Issues, ethics, memory
I traveled in Germany recently searching for information on my Catholic ancestors. While there, I found that members of my wife's Anabaptist antecedents had rebelled against religious and civic authorities in Münster, Germany in 1534-35. Leaders of the rebellion were apprehended, tortured to death, and had their bodies placed in cages suspended from a church tower. The cages are still there.
We traveled recently in Germany, where I sought out ancestral roots. Our guide, a family friend, has located us in church records going back to the fifteenth century. And he was able to document a murder that has long been family lore.
Pope Leo XIV has published a document called Magnificent Humanity, which places the human person and the common good at the centre of the discussion about the increasingly pervasive technology of AI. The document will take its place in the canon of Catholic social teaching.
A CBC news team has published a story about the RCMP’s spying on Indigenous leaders in the 1970s and 80s. A sub plot to the story is the frustration that the CBC journalists encountered in their year’s-long effort to obtain information from the RCMP Security Service files. This is a frustration with which I am only too familiar. Canada's Access to Information system is broken and must be fixed.
Recently I posted about good books that I read in 2025. My list was too long for one post, so here is my sequel. If you want to recommend books for the rest of us to read in 2026, please use the comments section at the end of this piece to do so. Happy reading.
Here are some of my favourite books from 2025. In a chaotic and troubled world, reading books, remains one of life’s great pleasures. It is also a way to stay more deeply informed that is possible by reading newspapers or following on air news, and infinitely preferable to doom scrolling on social media. Take a look.
A Politics and the Pen fundraiser at the Chateau Laurier Hotel in Ottawa went smoothly for most of the evening. But it turned nasty near its end when one of the MPs co-hosting the event implied in a quip that the NDP is antisemitic.
David Shulman is an Israeli author, professor emeritus, and peace activist. In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, he describes how extremist Israeli settlers in the occupied territories are attacking Palestinian homes and villages, crops and herds. Shulman calls it a second Nabka.
NATO leaders, including Canada, have agreed to spend 5.0% of Gross Domestic Product on the military. Prime Minister Mark Carney says Canada will more than double its military spending. That will fuel the arms race and crowd out spending on much-need social programs.
NATO and the Trump regime in the US are demanding that Canada drastically increase military spending. We should, rather, apply a peace lens. It would include a greater emphasis upon diplomacy and peacebuilding in concert with military spending.
Pulpit and Politics 