Visiting Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change several years ago, I overheard a small black boy ask his mother: “Why were white people so bad to us?”

Canadians living jam-packed lives barely have time to read their watches, much less pore over voluminous legal judgments on pressing matters of the day.

Several years ago, a man showed up at a magazine company where I worked demanding to be paid “his” million dollars.

Bishops in Alberta and the Northwest Territories issued what has been prosaically called a series of guidelines to deal with so-called medical aid in dying. In truth, the Vademecum for Priests and Parishes beautifully illuminates, and reminds readers, what it means to live a Catholic life.

When Canada legalized assisted suicide earlier this year, the National Post’s coolly analytical Andrew Coyne wondered in a column whether we haven’t lost our way as a country. Barely two months after the legislation’s passage, a marker of how lost we are shows up in our insistence on going both ways at once.

The question, Rabbi Kliel Rose says, is not whether to help. It is not even how to help in the most efficient way. It is how to help in the fullest way.

It seems unimaginable that America’s incomprehensible deadlock over gun control could become any stranger. Yet somehow the quasi-ritualized mass slaughter of citizens by other citizens with high-powered weapons has produced the unfathomable effect of making prayer a victim.

Last week, two vibrant Catholic voices spoke on the same night in venues across the street from each other in downtown Toronto.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May made the perceptive point recently that democracy is too important to be left only to politicians. A nuance that might be added is that as a keystone of democracy, free, fair and above all vigorous elections should never become the exclusive preserve of the political actors seeking to benefit from them.