Issues, ethics, memory
Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) was working in Germany before and after the Second World War. The organization arranged emigration for thousands of Mennonites who had escaped to Germany from Ukraine. Many of those Mennonites had welcomed the Nazis as liberators from Soviet communism, and some were collaborators. In Germany, some MCC advocates were also sympathetic to the Nazis as well. MCC is now coming to terms with a difficult and troubling past.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has announced plan to move cataract surgeries from public hospitals to private clinics. He says people will continue to use their health cards and not their credit cards. I have recent experience which gives the lie to those claims.
At year's end, I wrote about some of the best books that I read in 2022.
American writer Nicholson Baker spent ten frustrating years trying to get information from the US military about its biological weapons program.
Bellingcat specializes in fact-checking and open-source intelligence to cut through the fog of misinformation that surrounds wars and conflict.
Canada's Liberal government was right to invoke the Emergencies Act to end the winter 2022 occupation in downtown Ottawa.
Robert Andjelic owns 225,000 acres of Saskatchewan farmland, about as much as 125 average-sized farmers. His model represents depopulation on steroids. Do we really want latifundia and a modern-day serfdom where absentee landowners hire locals to work their estates?
Premier Doug Ford fired aal members of the Ontario COVID Science Advisory Table in the summer of 2021. Ford does not want expert advice to get in the way of his blatantly political decision making and short-term thinking.
We lost our dear brother Jackie Gruending to the ravages of multiple sclerosis in 2021 at age 57. This memorial booklet combines his personal history along with that of our family and community, with lots of photos.
Some believe that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab. Others insist it was an American lab. But a group of eighteen health scientists says that COVID-19 began in a market in the Chinese city of Huanan, where the virus spread from live animals to humans.
Pulpit and Politics 