"Truth unasserted is a lie unopposed."
George Jonas in the National Post Dec. 11, 2010
"It will not do to offer democracy, secularism and licentious living as an alternative to religious extremism. The answer to bad religion is good religion — to put it more elegantly, theology is required to answer the false claims of unreasonable religious positions."
Fr. Raymond J. De Souza in National Post January 31, 2008 (after favourably quoting George Weigel's claim that "It is thus a great folly to think that jihadism and the terrorism it underwrites can be understood in terms drawn primarily from the patois of the therapeutic society, as if jihadist terrorism were some Levantine form of psychiatric aberration. Within their own theological frame of reference and the reading of history it warrants, jihadists are not crazy. They make, to themselves, a terrible kind of sense.")
"There are some people - and I am one of them - who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe."
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in William James Pragmatism
The "Israel for Canadians" documentary fundraising campaign on Kickstarter just concluded and, I'm sorry to say, fell well short of its target. So it won't get made. At least not this year and perhaps not exactly as described.
I'm very grateful to everyone who did back it. (Kickstarter being an "all or nothing" platform those who pledged through it won't get charged; you don't need to do anything. And I'll be in touch with those who contributed through other channels about refunds.) I'm also grateful to all those who worked to help publicize it, through social media and otherwise.
Over the next few months I'll be giving some thought to why the funding effort failed, from flaws in the fundraising campaign to defects in documentary design and presentation. I'm convinced the cause is important so I'm not by any means giving up on it. But I apologize to those whose hopes were raised by a project I wasn't able to make happen, at least this time.
Again, thanks very much to everyone who did back and help promote it.
"I beg you to believe in the most ridiculous of all superstitions: that humanity is at the centre of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrator of the grandest dreams of God Almighty. If you can believe that and make others believe it, human beings might stop treating each other like garbage."
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in a 1970 commencement address according to "Thought du Jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail June 11, 2003
"Know Thyself"
The inscription on the temple at Delphi "ascribed to Apollo himself" according to Juvenal
"an open mind, to be sure, should be open at both ends, like the foodpipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake."
Northrop Frye The Great Code