Literature

The Industry of Ideas

Peter Stockland

March 7, 2017

Publisher Peter Stockland contests the idea that the age in which we dwell is one marked entirely by misinformation and the mediocre. Rather, he points us towards the rich tradition of several publications upon which to delve and enjoy a taste of "the good, the true, and the beautiful."

Most of us know the game where a simple message is passed among a number of people to test how unrecognizably shredded it is when it reaches the last person.

The game teaches, or reminds us, of the vagaries of individual witness.

It’s curious,...

Read more...
Full Disclosure

T.W.S. Hunt

February 22, 2017

Author T.W.S. Hunt reflects on the true nature of pluralism as a tool to navigate difference within both society and literature.

I wrote a book recently. The first question people ask is what is the book about? I wish I could tell them I wrote a novel. Novelists are like superstars. I’d also have been okay with writing a book about ornithology or moral ecology, something that would m...

Read more...
Marilynne Robinson’s Metaphysical Inklings

Marilynne Robinson

February 15, 2017

Reporter Sarah Grochowski reports from the University of British Columbia, as Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson delivered spoken essays as part of the 2017 Laing Lectures hosted by Regent College’s graduate school of theology.

Through writer Marilynne Robinson’s voice in Vancouver last week, a lecture series founded from one father’s love of ideas became a meditation on God the Father’s love.

For three days at the University of British Columbia, the Pulitzer Prize winning ...

Read more...
Below the Silence

Peter Stockland

June 22, 2015

Yet those who care to remedy such a state of affairs still have time before Saul Bellow’s birth month is out to read his astonishing 1976 Nobel Prize Lecture.

Only a forgetful silence has marked this June’s centenary of the greatest of all Canadian-born novelists.

Yet those who care to remedy such a state of affairs still have time before Saul Bellow’s birth month is out to read his astonishing 1976 Nobel ...

Read more...
What DO they teach them at these schools?

Beth Green

February 27, 2015

C.S. Lewis, himself a notoriously poor mathematician, challenged the false dualism of an education which separates reason from imagination: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It might be said that not enough graduates of Protestant Christian schools in North America will go on to make their vocation in a STEM-related field. ...

Read more...
Stealing Past the Dragons

Doug Sikkema

December 1, 2014

Marilynne Robinson is a 21st century successor to Flannery O’Connor and C.S. Lewis, with less shouting and fantasy.

Almost no two writers of the 20th century quite captivate the Christian imagination the way Flannery O'Connor and C.S. Lewis do. Almost. I know the century gave us—if centuries really can give such things—the inimitable riches of Tolkien's Middle Earth, the...

Read more...
The Imagination: Free, but Everywhere in Chains

Doug Sikkema

October 30, 2014

Now while it might seem that North Koreans have much more to worry about on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs than the fine arts, it’s telling that the Kim leadership not only knows the importance of the arts, but maintains a heavy bureaucratic stranglehold upon them. Case in point: a wrongly chosen metaphor meant to exult the leader might result in years of hard labour in a concentration camp, or possibly death.

How might we imagine something new? How might we even begin?

...

Read more...
New Cardus Education Survey to be released

Naomi Biesheuvel

September 4, 2014

The release will take place at the CUNY Institute for Education Policy at Roosevelt House, New York, New York, from 5:30-7:45pm on September 10, 2014. The event will feature Cardus's Ray Pennings, along with Sean Corcoran of New York University; Kathy Jamil, founder of Islamic School's League of America; and Ashley Berner of the CUNY Institute for Education Policy.

The newest collection of U.S. data for the esteemed Cardus Education Survey will be released next week.

The release will take place at the CUNY Institute for Education Policy at Roosevelt House, New York, New York, from 5:30-7:45pm on September 10, 2...

Read more...
Becoming Like Gods

Doug Sikkema

June 16, 2014

Feenan's point was that the rise of these Nietzschean supermen (ubermenschen) are using social media—and, well, guns—to extend their will-to-power. In a way, the superman or, literally translated, "over man" Nietzsche foretold was meant to be a source of optimism for a world where God was dead. Nietzsche's hope, delivered by his prophetic persona, Zarathustra, was that we could become like so many gods. No God was no reason to despair, it was a cause to rejoice, and embrace the this-ness of life in all its fullness. His vision, as Calvin would have noticed (and Dostoevsky did), might not have properly accounted for the heart's affinity for deceit. Could any man or woman really handle the godlike powers Nietzsche wanted them to grab hold of?

