As Britain remembers the 200th anniversary of the legislation abolishing the slave trade this year, calls for reparation have gone forth from Africans on both sides of the Atlantic.

With the coming of Easter, the calls for conversion we Christians heard so often during Lent are naturally heard less. The mind of the church turns to other things: the victory of Jesus over death, the coming of His Spirit, the inauguration of the Kingdom of  God as a radical new reality in the life of humankind.

The documentary Lost Tomb of Jesus, for all its trumpery, posed a question that is as relevant this Easter as it was two millennia ago: Did Jesus rise from the dead? Even if the answer is self-evident to Christians, it does no harm to be able to explain it to the rest of the world in which we live.

What could we accomplish if Canada made a real effort to significantly reduce poverty in our country? Societies can reduce the rate of poverty and the depth of poverty. The key rests in the political commitment to develop an integrated and comprehensive action plan to combat poverty.

One of the Catholic Church’s most valuable and humble services to the people of Saskatchewan is coming to an end. Regrettably, the owners of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in the small city of Humboldt have been told their religion is no longer welcome at the governance of of their institution.

“Sometimes we overlook life’s small joys while searching for the big ones.”  Unknown

The recent March break was a low-key one for our family — very unstructured for a change.

Editor’s note: The following is excerpted from a brief presented to the Ontario Legislature’s standing committee on finance and economic affairs last month by Catholic Charities. The next provincial budget is expected to be revealed March 22.

There is a crisis that continues to grow in our midst. It is one that affects the poor and marginalized and the most vulnerable in our society.

World Water Day, March 22, affords us the opportunity to stand up, speak out and act to ensure our earth’s fresh water is protected as a public trust. Water is a right for the common good of all life forms, not a commodity for buying and selling to the rich by the rich.

One of the problems of war is that its casualties are not limited to combatants; they include what military strategists euphemistically call “collateral damage” inflicted by “friendly fire.”

When I first read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in 1960, this ironic novel from 1932 about the distant future had been around for a little over 25 years. But already its predictions seemed to be coming true, at least in the affluent North American society in which I lived as a young man.