It is early Saturday morning deep in mid-summer and I am lacing up my shoes in the locker room at the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association before a long run. If someone were to look up the word “bliss” in a dictionary, my smiling face might well appear as the definition.

It is both proper and gratifying to see the success of World Youth Day in Rio as a massive, marvelous “yes” to Christian faith.

To read the coverage and study the ghastly pictures from the Quebec village of Lac Mégantic is to know that hearts must be asking where was God during this tragedy.

The Parti Quebecois’ so-called Act Respecting End of Life Care, the horrifying Bill-52, is cynicism wrapped in subterfuge blanketed by the blackness of ideological blindness.

There was a small moment at a recent McGill University conference that put the very large debate about public religious faith into clear perspective. Rabbi Lisa Gruschcow, appearing on a panel called Taking the Temperature: Religion and Secularism in Canadian Society, spoke eloquently and effectively about the delicate balancing of neutral secular governance with public manifestations of religious freedom.

Convivium magazine’s recent event in the heart of Canada’s financial district counted as an overwhelming success for me for one reason alone.

At a recent debate on euthanasia and assisted suicide, the proponent for medicalized killing was making the predictable argument on the grounds of personal autonomy.

Only those who have run marathons fully understand the event’s power to shred body, soul and psyche. Runners of half-marathons don’t half understand that power because the full 42.1 kilometres does not split arithmetically in two. It is commonly said the marathon truly begins at 30 kilometres.

As someone who can smell the incense from the last pew of the church, it was no challenge for me to sniff the billows of the beer coming off Ralph Klein.

Imagine being the universe and waking up one day to find you’re 80 million years older than you thought. Or, worse, to find the whole world now knows you’re so much older than you’ve been letting on.

That has to be an awkward moment even for a cosmos that’s seen, well, everything in its 13.81 billion years of existence...