The Church and the Commons

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 10:52 AM - 20 Comments

Paul Dewar discusses the impact of his faith on his politics.

Dewar’s background is as a teacher, but his call to politics was heavily influenced by the religious beliefs passed on to him by his activist parents, Ken and Marion Dewar, and by the Ottawa church the family attended for decades, St. Basil’s Roman Catholic.

“Faith and politics are congruent and we have no option but to be political if we are going to live the gospel,” Dewar is quoted as saying in the forthcoming book Pulpit and Politics: Competing Religious Ideologies in Canadian Public Life by Ottawa author and former NDP MP Dennis Gruending. “We have to constantly question what the Christian message is and we can never stop trying to change the way things are in society.”

‘The lodestar is human dignity’

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 13, 2011 at 4:32 PM - 2 Comments

Jason Kenney talks about faith and politics with the National Catholic Register.

I guess the big question is how your religious faith and your politics relate. Is there a connection?

Well, I believe in a pluralistic, liberal democracy. Everyone comes into the public square with certain core convictions, a certain worldview that’s informed by most deeply held convictions about the ultimate questions. For me, that view is partly formed by my Catholic faith. I think it’s important in a liberal democracy that people of faith not be excluded from participating in democratic debate, but it’s also important they not impose a kind of narrow, sectarian agenda, but rather to advance the common good in a way that brings others along.

For me, the lodestar is human dignity, the inviolable nature of human dignity. This is a principle which obviously is deeply grounded in Catholic social thought, but it is also one that has universal social application.

In conversation: Christopher Hitchens

By Noah Richler - Monday, December 13, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 164 Comments

Photography by Tom Sandler

The 61-year-old author and Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens is one of the most popular, eloquent and contrarian public intellectuals of our time. His book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, assailed the reputation and work of the Catholic nun and icon, as his later The Case Against Henry Kissinger did Richard Nixon’s former secretary of state. His book God is Not Great has become necessary reading for atheists everywhere and was the reason Hitchens visited Toronto recently to challenge the former British prime minister and converted Catholic Tony Blair in a Munk debate with the proposition “Be it resolved that religion is a force for good in the world,” which was broadcast globally. Hitchens, “Hitch” to his friends, won, taking 68 per cent of the vote—and this, despite being gravely ill with cancer that was diagnosed in the spring. His most recent book is Hitch-22: A Memoir.

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Born in the U.S.A.

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Keystone Press/ Bob Falcetti/Getty Images

Half a century ago, when religion entered the political arena in the U.S., it was as a matter of tensions between denominations, the kind of flare-up in tribal loyalties sparked by Catholic John F. Kennedy’s 1960 run for the presidency. With a full 30 per cent of respondents telling pollsters that they would never vote for any Catholic, Kennedy had to repeatedly assure voters he didn’t take marching orders from the pope.

But religion itself was quiescent—certainly in comparison to other times in American history, including the present—primarily because both religious and secular Americans held the same conservative views on sexual morality. It’s an era that now seem almost as far in the past as the Inquisition: by 2004, when Catholic John Kerry ran against George W. Bush, the religious tribes had almost vanished and Kerry’s denomination was of little interest to Protestant voters. What counted was how devout he was, and how his religiosity, or lack thereof, affected his policies on the hot-button moral issues of American politics.

How American religion lost its interior animosities (mostly, that is—Mormons and Muslims are still largely outside the tent), while becoming a much more militant side of a deep religious-secular divide, is the key question for Robert Putnam and David Campbell in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. To find the answer and to see if current trends seem likely to hold up, the co-authors comb through the two most comprehensive surveys ever done on religion and public life in the U.S., specially commissioned for their book. Campbell and Putnam, the latter a political scientist who rose to fame in 2000 with Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital, get where they’re going all right, and they turn up a lot of fascinating information about America’s ever-evolving religious life along the way.

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High-tech nuns

By Stephanie Findlay - Tuesday, August 17, 2010 at 4:56 PM - 0 Comments

Ross Parry Agency LTD

The Monastery of Poor Clares on Lawrence Street in York, England, is home to just over a dozen nuns.

Most are over the age of 80 and, having taken vows of poverty, chastity and enclosure, haven’t left the convent in 30 years but for doctors’ appointments. And yet their prayer must be “pertinent,” because practical prayer is part of their mandate to bring the world closer to God. So the nuns listen to the radio, surf the Internet and answer letters and emails from people requesting prayers. Now, they have another tool to keep their prayers up to date: Goldie, an electronic device that displays rolling headlines from 25 news sites, including the BBC, the New York Times and Reuters.

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'It is a democracy at the end of the day'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 2, 2010 at 12:54 PM - 43 Comments

Steve Paikin comes perhaps as close as anyone is going to get to having a rational televised discussion about the fact that people with religious beliefs might wish to participate in the democratic process.

