Jason Brown was making millions of dollars playing in the NFL when he suddenly quit last winter to answer a call to feed the poor. 

One of the highlights of the year just ending was the canonization of the greatest pope and dominant religious figure of our times, John Paul II. Over the years I had attended many such events as a reporter or broadcaster in the media section, but I thought that this time I would take it in as a pilgrim. That meant arriving in St. Peter’s Square some four hours or so before the Mass began. How to spend those hours in a suitably pious and productive way? After all, the breviary and rosary don’t take that long, even at a leisurely pace. 

Before I became convinced that William Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic, I was one of those conspiratorially minded chaps who believed Shakespeare was not the person who wrote the greatest single cache of plays in the English language. 

The Feast of Christ the King was instituted in 1925, just as the age of kings was ending. The natural order of society — kingly rule — for millennia, was replaced by the modern state. Christians who may not have known kings were reminded that Christ was their king. 

It’s doubtful Janet Epp Buckingham ever dreamed the dream of a law school at Trinity Western University would turn into a crucial test case for religious liberty. 

Ontario’s Ministry of Education has launched an online survey regarding the sex-ed component of a new health and physical education curriculum for elementary schools. According to an information package, the ministry is seeking input from 4,000 selected parents — one from every elementary school in the province — as it finalizes a new curriculum for implementation next September. 

The 25th anniversary of the defeat of European communism, dramatically punctuated by the smashing of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, was a historical moment of biblical proportions. The peaceful dismantling of the Soviet empire — so much so that the Soviet Union ceased to exist altogether in 1991 — was never thought to be possible, let alone to be accomplished by the very workers and ordinary people in whose name communism ostensibly ruled. Rarely is it possible to see in history the finger of God so clearly at work.

Four months after its health care policy for refugee claimants was ruled unconstitutional, Ottawa has grudgingly relented to a judge’s order and returned many — but not all — benefits to the needy people it had previously abandoned. We say grudgingly because the immigration minister remains determined to continue a court battle in defence of a policy that a federal court has already — and quite rightly — denounced as “cruel and unusual.”