God on Stage: 15 Plays that Ask the Big Questions Peter Kreeft (Word on Fire, $32.50, 216 pages): Peter Kreeft’s God on Stage examines 15 plays, three each on five different themes (life and joy, relationship with God, suffering, death, damnation), one that is pre-Christian, one Christian, and one that is post-Christian. Kreeft says “reading and reflecting on great dramas, great plays, [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: The Mystery of Joy by Peter Kreeft (Ignatius, $18.95, 241 pages) Version 1.0.0 Peter Kreeft’s latest book offers 95 pensées about joy, short, (two to four page) thoughts on what joy is, and isn’t. Joy, says Kreeft, “is to happiness what happiness is to pleasure: the next step up.” According to Kreeft, way up, up to heaven. He [...]
T.S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy: James Matthew Wilson (Wiseblood Books, USD$8, 66 pages) T.S. Eliot is probably the greatest literary and social critic of the 21st century, as well as one of its greatest poets. There is no shortage of treatments of his work, but James Matthew Wilson’s T.S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy is a worthy edition to any library. Eliot was [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn (Notre Dame University Press, $38, 195 pages) The novelist and essayist Aleksander Solzhenitsyn is best-known as a Soviet dissident who spent time in communist concentration camps known as the gulag, of which he became their most famous chronicler. He is one of [...]
From the editor’s desk: We live in an age in which far too many people live lives of anguish because they lack meaning or are searching for it in the wrong places. In Be not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James (Princeton, $24.99, 377 pages), John Kaag and Jonathan Van Belle say that seekers looking for meaning could do [...]
Paul Tuns Catholic Bishops of Saskatchewan (CBS) released a pastoral letter, “Dying with Hope: Living and Walking Together,” on March 25 calling for a Christian response to so-called Medical Assistance in Dying. In 2017, the CBS released a pastoral letter, “On Living through our Dying,” in response to the legalization of euthanasia the previous year. The bishops said in its latest letter, [...]
King: A Life Jonathan Eig (Picador, $31, 669 pages) Martin Luther King Jr. is probably the most famous civil rights leader in American history and as such biographies tend toward hagiography. Jonthan Eig’s King: A Life, released in hardcover in 2023 and paperback earlier this year, avoids that mistake, offering a rich and deep exploration of the slain civil rights leader. Eig, [...]
Catholic Heroes of Civil and Human Rights: 1800-Present Matthew Daniels and Roxanne King (Ignatius, $18.95, 205 pages) In Catholic Heroes of Civil and Human Rights Matthew Daniels and Roxanne King profile 16 Catholics who championed civil and human rights in different parts of the world (although mostly the United States) and in different eras. What all 16 men and women have in [...]
Paul Tuns, Commentary: Pope Francis died on April 21 at the age of 88, after leading the Catholic Church for 12 years as its 266th pope. There were numerous articles and essays exploring his legacy. One cannot help but think of the apocryphal comment by Zhou Enlai, the Chinese Communist revolutionary, in the 1970s, when asked what he thought of the French Revolution: [...]
Comment made after Carney attends Mass featuring pro-life sermon Paul Tuns: The head of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) has endorsed denying Holy Communion to Catholic pro-abortion politicians like Prime Minister Mark Carney. During an April 11 interview with EWTN, Bishop William McGrattan, president of the CCCB, said pro-abortion politicians should not receive the Eucharist. Days earlier, Prime Minister Mark [...]
No aborted baby parts to be used in NIH research Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine, economics, and health research at Stanford University, has been confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the new Director of the National Institutes of Health. Bhattacharya came to international recognition and criticism when he co-authored, with Dr. Sunetra Gupta and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, The Great Barrington [...]
At what point will the size of Canada’s so-called “Medical Assistance in Dying” program become cause for alarm? What percentage of our vulnerable, elderly, infirm, or disabled fellow citizens need to choose death (or have it chosen for them) before we feel chastened by our outrageous indifference, and our national conscience is, at long last, pricked? The statistics for 2023—which, curiously enough, [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements First Nations issues are evergreen in Canadian politics, rising to prominence regularly, like during the battle over the Meech Lake Accord in the late ‘80s, when Manitoba MLA Elijah Harper and his eagle feather helped scuttle any attempted constitutional amendment (and got Harper elected as an MP shortly after). It was a major [...]
Interim Staff: On March 20, the Quebec provincial government of Premier François Legault tabled a bill that, if passed, would expand the current religious symbols ban to include all school staff, including teachers, from wearing any religious symbols including the cross or crucifix. Education Minister Bernard Drainville said, “If we are going to be coherent with this idea that a figure of [...]
Paul Tuns: Three municipalities that declared December Chirstian Heritage Month in 2024 have reversed themselves and will not do so again. In January, The Interim reported that 56 jurisdictions in Canada, including the province of Saskatchewan, and cities such as Calgary, Mississauga, Regina, and Toronto, officially declared December “Christian Heritage Month” after an advocacy campaign by Molly Banerjei, a realtor from Toronto [...]