Can you buy a better car than a Honda Civic? Or for that matter a Toyota Corolla? I don't know if you can. For approximately $15k you get a really decent car—four wheels plus a steering wheel, comfortable seating, a decent trunk, pretty good fuel efficiency and intermittent windshield wipers. For roughly the same amount of money you can get a Pontiac G5 or Vibe or a Kia Rio5. There are equally fine cars in that price range offered by Chrysler, Mazda and Ford. The Ford Focus is a perfectly acceptable choice.

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. – Matthew 25: 35, 36

Bald eagles are diving lazily into the Pacific, outside this cottage on a northern Gulf island, three ferry rides away from Vancouver. In a few […]

The following is an email exchange I had with a commissioner in the weeks following this year's General Assembly.

That Phyllis Tickle is absolutely smart; and a fun writer to read. Her introduction to her slim volume, Greed, is worth the price for the whole package. (That could be said for any one of these books.) She runs through a history of Christianity, bringing it to our world today: “This culture [is] faced with issues of human responsibility and training and social management, even of human manipulation, for which no prior intellectual guidelines exist and for where there is not yet a fully realized shared imagination.” Yup, that pretty much sums it up — the Reformation is done, Christendom is gone, the landscape has shifted. Infused with knowledge from science, psychology, medicine, from other social and political sciences our understanding of religion is brought into sharper focus. (See the Letters to the Editor in this magazine the last few months as readers discuss the Virgin Birth as metaphor.)

It's become popular not only to make fun of the church and people of faith, but to attempt to attack or topple Christian tenets. Books like The Da Vinci Code and documentaries claiming archeological discoveries of the bones of Jesus and his family appear to threaten the very foundations of the Christian church. Our society has forgotten and neglected its roots, and we've lost the Sabbath. Church has moved from the essential institution at society's hub to a blip on the weekend radar, wedged between hockey practice and the scratch-and-save sale at Sears.

Assuming that the media has done its job, the hype surrounding the impending blockbuster movie season should be kicking into high gear by now. One of those titles coming fast and furious down the pipe is the third installment of the Spiderman movie franchise. The first two have a great track record… I must admit my more literary and theological side likes it when I get to “geek out” about the surprising theological depth of something usually better known for its special effects.

We are told that seeing is believing which is interesting for those of us who are 'believers' living in a 'seeing' culture. We live in one of the most visually-based cultures in human history. Television has become the way that we see the world and filter truth.

Smoking cigarettes, it is said in advertising and on pamphlets, is the most preventable cause of death. It's an absurd statement of course: there is no way to prevent death; unless you take the virgin birth route. And I wouldn't suggest anyone take that path too lightly, the responsibility is too heavy.

I've stayed in some pits in my time but this place really takes the biscuit. Disgusting. I don't mind shabbyness but this place was just plain dirty. And the staff have a bad attitude to boot.”

The steel girder cross can be found kitty-corner from the World Trade Center site in New York City. Though it did once sit on the site, it is no longer there. It has been moved away from the tourist centre which now surrounds what was once the heart of commerce, trade and, most importantly, human interaction.

The problem is these are very good books. Oh yes, that is a problem—because a book with the title The Bible for Dummies sounds like a punch line for some petty, mean spirited joke. Even more so Catholicism for Dummies or Islam for Dummies; as if either Catholicism or Islam are for idiots or that rich theological learning has been dumbed down.

I have a bag at my feet that weighs over 12 kilograms. It is filled with literature I picked up at the AIDS conferences in Toronto — the faith based and the international — in August. The bag is crammed with books, brochures, pamphlets, posters, CD ROMs (some of which may have dozens of documents on them), advertising campaigns, postcards and even a few toys from HIV/AIDS-related organizations around the planet. I have more information than I need on the socio-economic, psychological, political, medical, scientific and spiritual aspects of the virus. In this bag are pharmaceutical corporations explaining their medicines and advocacy groups damning pharmaceuticals. Mostly, though, the bag is filled with very similar sounding material from many, many, many different advocacy agencies.

Debbie Travis is a television host of design and renovation shows, which she produces through her own company. She got herself in a frenzy earlier this year when she realized that youth today just ’aint got no gumption. So, she decided to teach them a lesson: “This new show has the backdrop of a renovation but is focused on these 20-somethings, the ‘entitled’ generation who have it all … except a future.”

I popped in at General Assembly for about 36 hours. From my position as managing editor of this magazine I have established relationships via email with a lot of people across the country but have met very few of them. I went to this annual family reunion to glad-hand, while my colleagues worked. (Thank you, Amy and David.)

Not a day goes by, it seems to me, without some newspaper of magazine article that somehow touches upon the moral, ethical, spiritual or religious zeitgeist. So, over the Easter weekend I clipped random stories. Here's but a taste of those clippings — they are a snapshot of our times, they contradict each other, they support each other, they paint a portrait of the world in which we live. I present them without comment. However, I invite you to comment on them. What do you make of it all? Send your comments, or clippings, to my attention and perhaps they too will form a time capsule.

In the madcap world of gender and religious politics in the United States, Roy and Silo, two male penguins at New York City's Central Park Zoo, were a cause célèbre for years. They spawned a children's book And Tango Makes Three, of which The School Library Journal said, “They cuddle and share a nest like the other penguin couples and when all the others start hatching eggs, they want to be parents, too.”

My cell phone sucks. It doesn't take photographs, it doesn't make movies, it doesn't store or play music, it doesn't receive or send email and it doesn't store my address book. It doesn't even have games; no solitaire, no shoot-em-ups, no smash-em-ups, no Tetris, no chess. It does have Internet capacity but I don't know how to access it. And it does not play television shows. It does receive and send phone calls and the range is pretty good. But, really, it's just a phone and who needs that from a phone?

Over the past five years, four young men of my acquaintance have been murdered. They were all black, not yet 25 years of age. And they were all shot to death over what the press commonly calls gang violence.

I have already lived more than half the years I am expected to live according to trusted statistics about the average lifespan of males in Canada. And, as I celebrate yet another birth anniversary this month and the anniversary of my father's death, my thoughts turn, naturally, to the imminent apocalypse. Here, in no particular order, are sure signs the end is nigh: