Give your children L-O-V-E
It’s legislation long overdue. The introduction of Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, is badly needed protection for the vulnerable — particularly children and youth — against traumas arising from an unsafe and unregulated digital world.
The proposed act identifies seven categories of harmful content, three of which directly relate to children. These include content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, bullies a child and induces a child to harm themselves.
Do you understand what you are reading?
Acts: 8: 30
The art of reading is rapidly disappearing. According to a study by the National Endowment for the Arts, nearly “half of all Americans ages 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure.” Even more alarming given my line of work, “College attendance no longer guarantees active reading habits.”
“Is Toronto finally shaking off the sexual stigma of polyamory?” reads the recent headline in the Toronto Star. News outlets have been peddling polyamory apologetics after a middle-aged woman released a book about her life-changing adventures pursuing polyamory in January 2024.
Alexey Navalny was surely a hero. Perhaps he was also a saint. Little evidence is available to buttress the hope that he might someday be recognized as such. Navalny, the Russian dissident who died/was murdered Feb. 16, spoke little of his conversion from militant atheism to Christian Orthodoxy during his abbreviated life.
The world can be a cold, unfriendly, even hostile and angry place — online and offline. It doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not supposed to be that way. God created an earthly paradise for us, but when we reject Him and His ways, we reject our true selves, each other and everything we’re actually longing for. We become prideful and selfish. Put a bunch of prideful and selfish people together and you have a recipe for guaranteed misery.
My family and I visited the Holy Land more than 40 years ago and witnessed discriminatory treatment of Palestinians. After 75 years of such treatment, the Oct.7 event should not be a surprise.
If posthumous praise could be turned into retroactive votes, the late Brian Mulroney might be poised for resurrection as Canada’s prime minister.
Timely Lenten advice from the Archdiocese of Ottawa-Cornwall website
I would dearly like to see a regular column by Rev. Andrew Bennett alongside Fr. Scott Lewis.
Verbatim: A meditation on 'The Flavour of God' written by Jason Openo
A meditation on The Flavour of God written by Jason Openo, a permanent diaconate candidate in Medicine Hat, Alta., and posted on the Diocese of Calgary blog.
It’s easy to be convinced that current times call us to shout at each other, to disdain, to quarrel, to stage hit-and-run detraction ops against perceived foes.