Dear Friends: After more than 10 years of posting regularly to my Pulpit and Politics blog, I have been mainly silent for the past few months, but I will pick up the pace again this fall. There are several reasons why I have been less active than usual.
A new book of mine, Speeches That Changed Canada, was published in April 2018 and I have been doing quite a lot of work to publicize it. That has included my creating a second blog, called Great Canadian Speeches, on which I have been posting significant speeches made by Canadians over the past 150 or so years. If you don’t already follow that blog, I would very much like to have you do so.
I have also been fulfilling a promise to sort through some of my papers, particularly from my time in politics, and get them to the Saskatchewan Archives in Regina. I had a number of banker’s boxes in the trunk of our car when we made a trip out to Saskatchewan this past summer, and I was pleased to turn them over. There are more such boxes to come.
Finally, my wife Martha and I took a long, leisurely drive out to Saskatchewan in July into August, and I also took a holiday from doing any writing — okay, I did post some photos and quick observations on Facebook about the wonders of our country.
On our holiday, we saw a lot of old friends and were able to do events related to book promotion in Regina and Winnipeg. We were also fortunate to participate in two family reunions — one on each side. Martha’s family gets together often, but on my (Gruending) side it was a first that coincided with a remarkable book of family history researched and compiled by several of my cousins.
There are no longer any buildings on the Gruending homestead about 60 kilometres to the north and west of Humboldt, Saskatchewan. But we were able to drive the back roads nearby and to visit an old church and the graveyards in which our grandparents, parents, relatives and friends are buried. It was a deeply satisfying experience.
I hope that your summer has been equally good. Such experiences do remind us that there is much that is good and solid in our lives and communities, despite what often seem to be the overwhelming challenges that we face as citizens of the world.
It is those challenges that I will return to writing about when I begin, soon, to post to my Pulpit and Politics blog once again.
Pulpit and Politics 
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