Glen Argan: Monuments should be used for education
Statues typically honour those who have done great deeds. They are built so we do not forget our past. To forget the past is to lose hope for a better future. Without a memory of the past, our only vision of reality is that of the present. We are stuck in the ideology of today, reduced to a one-dimensional world. Memory opens horizons.
- By Glen Argan
Cathy Majtenyi: Today’s racism built on bedrock of history
In mid-August, Unilever urged ice-cream trucks selling Good Humor products to play a newly-created jingle.
Peter Stockland: Chesterton’s insights defy passing of time
At dinner during a recent event, a young journalistic rising star of decidedly Calvinist conviction acknowledged G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy ranks among the most inspiring books he’s read.
Charles Lewis: Music helps us ask simple question: Why?
Music is a great comfort. It raises deep issues of the soul and then expresses them in a way most of us never could. Many kinds of music are deeply spiritual, from Gregorian chant to country to rock.
Fr. Raymond de Souza: Discovering the roots that nurtured faith
On Sept. 5, 1920, Laura Cardoso left the family home in which she had been born to marry Salustiano Roque de Freitas. Nearly 100 years later, I visited that home, now deserted, in her village in Goa, India.
Robert Kinghorn: Fighting the fight against ‘alone-ness’
Many years ago, I heard the story of a school principal in South Africa who quit his job rather than submit to the school’s apartheid policy of racial discrimination. His friends told him he was crazy, but he said, “One day I am going to meet God, and God will ask me, ‘Where are your wounds?’ If I reply that I have no wounds, God will ask me, ‘Was there nothing that was worth fighting for?’ I could not face that question.”
Gerry Turcotte: The garden of the soul
I am not a gardener. In fact, I moved into a house with a large garden a decade ago and I joke that I have killed off one species of plant each year. Except that it’s not a joke.
Glen Argan: Humanity shows when we’re poor in spirit
When I was in Grade 8 at St. Augustine School in Regina, one of the priests at the neighbouring Little Flower Church frequently asked me to be the altar server at funerals. After a few of these ventures, my teacher told me to stop taking time away from school to serve at these Masses. I considered his command and decided that since this was a Catholic school, being the server at these funerals was the right thing to do. So, I engaged in my first acts of civil disobedience.
- By Glen Argan
Peter Stockland: Cardinal sending a strong message
Near the end of June, I pulled into our parish parking lot full of gumption at the resumption of Masses after four months of COVID-forced church closures.
Leah Perrault: Falling apart is one step toward healing
Falling is on my list of least favourite things.
Charles Lewis: Some sound advice for our next pope
We need to stop from time to time to contemplate what it means to be Catholic in this aggressively secular society of ours. It is easy for our beliefs to be swamped by the detritus of a powerful popular culture that looks upon us with bare tolerance at best and derision at worst.