Issues, ethics, memory
Suzanne Doerge, a poet and activist who lives in Ottawa, walked the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain 2016. She developed painful problems with her feet, but used her rest time, interspersed with walking, to ponder on the meaning of pilgrimage and life. The result is her book, Footfalls: Poems of the Camino.
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.
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?
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.
Medicare was born amid controversy in Saskatchewan in 1962, when most of the province's doctors went on strike rather than cooperate with a new government plan. Now, I have discovered that the RCMP believed it was all a communist plot and so they spied upon Medicare's proponents. Talking about being on the wrong side of history.
I sat beside my six-year-old grandson as he endured online classes in grade one during the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2021. It was not a pleasant experience for him. Nor was it a picnic for me, hovering just off screen. But I was pleased to accompany him.
Pulpit and Politics 