Political scientists (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 28, 2009 at 6:39 PM - 6 Comments

Chris Selley considers Jason Kenney and KAIROS.

Heaven only knows what went on here. Maybe it’s just general hamhandedness. Maybe they hoped the benefits reaped whilst people assumed they’d taken a stand against anti-Semitism and/or for Israel would outweigh the damage reaped by disavowing the idea on a day when everyone’s shopping instead of reading the Star. Maybe Ms. Oda really did make the decision on her own, and Mr. Kenney decided he’d try to score some disingenuous points with it in Israel. Whatever happened, it’s a complete insult to Canadians’ intelligence — and Israelis’, come to think of it. And it’s proof positive, as if any was needed, that nobody should put any stock in what any Canadian politician says. Ever. About anything.

Not tortured, merely insulted

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 9:48 AM - 66 Comments

Laurie Hawn, amateur anthropologist, talking last night on CTV’s Power Play about the abuse of a detainee in 2006.

We’re talking about an issue of somebody being hit with a shoe, which is, frankly, in Islam, is an insult. If they wanted to torture the guy and beat the guy, they’d have beat him with the stocks of their AK-47s, they wouldn’t have been hitting him with shoes.

This sort of thing came up a year ago when an Iraqi journalist removed one of his shoes and proceeded to throw it in the direction of George W. Bush’s head. A reporter with U.S. News & World Report went to the trouble of trying to sort out the actual significance of the shoe. Continue…

Politics before God

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 12:42 PM - 18 Comments

Glen Pearson struggles with with the intersection of faith and partisanship.

For people of faith, the imperative is there to combine our efforts to live honorable lives, especially among one another.  We either set a new and noble example or we fail.  Politics in Ottawa is hard, mean and downright oppressive right now. Faith, on the other hand, is meant to bring us together for a greater good, to transcend any particular political branding for the sake of making this world better.  When the two come together, as they did this morning, there wasn’t one person there who wouldn’t have admitted that love for God and our fellow human being, as expressed in our faith, is meant to trump politics at each and every turn.  We are meant to put that belief on the line by casting aside the meanness of partisanship to embrace, in humility, a common bond. We can disagree, but in respect.  It’s not a love-in, but it’s not a rugby match either…

If faith is going to matter, it has to matter in the House of Commons and be lived out in lives of humility and service. Some at the breakfast practice that kind of faith; others of us don’t.

Church and state

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 1, 2009 at 2:30 AM - 28 Comments

John McKay talks to Charlie Lewis about Liberal efforts to reach out and touch faith.

“There is a deep feeling in the faith communities … that they have been marginalized and they have not been able to participate in the debates in society as fully as they might. I would argue that we are a poorer society as a result,” he said. “Tommy Douglas was a Baptist minister, for goodness sake. And if it hadn’t been for the force and clarity of his moral vision we might still might be arguing whether we should have universal health care.”

Faith

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 13, 2009 at 12:43 PM - 1 Comment

Glen Pearson considers politics, arrogance, ethics, civil discourse and religion.

The making of Mary

By Brian Bethune - Saturday, April 11, 2009 at 9:30 AM - 24 Comments

Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus Christ, rates a mere 19 references in Scripture, and barely dented the consciousness of Western Christianity in the first millennium of its existence. Rather miraculously, for all this, today she is the most recognizable female figure in the world. Her reach is enormous in the heartland of what was once Christendom. A short walk along the Thames, as Peter Ackroyd points out in Sacred River, yields over 50 churches and other religious foundations named after her. And that’s in Protestant England: in Catholic Spain, it’s impossible to turn a corner without encountering something or someone, woman or man, named after Mary. She is found throughout the Western tradition in painting, sculpture and music, not to mention in Christian liturgy and Christmas ads. Nor is devotion to her a mere echo of past belief. The modern pace of Mary’s ongoing apparitions has, if anything, quickened since she showed herself in 1858 to a poor French girl named Bernadette in Lourdes, and to three children at Fatima in Portugal in 1917.

Outside Europe, too, Jesus’s mother has been a powerful presence for centuries. One of Mary’s most recent appearances to be accepted as genuine by the Roman Catholic Church took place in a Japanese nunnery in 1973. Then there is Guadalupe. No other Marian site is more significant in the history of Catholicism than the Mexican shrine. There, in 1531, a decade after the Spanish Conquest, on a hilltop sacred to an indigenous mother goddess, Mary appeared to an Aztec convert, Cuauhtlatoatzin—known since his canonization in 2002 as St. Juan Diego—and spoke to him in his native Nahuatl language. Our Lady of Guadalupe was the bridge between natives and Spaniards in their slow fusion into Mexicans, and a crucial force in bringing millions of New World natives to Catholicism. Today 10 million people a year visit her basilica.