In a recent piece at The American Scene, Matt Feenan was one among many trying to make sense of another senseless shooting that left another community reeling in its wake. Canadians haven't been immune from this either, as the recent tragedy in Moncton so s...

Read more...
March Madness: Rooting for the Underdog

Doug Sikkema

April 4, 2014

Doug Sikkema writes on how the anticipation of spring, Easter, and March Madness all tell us a little bit about who we are by kindling, albeit subtly, some of our most basic desires.

March is a month of anticipation. We await the end of winter with the arrival of spring, the end of Lent with the arrival of Easter, and the end of a sport's drought with the arrival of NCAA's March Madn...

Read more...
Walking Away From Omelas

Doug Sikkema

January 10, 2014

The only way for Omelas to maintain its stoic happiness is to free itself from guilt. Easy enough, it seems, but for one problem. In the basement of one of the buildings in Omelas is an imprisoned child that everyone living in Omelas must confront. The child is never let outside, is never spoken to, and must sit chained in its own filth.

In Ursula LeGuin's 1973 short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," we are told of a place where everyone (well, almost everyone) is perfectly happy. The Summer Festival is upo...

Read more...
Patronage: Of Visions and Revisions

Doug Sikkema

December 13, 2013

I can still recall a visceral outrage at my Dad's indecipherable scribbles on my primary school essays as he moved paragraphs around and suggested new words. He actually took the time to give the rationale for all his choices, but an indignant voice told my 12-year-old self: "He is throwing a rock through a stained-glass window." I'm sure my page-long book report on Prince Caspian was no such thing, but it was hard to humble myself and make the changes.

There is something satisfying about a page of text marked up in a sea of red—of course it helps when you're on the right side of it. I've been on the giving and the receiving end of vic...

Read more...
Standing by Words at Home and Abroad

Doug Sikkema

November 7, 2013

It is 1895. Oscar Wilde, the witty Irish socialite and notorious public flaneur, is embroiled in a public scandal over allegations of sodomy. The Victorian public is far less accommodating of Wilde's proclivities than we would be today, and the case quickly becomes a media frenzy as the sordid details of Wilde's private life become fodder for the gossiping masses.

"He said, and stood . . ." —Paradise Regained, IV, 561

It is 1895. Oscar Wilde, the witty Irish socialite and notorious public ...

Read more...
A Culture Breaking Bad?

Doug Sikkema

October 4, 2013

Either way, I think that we get a good reading of the cultural climate if we look at the heroes gripping our collective attention. And with the final demise of Walter White, the heroic centre of AMC's Breaking Bad, there is something more than a little troubling about the type of hero for whom we find ourselves cheering.

If you haven't been caught up in the Breaking Bad buzz for the past few years, then you likely didn't tune in with the other 10.3 million people last Sunday night to watch the show's finale and, more lik...

Read more...
Be Not Afraid: Prophecy in War-Time

Doug Sikkema

September 13, 2013

While fear may seem the only option, Doug Sikkema reflects on the work and life of Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who used his last words to urge against being afraid.

This article was first published in 2013 during the Syrian conflicts.

If you've been sucked into the 24-hour news cycle lately, or ever, it might seem that fear and hopelessness are ...

Read more...
The Extraordinary Ordinariness

Peter Stockland

July 3, 2013

In a lovely, reflective article by Charles McGrath, who identifies himself as Munro's first editor at the New Yorker Magazine in the 1970s, Munro confirms that a lifetime of short story writing has come to an end. It is astonishing, of course, to think of Alice Munro turning 82. Writing that endures seems to confer on the writer not just extended literary mortality but also an exemption from normal human passage.

One of the small, quiet, but deeply meaningful stories on Canada Day was the news in the New York Times that Alice Munro will write no m...

Read more...
Learning to Speak of Beliefs

Peter Menzies

January 14, 2013

The suburban Canada I grew up in contained people from many different backgrounds—German, Ukrainian, Italian, Scottish, Irish, Greek for instance—but was almost entirely white. In terms of belief, we were all either Roman Catholics (Habs fans) or Protestants (Leafs fans) although I was aware of a few Jewish kids here and there and couple of Chinese heritage families. Regardless, almost all of us came from a Judeo-Christian, European cultural context. The only major fracture in our country was that elsewhere in it, people spoke another language, which made Canada into an officially bilingual country founded by English-speaking people whose origins were in Britain and French-speaking people whose origins were in France.

