Jonathan Castillo is a cartonero in Argentina — a collector of discarded recyclables.

It was a shocking revelation. A recent CBC investigation revealed that Dr. Carrie Bourassa, one of Canada’s leading Indigenous health researchers, is actually of Eastern European descent.

Some people like to think of life as a journey, an adventure, a pilgrimage, a blank slate, a beach, a work of art … a box of chocolates. But life isn’t always that neutral, is it? Sometimes we are dealt a rough hand from the earliest moments of our existence. Sometimes life is filled with pain and obstacles. We are free to look at life however we want, but one thing is for sure: Life is a battle, and no one gets to sit on the sidelines.

Today, I phoned to book a haircut only to find that Pat, my stylist of the past two years, had died of the delta variant of COVID. When I last saw him in late August, he looked fit and healthy as ever. I phoned back a month later to set my next haircut appointment but was told Pat was off work because he was having back problems. He died shortly after that call.

Granted, there is something beyond the borderline of zany in a journalist urging theologians to look to economics for reform of human behaviour.

Pope Francis will visit Canada to further reconciliation with Indigenous Canadians in relation to residential schools.

I appear to be depressing readers. Over the past few months, some have mentioned that I seem down, depressed and sad and it comes through in my copy.

At the end of a recent long run during which the state of the world is a staple of the conversational smorgasbord, my running partner asked a pressing perspicacious question: When, exactly, was conscience transferred from individual to collective ownership?

Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. Actually, it was Plato who argued that “our need will be the real creator,” a comment that eventually morphed into our more familiar adage.

The first responsibility of a journalist is to get the facts right. In that regard, I failed in my column “Lack of transparency shatters credibility” in the Oct. 17 Catholic Register. In that article, I took Canada’s bishops to task for failing to meet their responsibility to live up to agreements to provide healing and reconciliation to the survivors of residential schools.