How it all came to be, how Mary emerged from a handful of Gospel references to become so woven into the fabric of Western life that it is impossible to conceive of Western history without her, is the subject of Miri Rubin’s wonderful book, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (Yale UP). Some of Mary’s scant scriptural references, like the stories of the Christ child laid in a manger and the flight into Egypt, are cherished parts of the Christian story; while others, like the Annunciation (when the Angel Gabriel told the virgin she would bear the son of God) and the Magnificat (Mary’s prayer of praise), are vital in theological and liturgical terms.

But, as in the case of Christ himself, there is little personal information about Mary’s life. Just as the pious speculated about the true nature of Jesus in the decades after his death, Rubin notes, they pondered—for the same reasons—those questions about his mother. The Apocrypha, books of Christian devotion and legend that were not ultimately absorbed into the canon of Scripture, filled the gap, abounding with tales of the marvellous child and the special woman who bore him. By 150 CE the Protogospel of James had given Mary a backstory appropriate for the mother of God. The daughter of a rich couple, precocious Mary was offered to the Temple at age three and dwelled there in purity until a divine sign picked Joseph as her husband—or rather, guardian, since she remained a virgin. And when nascent Christianity spread to Egypt and encountered the cult of Isis, mother of the god Horus, Mary’s status began to rise even higher. Isis was a powerful and kind-hearted deity, attributes Mary soon acquired. One Egyptian temple bears an inscription requesting, in the same language as those importuning Isis, the blessing of “the mother of us all, the holy, God-bearing Mary.”

As the centre of Christian gravity moved to the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire, the Egyptian influence was to prove crucial in making Mary ever more exalted, until she became queen of heaven. In fifth-century Constantinople, paralleling earlier battles over just how the divine and human mingled in Christ, an unholy row arose over whether Mary was the bearer of God or just of the human Jesus. Syriac Christians, Aramaic-speaking and closely connected to their Jewish roots, held to the latter; Egyptian Christians to the former. With Christianity growing more distant from its Jewish roots—and the emperor’s influential sister inclined to the concept of an exalted, rather imperial Virgin—Mary, the Bearer of God, won the day.

Ever since, Rubin argues, a constant state of tension has surrounded Mary. That tension—poised between virgin and mother, human and divine—is the source of her endless variety of portrayals, all gracefully traced by Rubin, from the young, sometimes playful, virgin girl to the grief-stricken and empathetic mother at Calvary. The need to ground Mary explains why she did die, as befits a mortal, but was raised bodily to heaven, as befits the mother of God, and why too there was a lengthy theological debate over whether Mary menstruated. Eventually won by the naturalist side, it was no less than an argument over her humanity.

In the West, popular interest in Mary was much slower to form, but when it took root, in the early 12th century, it sparked an explosion of art and devotion. Preaching, liturgy and other theological work by clergymen was central to the development, but in Rubin’s opinion, the lives they led were even more important. Most monks began their religious lives as oblates, young children offered to religious houses by their parents. “Those young boys were wrenched away not just from their own mothers, but from the entire feminine world—the entire vernacular, domestic world, in fact,” she says. “The language of their prayers to Mary, their cries for support, is so moving.” After celibacy was enforced for parish priests, they began forging similar ties. “Even in modern times, there is a notable bond and a notable tension in Catholic countries between a mother and a son who enters into the religious life—so easily equated with Mary and Jesus—the pride on the one hand and the sacrifice of family, of grandchildren, on the other,” Rubin says. “Those clergy, too, must have had poignant relationships with their heavenly mother.”

But there was a Mary for everyone, not just motherless clerics, in the flowering of medieval Mariology. For every image of a heavenly queen commissioned by wealthy art patrons, there was a story of the humble carpenter’s wife, particularly gracious to the poor and those who suffered. Her miracle stories were gathered in numerous similar collections, but one Spanish compilation, Songs of Saint Mary, stands out. It contains miraculous tales not only of Christians saved from death in wars against Islamic realms, but of Muslims converted to the faith by Our Lady’s grace. (Islam has always been friendly to Mary. The Koran mentions her 34 times to the Bible’s 19, and considers her a good and holy woman. There is considerable evidence of Muslims visiting Marian sites in Islamic lands, and Spanish Christians considered Mary uniquely suited for bringing Muslims to Christianity.)

As the role of Our Lady of Guadalupe shows, Mary was destined to become the engine of Catholicism’s transformation into a global faith. It was a role first honed during the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from its Arab invaders, a 780-year struggle that had brought numerous Muslims under Christian rule by the time it ended in 1492. Thus it was triumphant Spaniards, fresh from conquering the last Iberian Islamic state and accustomed to Mary’s role in mass conversions, who brought her to the world.