Recent shifts in language use and demography make it clear that Christians will have to broaden their understanding of other faiths or risk being isolated in their own cultural catacombs.

The suburban Canada I grew up in contained people from many di...

Read more...
Small Talk

Raymond J. de Souza

November 1, 2012

The smoke-free posse burgles Santa's pipe; the Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson busts a howler, and our editor-in-chief warns of bishops bursting their buttons.

The National Post couldn't resist putting it on the front page. The editor of a new edition of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas has edited out Santa's pipe and his head wreathed in smoke. It's the work of "smoking cessation advocate" Pamela McColl, who writ...

Read more...
Whatever is Left of Him

Peter Stockland

October 23, 2012

Yet there, yesterday, was the character named Rope who, when I last imagined him, was kneeling face down on a downtown sidewalk with his eyes full of broken glass, slowly bleeding to death to end a short story called "Orange and Peel." Yesterday he sat, flesh and blood, on the steps of a flower shop between Hingston and Beaconsfield in Montreal's Notre-Dame-de-Grace neighbourhood.

It is not a little unnerving to meet a fictional character you've created.

Yet there, yesterday, was the character named Rope who, when I last imagined him, was kneeling face down on a downtown sidewalk with his eyes full of broken glass, slowly blee...

Read more...
Careless Politics

Dani Shaw

October 22, 2012

The tragic death of B.C. teenager Amanda Todd is a poignant reminder of the power of words. Words such as "punch her," "nobody likes you, and "I hope she dies next time" were uttered to her in person and via Facebook. Her YouTube video, a modern day suicide note, consisted of nothing more than words on cue cards. Those words and her story were powerful—painfully and heartbreakingly powerful. Minister Broten was quoted as saying Ontario's new anti-bullying law (Bill 13) "is about tackling misogyny . . . Taking away a woman's right to choose could arguably be one of the most misogynistic actions that one could take."

"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." If only that were true.

The tragic death of B.C. teenager Amanda Todd is a poignant reminder of the power of words. Words such as "punch her," "nobody likes you, and "I hope she die...

Read more...
The Conversation: Private Education, Public Interest

Ray Pennings

September 1, 2012

Cardus director of research Ray Pennings discusses a new study of private education and the public interest.

In keeping with Cardus' Mandate to renew "Social Architecture" in this country, rather than examining academic achievement, the story looks at the way schools shape students into citizens. Ray Pennings, Cardus Director of Research, discusses with Publisher ...

Read more...
Limits on Scripture

Brian Dijkema

August 30, 2012

The greatest moment of American public life in the 20th century—and one of the finest examples of public speech in history—contains a quote from Isaiah. Yes. One of the greatest speeches ever made, in one of the greatest political communities our fair planet has ever seen, was lifted straight from the pages of a book that is thousands of years old and written in the Middle East. And the speech contains not just one quote. This great example of goodness and power is shot through with quotes and references to Scripture. It is a speech in which Scripture is the foundation, the wellspring of the great dream that changed American life and helped to overcome its original sin.

I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord s...

Read more...
A society watching The Dark Knight Rises has something wrong with it

Peter Stockland

July 25, 2012

In this morning's Globe and Mail, columnist Lynn Crosbie takes the case a step deeper and challenges literary creators to respond with essential grace when their creations go damnably wrong. In contrast to the harrumphing galumphers who churn out endless pure political commentary, she works from the assertion that the electoral, parliamentary, and policy cliques are to our lived meaning as WWE wrestling is to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot: a bombastic sideshow relation to the authentic theatrical absurdity of contemporary life.

My Cardus colleague Josh Reinders makes a brilliant argument in yesterday's blog for literature's powerful formative role in creating a culture of saving grace.

In this morning's Globe ...

Read more...
Myth-making

Josh Reinders

July 24, 2012

We are a civilization of creators. Or, through the eyes of The Lord of the Rings author, we are sub-creators. Our histories are deeply marked by the devices we create. From the wheel to the atomic bomb to the microprocessor, humans carry an innate propensity to create tools and devices to make our lives easier and help to further the development of the human race. We as beings want to create.

We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and in...

Read more...