Issues, ethics, memory
On May 2, 2011 Canadians held a federal election that provided Stephen Harper and the Conservatives with a majority government. I wrote a piece for my blog at the time reviewing the election through a religious lens and making some predictions about how Harper might act with a majority. That blog entry also became... Continue Reading →
A note posted on the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada website says that Father Raymond De Souza will be the featured speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast in Ottawa on May 1. Hundreds of MPs, Senators, judges of the Supreme Court, Parliament Hill staff and invited members of the public attend the annual event. The EFC... Continue Reading →
Public hearings are occurring for the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline that would transport crude oil from Alberta's oil sands to the northern British Columbia port of Kitimat. There the crude would be loaded onto oil tankers plying the B.C. coastal waterway and sent to China. There are billions of dollars at stake and the Prime... Continue Reading →
I was thinking over the Easter weekend of Father Bob Ogle, my late friend and political mentor. It was in April 1998 that he died at age 69 after more than a decade of serious illness. I wrote a brief piece about him for the Lives Lived section of the Globe and Mail and the... Continue Reading →
My recent book book Pulpit and Politics has been reviewed in the Clarion Journal of Spirituality and Justice, an on line publication. The reviewer is Ron Dart, a professor in the Department of Philosophy & Politics at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B.C. You will see that he recommends the book and is pleased that it... Continue Reading →
Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) have been present since the 1980s in some of the world's most troubled locations, including Iraq, Colombia, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as well as on a dozen first Nations in Canada and the United States. Members of CPT teams either stand between opposing sides in conflict or accompany the weak in... Continue Reading →
The Scottish writer William Dalrymple says that Syria has been a kind of oasis for Christians in the Middle East. But Syrian Christians are now faced with a painful choice. They can offer support to a brutal dictatorship that, generally, has protected them but has killed 5,000 of its citizens since calls for change and... Continue Reading →
Writer Christopher Hitchens has died at age died at age 62. One of his most popular and controversial books is God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. In a guest column for this blog, Eric Schiller, a Quaker and a retired University of Ottawa professor, writes about the book and analyzes Hitchens' attack on organized... Continue Reading →
About 130 people attended an Ottawa launch on November 2nd for Dennis Gruending’s new book, Pulpit and Politics: Competing Religious Ideologies in Canadian Public Life. The event took place at Southminster United Church and was co-sponsored by Kingsley Publishing and an Ottawa-based group called Canadians for Democratic Renewal. Veteran journalist Juliet O’Neill, who is now... Continue Reading →
A number of Canadian newspapers have carried an excerpt from my new book Pulpit and Politics: Competing Religious Ideologies in Canadian Public Life. I was asked to choose the excerpt to be used and decided upon a piece that I had written about Murray Thomson, a Quaker and pacifist who was, in his youth, an air force pilot. He... Continue Reading →
Pulpit and Politics 