A writer who practices his art at home does not want to turn his place of residence into a library warehouse. And so, every so often, in order to maintain a dynamic equilibrium between acquisitions and dispersals, he must sift through his material and separate the transitory from the enduring. It is a practice akin to gardening in which one separates the [...]
I envy people who’ve maintained a constant connection to their faith, but not just for the bedrock of moral certainty that’s been beneath their feet their entire life. If you haven’t walked a meandering path all over the political and spiritual landscape, you probably won’t have experienced the panic that overwhelms you the morning after you’ve returned from that tacitly secular, hyperbolically [...]
I’m about to make my annual visit to Britain, the land of my birth and where I spent the first 27 years of my life. Also, the country of John Wesley, who was born a little over 300 years ago. Wesley was, of course, the founder of Methodism, an evangelical grouping that began within the Church of England but eventually [...]
If I had a second chance at life, I think I’d come back as a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies, whether private or public, seldom die. I could live with that. Consider the March of Dimes. It was set up to raise money for the fight against polio. Well, in the 1950s, Dr. Jonas Salk figured out how to get rid of polio, and it’s [...]
“Where are you going, Frank, in such a big hurry?” my wife, Ileen, asked me recently. “Dear, I just got a call from the Toronto Police Services Board asking me if I would come down and help them out in an emergency situation.” “I never knew you to be that crazy about the police.” Ileen said. “Oh I am, dear,” I said. [...]
Today people have a tendency to hold their ha nds up and make pretend quotations marks when they use the phrase “family values” as though they’re embarrassed about it and want to qualify or justify what they’re saying. There’s no need. Family values are obvious – as natural as family itself. We can argue the politics, but for once let’s [...]
Esquire magazine’s motto is “man at his best,” but if you only watched movies and television, the last couple of decades would have made it harder for you to figure out just when, particularly, a man could count on hitting his golden years – that plateau where health, wealth and hard-won wisdom combine at a tolerable average. It certainly isn’t the gormless, [...]
Last month I reviewed Marci McDonald’s hideous book The Armageddon Factor. I chose to focus on the numerous errors throughout the book – author Denyse O’Leary has coined the term ‘marcis’ to describe “errors of fact that fact-checking would have prevented.” On TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paiken, McDonald pointed out that her critics have merely pointed out the factual errors in [...]
They stopped briefly at a statistical display of female advancement. They were particularly interested in figures that showed how women are catching up to, and even surpassing, men in smoking, drinking, swearing and swindling. Advances in female arson, assault and assassination also caught their attention. “Women have become more assertive,” Molder said, when they had seen enough. “Really?” said Bimson. [...]
We’ve all heard it. “You anti-abortion people are obsessed with one issue.” Actually we’re pro-life and it’s you who try to make us monomaniacal by calling us anti-abortion. Mind you, to be opposed to the mass slaughter of the most vulnerable people in society is hardly anything of which to be ashamed and it’s surely activists who obsess about taxes [...]
On May 14, a three-judge panel of the Ontario Divisional Court unanimously delivered in Ontario Human Rights Commission v. Christian Horizons another blow to freedom of religion in Canada. This ruling could have a devastating impact on Christian organizations involved in everything from providing disaster relief overseas to operating pregnancy crisis centres here at home. The complainant in this case, [...]
I read a wonderful write-up in the Toronto Star recently by Nicole Saute, starting on the front page about a Toronto man reuniting with his birth mother after a 12-year search. You’d swear that Jamie Low had just won a $12 million jackpot. In a way he had. A most enjoyable and an un-buyable occasion occurred when mother and son finally overcame [...]
The scientist Stephen Hawking recently returned to TV screens with a new miniseries, his first since 1997, and like all eager presenters, he took the time to do some interviews to publicize the show. The series, Stephen Hawking’s Into the Universe, is the sort of symphonic, planet-hopping science entertainment that it seems so much easier to produce in an age of flashy [...]
Back in the Fifties boxing used to be criticized for its regular Friday night fights which were called ‘bum of the week’ where it seemed that every washed up fighter who ever lived got a chance to pick up one more pay cheque ending flat on his back in the ring. This farce has only been equaled by the New York Times [...]
Under intense public pressure, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty may have withdrawn his government’s revised curriculum guidelines on sexual education for a “serious rethink,” but this battle is far from over. Proponents of ever more explicit sexual education for young school children have been quick to mount a concerted counterattack. They commend the revised curriculum for proposing to normalize homosexuality in [...]