“In bringing Mary to the indigenous peoples in what’s now Latin America, the image of maternity—so universally recognized, so powerful—carried the meaning,” says Rubin. “As she was in Egypt, Mary was the major bridge to societies with maternal deities.” The irony is intense. Mary is closely associated with suffering, both experiencing it and offering solace for it. It’s that attribute of the sorrowful mother—captured in marble for Westerners in Michelangelo’s Pietà—that “made Mary so welcomed by those indigenous peoples who suffered so much at the hands of the very men who brought her to them.”

Rubin ends her book around 1600, with all the wonders of modern Mariology still to come, partly because she was leaving her medieval and European zone of expertise, partly because she felt she had left her readers with “the tools” to interpret the Marys they see around them. That is certainly true: among the swelling tide of Marian apparitions are two in Belgium in the early 1930s, seen by kids. Anyone wondering why then and why there will be interested in Rubin’s description of the Great War memorials in every French and Belgian village, each with a sorrowing mother figure deliberately reminiscent of the Pietà. Consider the circumstances facing those children: brutal economic times and the rise, just across the border, of an aggressive (and anti-Catholic) Nazi state. What more consoling sight could they have desired? For faithful and skeptic alike, Mother Mary always comes in times of trouble.

Youth Survey: Teens lose faith in droves

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 92 Comments

Every day, Mohamed Hadi wakes up before sunrise for morning prayer. The 19-year-old then boards a bus for the 90-minute ride from his home in Richmond, B.C., to the campus of Simon Fraser University, where he’s studying to become a physiotherapist. He’s involved in the Muslim Students’ Association, and with Rich in Faith, a Muslim youth group he founded that offers tutoring and mentoring services. Hadi’s a busy guy, yet he always finds time for his religion, including prayer five times a day. “It helps me stay composed,” he says, “and to maintain balance in my life.”

Such devotion is rare among teens these days—or at least, among those from Protestant and Catholic households. Just as the younger generation is abandoning the Christian faith, though, non-Western religions, such as Islam and Buddhism, are growing in Canada at a surprising speed. According to new data from Project Teen Canada, more teens now identify as Muslim than Anglican, United Church of Canada and Baptist combined. As a group, the percentage who adhere to so-called “other faiths”—including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism—has grown fivefold since Project Teen began its surveys in 1984, while the percentage of teens who identify as Roman Catholic has declined by one third, and the percentage who identify as Protestant is down by almost two-thirds.

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More troubles for the Vatican

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 4, 2009 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

The Legionaries of Christ, an influential Roman Catholic religious order, have been shaken by new revelations that their founder, who died a year ago, had an affair with a woman and fathered a daughter just as he and his thriving conservative order were winning the acclaim of Pope John Paul II. Before his death, the founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, had been forced to leave public ministry by Pope Benedict XVI because of accusations from more than a dozen men who said he had sexually abused them when they were students. Now the order’s general director, the Rev. Álvaro Corcuera, is quietly visiting its religious communities and seminaries in the United States and informing members that their founder led a double life.

New York Times

Vatican launches itself on YouTube. What's next? Twitter?

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 23, 2009 at 10:31 AM - 3 Comments

Following up on its website, the Vatican launches itself deeper into cyberspace with its own YouTube channel. It will broadcast short video news clips updated daily on the Pope’s activities and what’s happening at the Vatican, with audio and text in English, Spanish, German and Italian. Officials at the Vatican say it is aimed at everyone from devout Catholics to the casual web browser. The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, noted Pope Benedict had always been “fond of new technologies” and hoped to use them to reach out to “the digital generation.”

BBC News

Religion defeats suicide

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 16, 2009 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

People who attend religious services, even just once a year, are only half as likely to attempt suicide as those who never attend, according to psychiatric researchers at the University of Manitoba. Experts have suggested several factors to explain the divergence, from the sense of family and community instilled by regular attendance, previous studies in which people raised in religious households are more likely than the general population to describe themselves as happy, to the fact most religions condemn suicide. 

Canadian Press

Respect Muslims–just don’t marry them, cardinal says

By macleans.ca - Thursday, January 15, 2009 at 3:55 PM - 0 Comments

A Catholic cardinal in Portugal, once considered a contender to succeed the late Pope John Paul II, has warned European Christian women not to marry Muslims. Though the Vatican discourages cross-religion marriages, the Church is also trying to reach out to the faith. So José Cardinal Policarpo’s blunt televised advice to “think twice about marrying a Muslim” has sparked controversy in the Iberian nation, home to 40,000 mainly North African Muslims.

Spiegel