Did you see last week’s episode of “The Amazing Race?” Are you watching that? I guess we’re all waiting for “The Amazing Race – Canada” to air. It didn’t this time, but I’m sure next time.

Anyway, in last week’s episode, in one of the more creative challenges, contestants were required...

Sitting around the kitchen table at my parents’ place in Ottawa, my mother finishes bringing all the food to the table – chicken schnitzel, scalloped potatoes, buttered string green beans. We give our thanks to God, and start loading up our plates with this warm, steaming, savoury food.

And no sooner is my mouth full, and I’m...

Marieta Holst made the best cakes ever.

At least that’s what I, as a ten-year-old, wholeheartedly believed.

This great early memory of sinking my teeth into a deep, moist, vanilla sponge-type flat cake with the best vanilla or chocolate icing in the world (with those green, blue and pink icing flowers on the corners) – that great...

In 1946, Viola Desmond, a teacher and a businesswoman with her husband in Nova Scotia, took her car to New Glasgow on business.  On her way there, her car broke down.  As it was being fixed, she decided to wait it out by going to the movies.  Unaware of the segregation laws in New Glasgow, she bought a ticket for the main floor of...

Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield onboard the International Space Station orbiting the earth has been tweeting photos of the earth.

I along with over a quarter million other “followers” have been following Hadfield on Twitter, and checking now and then for the latest amazing photo of a mountain range in Venezuela, or a desert expanse...

The wedding at Cana

It is Jesus’ mother who pushes. John’s gospel doesn’t name her, but we know who she is: Mary, who was young and courageous and who took on the task of bringing Jesus into the world. This mother, who heard the voice of angels, saw shepherds and nobles alike come to see her newborn son, who muted her fears and...

Have you seen this on the news over the last couple of weeks; this crazy custom of people in their bathing suits, running and jumping into icy cold water? Some kind of New Year’s tradition, or something like that.

Apparently, in Eastern Europe at around this time of year, there’s a custom which commemorates the baptism of Jesus,...

In my early teens, my parents, brother and I used to make road trips to Florida on our summer holidays. On the way, we’d drive through South Carolina and Georgia.

And occasionally we’d to stop to buy pecans, or to admire the palm trees.

But what I remember most about those roadside stops was the way the local people would talk to us,...

New Year’s Eve for me has always been one of those wonderful moments in time, when I’m reminded of our human impulse, indeed my own impulse, for renewal, new beginnings, fresh starts.

And certainly, the Christmas and Easter themes of birth, and new life, and resurrection, feed into this impulse of hope for new beginnings.

St....

What do we see?

When we look out on the world, on people, on the news events that we hear about and read about, what is it that we see?

Certainly we see a lot of fear, destruction, and violence. The world often seems to us a dark and scary place, on the brink of destruction, on the brink of “catastrophic failure”, by its own...