Interim Staff: On Sept. 24, Pastor Derek Reimer was acquitted of charges related to his drag queen story time protest in Calgary. Reimer, pastor of Mission 7 Ministries, was charged with causing a disturbance and mischief for protesting the “Reading with Royalty” event marketed for children at the Seton Public Library in February 2023. He was removed from the premises by police. [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Hockey Priest: Father David Bauer and the Spirit of the Canadian Game by Matt Hoven (Catholic University of America, $38.95 pb, 339 pages) Fr. David Bauer was born in Waterloo, Ont., in 1924 and would later attend St. Michael’s College School in Toronto, which was run by the Basilian Fathers. He joined their religious community and coached the St. Michael’s [...]
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will Robert M. Sapolsky (Penguin Press, $48, 511 pages) Robert M. Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford and the author of the bestselling Behave. In Determined he delves into the scientific case against free will by explaining both the science of the brain and the epigenetic influences on how the brain [...]
Tim Walz’s deadly record on life Tim Walz is the vice-presidential candidate for the Democratic Party in the upcoming national elections. As governor of Minnesota, Walz was the first in the country to enact state pro-abortion legislation after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and sent the issue of abortion back to the states. Abortion was already legal in Minnesota through [...]
Gideon Spevak: In June 2022, Supreme Knight Patrick Kelly introduced the Aid and Support After Pregnancy (ASAP) program to offer financial and material support to pregnancy care centres and other pregnancy support organizations in the United States and Canada. This program was introduced by the Knights of Columbus after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that overturned Roe v. [...]
Rory Leishman: According to the latest, most reliable information on COVID 19 vaccines, are they ethical? Have they really been a safe and effective means of drastically reducing hospitalizations and deaths due to the COVID-19 virus? Consider, first, the ongoing controversy over the ethics of the Moderna and Pfizer-BionTech mRNA vaccines. Some well-meaning, but misguided, pro-lifers maintain that no one in good [...]
Interim Staff: Last year, the nation-wide Million Person March for Children drew an estimated 1.5 million Canadians to demonstrate for parental rights and in an interview with LifeSiteNews, Muslim pro-family activist Kamel El-Cheikh, head of Hands Off Our Kids, said his group has quadrupled in size in the months leading up to the second Million Person March. Hands off Our Children is [...]
Why Does Everything Come in Threes: A Short Book About Everything Peter Kreeft (Ignatius, $22, 146 pages) Peter Kreeft, a modern-day G.K. Chesterton, has a delightful meditation on the persistence of important things coming in threes, modeled on the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity, asserts Kreeft “is the most practical thing in the world,” the First Cause, the [...]
Lost in the Chaos: Immanence, Despair, Hope: R.J. Snell (Angelico Press, $28 pb, 182 pages) R.J. Snell, editor-in-chief of The Public Discourse and director of academic programs at the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton, has written an important short brief against modern malaise, the false idylls that promise but fail to address that malaise, and the recovery of hope to escape the malaise. [...]
Fulton Sheen (Cluny, US$20, 233 pages) In 1940, Bishop Fulton Sheen, wrote Freedom Under God, a meditation on the extremisms of liberalism and totalitarianism that idolized the individual and society respectively with no appreciation of the interdependency of the individual and society. Both extremes were guilty of making “redemption and brotherly love” irrelevant, although in different ways. Christianity, Bishop Sheen, the popular [...]
Antoine Campagnon, translated by Catherine Porter (Belknap Press, $29.95, 168 pages) A Summer with Pascal is a light, breezy introduction by Antoine Campagnon to one of the most important Christian apologists, Blaise Pascal. Campagnon, who has written about other French writers (Montaigne, Proust) turns his eye to the 17th century writer who famously gave us Pascal’s Wager, which posits that it is [...]
By J.M. Glover: Dermot Kearney: Pro-life hero Dr. Dermot Kearney, a British Catholic cardiologist who spoke at the National March for Life in May, has been honoured for his work on the medical abortion pill reversal (APR). (See The Interim, June 2024.) In April, he received the Anton Neuwirth Prize for the Protection of Life Award in Slovakia “for providing medical care [...]
The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People Paul Seabright (Princeton University Press, $44, 485 pages) Paul Seabright, an economist at the Toulouse School of Economics, ambitiously applies not only economics but anthropology, history, philosophy, political science, psychology, science, and sociology, to understand how the world’s religions, which he calls platforms -- “structures that bring individuals together in mutually [...]
Oswald Clark: During a campaign stop in Tampa, Florida, highlighting the president’s unwavering support for unrestricted abortion, Joe Biden made the sign of the cross as Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Nikki Fried spoke lambasting Governor Ron DeSantis for signing a law that bans abortion after six weeks. It was widely taken as a sign of opposition to the state’s abortion restrictions. CatholicVote [...]
Paul Tuns: Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker is a conservative, Latin Mass Catholic, who was asked to deliver the commencement address at this year’s graduating ceremonies at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. His speech raised the ire of feminists and liberal Catholics. On May 11, Butker, who has won three Super Bowls in the last five seasons, told the graduating class, [...]