We will soon learn the fate of Constable James Forcillo, the Toronto police officer currently on trial for murder, who, shortly after midnight on July 18 2013 fired nine rounds from his 9 mm service pistol at 18 year= old Sammy Yatin, who was high on ecstasy (and perhaps marijuana and cocaine), semi-incoherent brandishing a switchblade […]
Masked, armed Muslims stormed the Radisson hotel in Bamako, Mali, taking 170 hostages. As I write, there is an operation underway to free them, but I suppose we should get used to this, and not just in Islamic countries like Mali. The tentacles of the ideology of ISIS, a virulent form of Islam, which bears […]
The massacre in Paris yesterday marks the beginning, alas, of other tragedies to come. Well over one hundred dead, hundreds more injured, with a bomb going off in the Stade de France where President Hollande himself was taking in the French-German football (soccer) match. Our first response is to pray for the victims and […]
Dostoyevsky wrote, through the voice of Prince Myskin in his novel, The Idiot, that ‘beauty would save the world’. I have often wondered about that quotation, and whether it be true. A month or so ago, our Schola choir traveled to a parish 2 hours from where I live, to sing Schubert’s Mass in […]
I just took in the new American-everyman Tom Hank’s movie, Captain Philips which, surprisingly from its limited quality, has made over $218 million so far, and won six Academy awards. Directed in shaky-realistic-video by Paul Greengrass, who also oversaw two of the Bourne movies, the film has a stark realism. The problem, I think, is […]
I had to wait a few days before writing on the election of Justin Trudeau as our new Prime-Minister-in-waiting, not least for the emotion of disappointment to dissipate somewhat, and a sense of objectivity to set in. To be honest, I expected the result. Harper’s heart (which sounds like a Harlequin romance) was not […]
In an interesting turn of events, the niqab, the face-covering veil worn by certain Muslim women, has become a defining election issue in Canada. Just today, Zunera Ishaq, who had petitioned for the right to take her citizenship oath wearing the veil, took that very oath, yes, with her face covered (she received a court […]
This morning, as I begin this column, ten people at a community college in Oregon were killed by yet-another loner gunman, seeking some kind of notoriety and/or settling some ill-defined grievance; the ultimate motive is really yours to choose. We will never really know, besides the killer’s confused on-line postings, for he was shot to […]
As this interminable election process lumbers on, like a dying African elephant stumbling through the savannah, only to curl up beside some fetid swamp, we, the electorate, are in the danger of ennui, and eventually not caring who becomes Prime Minister, nor who forms a government, just to get the whole interminable thing over with. […]
Today’s Gospel on the memorial of the beheading of Saint John the Baptist recounts the story Herod, Herodias, his unlawful wife (who had been married to his brother), Herodias’ daughter, Salome, and, of course, John the Baptist, at this point confined in prison. We all know the gist: The Baptist was imprisoned for condemning […]