“Christmas can be commercial and tacky – after all, graduations, weddings and funerals are often commercial and tacky – but it should never be sentimental. Sentimentality is love without sacrifice. The sentimental man sends his wife flowers but never helps with the dishes.”
Fr. Raymond J. DeSouza in National Post Dec. 24, 2002
“It is a pressing problem for a credible theology, second only to the problem of suffering, to give some satisfactory account of why the diversity of religious affirmations should not lead us to the conclusion that they are merely the expression of culturally determined opinions. Kenneth Cragg reminds us that even in the seventeenth century John Bunyan felt the difficulty. In Grace Abounding he wrote, ‘Everyone doth think his own religion rightest, both Jews and Moors and Pagans: and how if our faith, and Christ, and scriptures, should be but a think so too?’ Of course, there is unquestionably a degree of cultural determination in our actual religious beliefs. If I had grown up in Saudi Arabia, rather than in England, it would be foolish to deny that the chances are I would be a Muslim. But the chances are also that I would not have spent most of my life as a theoretical physicist, but that does not mean that science is simply a cultural artefact. We must not commit the genetic fallacy of supposing that origin explains away the content of belief.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
In my latest National Post column I ask whether Canadians will yet again excuse a pathetic performance by an elite institution because we are snobs.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say inflation isn’t a conspiracy run out of Davos and the conservatives don’t have a hidden agenda and climate skeptics aren’t in the pay of Big Oil and nobody can be bothered plotting against you nor could they if they tried because the people in power are just as muddled as they appear to be.
“It is a strange thing how the pain of seeing the suffering of those we love will sometimes make us add to their suffering by being cross with them. This comes of not having faith enough in God, and shows how necessary this faith is, for when we lose it, we lose even the kindness which alone can soothe the suffering.”
George MacDonald At the Back of the North Wind
“A classic vacuous nemesis of the Fifties was the young, progressive Dean of women who was brought in to replace the septuagenarian, traditional dean of women… who had all the give-and-take of Torquemada…”
Florence King in National Review July 12, 1999
On April 14 I had the pleasure of moderating a True Strong & Free Network discussion on the Charter at 40 featuring Suzanne Anton QC, former attorney general of British Columbia and former crown prosecutor, Bruce Pardy, executive director of Rights Probe and a professor of law at Queen's University, and the last living drafter and signatory of the 1982 Constitution, Brian Peckford PC
“Since life’s a series of disasters, you’d better choose disasters worth having, ones you’ll enjoy & learn from.”
Richard J. Needham according to an email from a friend and colleague May 25, 2001 (I wasn’t able to verify it independently but if Needham didn’t say it he missed a splendid opportunity, to crib from J.M. Barrie’s comment on the theory that Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare)