The Canadian Catholic Bishops have been trying to get Catholics involved in motivating Members of Parliament to oppose Bill C-38, which deals with same-sex marriage. Last Sunday at the 8:00 AM Sunday Mass St. Ignatius, instead of delivering a homily, Father Monty presented the Archbishop of Winnipeg’s Pastoral letter (available here in pdf format). Yesterday, I read in a newspaper that Fred Henry, the Bishop of Calgary, suggested on a Toronto Radio show that the Prime Minister of Canada, who is a Catholic, should be excommunicated for supporting Bill C-38.
Category: The Enchanted Ones
Letters to a Young Catholic
I noticed “Letters to a Young Catholic” by George Weigel in the library, read it, liked it, and posted a review at Blogcritics back in December. I decided to rewrite the review and put it up on my own site too.
Parish Mission
Last week I went to a parish mission for the first time in my life. A mission is a short series of homilies or lectures offered over a few days to sharpen religious knowledge and spirituality. It is almost always presented by a guest preacher, and it is common to hold the mission during Lent. This year the mission at St. Ignatius was presented by Father Andrew Britz, a Benedictine who spent about 20 years as the editor of the Prairie Messenger weekly newspaper. He spoke over three nights, February 14-16.
Truth in Religion
I picked out Truth in Religion, The Plurality of Religions and the Unity of Truth by Mortimer J. Adler (see previous post)- as I was browsing at the library. It was a quick and worthwhile piece of reading.
Religions of England
The main BBC Web site home has a lot of links to interesting internal resources. There is a page on Religion and Ethics. There is a box on that page which links to an Index of Religions in Britain The Guardian Online has its own Guide to Religion in the U.K..
Barr’s Religion
Nevada Barr’s book “Seeking Enlightenment, Hat by Hat” has a few interesting turns. I mentioned it in a review a few weeks ago.
Tsunami Preachers – Atheist
Richard Dawkins, the grand ayatollah of English atheism, has written a couple of letters to the Guardian which interpret the Indian ocean tsunami disaster around his personal value system. While he is a more presentable salesman of values than the homophobic pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, he is emotionally vested in his own beliefs, illogical about the lessons of the disaster, and ruthlessly determined to build his story on the bodies of the dead.
Tsunami Preachers – Right Wing
Some misguided people are finding bizarre messages from God in the Aceh earthquake and the Indian Ocean tsunamis. Their perspective is offensive, morally and religiously.
Epiphany
Several years ago Phillie Marcowicz, one of the hosts of one of CBC Radio’s folk, roots and world programs was on the Main Stage at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. She asked the audience if anyone had experienced a musical epiphany that weekend.
Pluralism and Orthodoxy
This is a book review that I wrote for the Blogcritics site. The book is the 2003 revised edition of The Dignity of Difference by Jonathan Sacks. The Blogcritics version of the review is nearly identical to this. The ISBN for this book is 0826468500. There is a copy of the 2002 first edition in the Winnipeg Public Library system.