speed toward the densely-packed districts of the garage. In the chorus of the Jimi Hendrix classic from the Summer of Love, "the wind cries Mary." In my household this summer, The Hurricane howls: "Old! Useless! Out!" You will appreciate the many nerve-wracking moments when I wondered how long it would before I, too, was lifted and deposited firmly on the curb.
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Surrendering to Terror
June 11, 2013The second curiosity is the way politicians and bureaucrats splutter with indignation about the revelation of such surveillance on the grounds that the State's entitlement to secrecy is inviolable while citizen privacy rights are entirely dispensable. Have none of those now hopping up and down about this purportedly novel infamy been through an airport in the last 30 years? You cannot board a puddle jumper aircraft anywhere in Canada, the U.S., or the U.K.
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The Sound of Silence
June 10, 2013The CD sold out. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Taking a Bow
June 3, 2013One of Dudamel's signature moves is to bypass the customary conductor's bow in response to audience applause, and instead leap off of the podium and embed himself within the orchestra. He will put his arm around a couple of the performers and initiate a communal bow to acknowledge the appreciation.
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Fear Going On
April 16, 2013Part one required prospective marathoners to drive exactly 42.1 kilometres from their houses, park safely, get out of the car and start walking—not running—home. Part three required being truthful about how it felt knowing such a thought would probably first occur with, oh, about another 41.1 kilometres still to go.
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Watching Democratic Infrastructure Crumble
April 3, 2013The result, as Andrew Coyne pointed out, is we now have mob rule instead of democracy (at least on this question). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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The Chattering Class That is All of Us
March 28, 2013Whenever "ordinary" people (what, in the United States, we refer to as "real Americans") want to dismiss the incessant pontifications of journalists, columnists, and so-called public intellectuals, they can avail themselves of that biting epithet: "the chattering class." The chattering classes are those educated elites who dominate public discourse, commanding op-ed pages and national magazines, reviewing one another's books, commenting on one another's proposals, largely sequestered in what Charles Murray calls "super zips"—those regions of North America where the overly-educated are concentrated, creating the echo chambers that the rest of us are privileged to overhear. Take any event X (where X might be the Newtown massacre or the election of a new pope or a Supreme Court decision about gay marriage or just the latest episode of Girls); Provide your (usually entirely predictable) analysis or commentary on X (which might include a harangue or heartfelt plea, a poignant affirmation or an ironic deconstruction); Cycle through the ripple-effect commentaries on your commentary, including the (equally predictable) ironic denunciations and subsequent defenses; when we start getting ironic defenses of the ironic denunciations, then you know it's time for a new X. Repeat incessantly for all new Xs, while nothing changes. It might be fun to foist this description on some distant "chattering class," attributing such navel-gazing to "them." But in the age of the internet and social media—when any of us can pontificate on our blogs and Twitter feeds—pretty much all you need to join the chattering class is a solid liberal arts education and some decent 3G. When the chattering class becomes the twittering class, then the epithet starts to hit a little close to home.
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Limits on Our Excess
March 8, 2013At the beginning, you're just trying to sneak in an episode before dinner, and before you know it you're on a bender—clocking over ten hours in a span of only two days, full seasons watched from start to finish. I've been there, and it is a dark time. I shamefully admit that my Netflix and I are so well acquainted, it has filtered in an entire category of "things I might like" titled "Eighteenth Century Period Dramas with a Strong Female Lead."
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Lance Armstrong's Increasingly Popular World
January 21, 2013First, Mr. Armstrong's sins were confessed to Oprah, who next to the Kennedys is pretty much the closest thing to royalty that America can find to fill the 237-year-old void it still seems to feel when it comes to monarchy. But there's more: Oprah is now a quasi-religious cultural construct, having assumed the roles of She To Whom One's Sins Are Confessed and She From Whom Forgiveness and Absolution are Sought.
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More than a Sports Story
January 9, 2013"(T)he English major is remarkably erudite for a professional athlete," notes the Toronto Star's Rosie Dimanno. After interviewing Dickey on the syndicated Prime Time Sports show with Bob McCown, Damien Cox opined that Dickey was among the most interesting interviews in professional sports today. John Lott's National Post summary of the newser noted that, "between his soliloquies on the knuckleball and the local baseball team's prospects of a winning a long-awaited championship" came stories of passion for charity and teaching his daughters. It's not every day that a sports celebrity is introduced as a "philanthropist, born-again Christian, sex-abuse survivor, and best-selling author."
