Witnessing requires we live not by lies
Review By Emma Castellino Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, by Rod Dreher (Sentinel, $36, 256 pages). Live Not By Lies is the book I needed someone to write. When I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 2016, it felt like the scales had fallen from my eyes. I began to smell propaganda beneath every compassionate platitude in the [...]
A woke world without forgiveness
By Rick McGinnis In the first decades of the 19th century, upstate New York became known as the “Burned Over District,” a hotbed of spiritual revival that gave birth to an explosion of religious sects and utopian communities. Usually evangelical and often millenarian in nature, these included the Shakers, the Mormons, the Millerites – who would in turn produce Seventh-day Adventists and [...]
Pornography Action Kit available from EFC
By The Interim Staff In February, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC) published its Pornography Action Kit, a toolkit to help concerned Christians urge the government to act against pornographic websites. The EFC says that “children and youth are exposed to sexually explicit and violent material online at younger and younger ages,” and that Ottawa must act, at the very least, [...]
Books of the day – April 2021
Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times Jonathan Sacks (Basic Books, $38, 366 pages) Rabbi Jonathan Sacks died last November, and his latest and presumably last book, Morality, was published shortly beforehand. It is message to all, Jew and gentile alike. He opens arguing that: “Societal freedom cannot be sustained by market economics and liberal politics alone. It needs a third [...]
Let the Church be the Church
Ken Boessenkool argues on The Line, here, that “(i)f the Grace Life (sic) (Church) leaders want to truly make (sic) their case, they should be charged.” A Canadian Reformed Calvinist,[1] Boessenkool deems GraceLife Church’s holding packed Sunday services in Spruce Grove, Alberta, as civil disobedience. He implies they are unwilling to “accept the consequences of their actions,” including trial and imprisonment. He [...]
Early statistics suggest pandemic baby bust
By Paul Tuns When the pandemic spread from Red China to Europe and then North America, there were news stories predicting either a baby boom as couples spent more time together or a baby bust as families worried about their future economic prospects. Most demography experts predicted the latter, putting further downward pressure on declining fertility rates in most of the western [...]
I’d be dead if C-7 was law 10 years ago
By Andrew Lawton The second-wave feminists of the 1960s popularized the idea that “the personal is the political.” Well, this one is personal for me. If Bill C-7 were the law of the land a decade ago, I’d probably be dead. Bill C-7 is product of the federal Liberal government’s efforts to expand access to assisted suicide. Supporters of the bill argue [...]
Government expands euthanasia with Bloc help
By Paul Tuns On March 11, the House of Commons voted to permit Canadians suffering from mental illness to be killed by euthanasia and a week later, the Senate approved the Liberal government’s amendments to their own legislation, Bill C-7. With the help of the Bloc Quebecois, the Liberal government forced closure of debate on C-7, Justin Trudeau’s euthanasia expansion bill. The [...]
Vaccines: Kenney vows choice, bishops sow confusion
By Interim Staff Health Canada has approved four vaccines against COVID-19: Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson. Moderna and Pfizer COVID injections utilized abortion-derived cell lines in their testing process but not their development or production, whereas the AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines utilized abortion-derived cell lines in their development, production, and testing. Last May, the Canadian Conference of Catholic [...]
Follow your conscience
Now that COVID-19 vaccinations are being made available across the country, Canadians find themselves facing important personal decisions about whether or not they should receive them—decisions which will require reflection, research, and prudence about a medical procedure which bears on personal physical health, social responsibility, and the inviolable dictates of conscience. From reading the headlines in the press, however, one wouldn’t think [...]
Social conservative victories at Tory convention
By Paul Tuns The Conservative Party of Canada held its biennial convention virtually this year and despite disappointment at not getting to vote on traditional pro-life and pro-family policies, pro-life groups are applauding the outcomes of the policies that were put forward, the defeat of several problematic constitutional amendments, and the new National Council of the party. Before the convention, pro-lifers and [...]
MP introduces conscience rights bill
Conservative MP Kelly Block (Carlton Trail – Eagle Creek) tabled a private member’s bill to protect the conscience rights of medical professionals, Bill C-268: An Act to amend the Criminal Code (intimidation of health care professionals). She explained, “Freedom of Conscience is one of the first fundamental rights laid out in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and it is at the [...]
Alberta will have to show science in Pastor Coates case
By John Carpay Pastor James Coates spent more than a month in the Edmonton Remand Centre, after being arrested and jailed on Feb. 16, 2021. He and his Grace Life Church are charged with failing to comply with Jason Kenney’s unscientific and unconstitutional health orders that restrict the freedom of Pastor Coates and his church to worship God as God calls them [...]
Should Scripture Be More Trans-Friendly?
Donald De Marco The Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals (U.K.) have issued a new set of guidelines that introduces an assortment of “trans-friendly” terms. The concern is to avoid offending people who have been transgendered by insisting that there is such a thing as distinct sexes. The guidelines instruct doctors, nurses, and midwives to use gender-neutral terms. Thus, “chestfeeding” should replace “breastfeeding” [...]