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Stories about Hutterites and photo-less driver's licenses:
Brethren driver's licences freed of 'graven images'
A Hutterite community in Alberta that believes willfully being photographed is a sin has won the legal right to have a provincial driver's licence without a picture.
Globe and Mail, May 17
Alberta Hutterites win right to driver's licence without photos
Alberta Hutterites have won the right to be issued driver's licenses without pictures after the province's Court of Appeal agreed with their arguments that requiring them to be photographed violates their religious rights.
Canadian Press, May 17
Also: Toronto Star
Stories about atheism:
Goodness without Godliness
Atheism is the "in" thing this spring. Not since Time magazine's infamous "Is God Dead?" cover in 1966 has non-belief been such a popular topic for debate.
John Moore, National Post, May 18
Goodness: It comes from God
John quite rightly affirms that one needn't believe in God to be a humanitarian or a lover of culture. Of course not, in exactly the same way that the greatgrandchild of a multi-millionaire who has set up a wonderful trust fund has no need to worry about paying his rent. It was the original capital that provided the revenues. Atheists committed to morality and social justice are simply people who chose not to grow the equity, but to live off the returns of the beliefs of their forebears.
Barbara Kay, National Post, May 19
Earlier: Stories about Christopher Hitchens and his book God Is Not Great
Stories about Islam and the West:
Anxiety, apathy and grim deja vu greet Algerian poll
Cat-and-mouse battles with Islamists, decade-long civil war loom large
Globe and Mail, May 17
Scant voter turnout for Algerian election
Radical Islamist groups who had been calling for a boycott of Algeria's parliamentary elections appeared to be succeeding as today's voting neared an end, with scant turnout reported at polling stations around the country.
Globe and Mail, May 17
Controversial imam in Toronto
Scholar's passionate speeches often draw overflow crowds of young Muslims
Toronto Star, May 19
Amid cowboys and Tory blue, Muslims thrive
Calgary's Islamic community, in the spotlight as the home of a Canadian detained in Afghanistan, is a surprisingly large and united group
Globe and Mail, May 22
Suicide attacks not justified, poll finds
About 25% of young American Muslims believe to some extent that suicide bombings can be justified to defend Islam, while nearly 80% of all U.S. Muslims reject such attacks, a survey showed yesterday. The nationwide poll of 1,050 Muslim adults by the Pew Research Center said the U.S. Muslim community is largely moderate, assimilated and happy.
National Post, May 23
Political correctness in a time of terror
The extent of our brainwashing by the politically correct has been exposed by follow-up reporting on the terror plot targeting a U.S. Army base. The teenaged clerk whose tip led to the arrests of six Muslim men on May 8 feared at first he would be accused of racism if he went to the authorities.
Steven Edwards, National Post, May 23
Earlier: Stories about Islam and the West
Other stories from the past week:
Court decision won't force Falun Gong away from Vancouver Chinese consulate
Falun Gong practitioners say despite a recent decision they'll still get a day in court over their ongoing protests outside the Chinese consulate in Vancouver. The quasi-religious sect and the city are locked in a fight over the bright blue protest hut and plywood billboards the group has refused to leave for the last five years.
Canadian Press, May 17
Earlier: Kilgour urges boycott of Beijing Olympics
Fellatio essay used by principal to solve bully problem at Quebec school
A Montreal-area school board is defending one of its principals who asked four elementary school students to each write a 10-line essay about fellatio as punishment for taunting a fellow student about the same topic. . . . "There is a much better way to teach them about teasing than writing about oral sex because that's not the issue," said Brian Rushfeldt, executive director of the Canadian Family Action Coalition, based in Calgary.
Canadian Press, May 17
A pope's love of writing
This week's English-language release of Pope Benedict XVI's new book, Jesus of Nazareth, was a historically unprecedented act -- which, given the long history of papal precedents, in saying something. The 350 pages of closely printed text are written in Benedict's private capacity as the scholar-theologian Joseph Ratzinger. Popes generally don't write books, and they don't do so in their private capacity, offering only, as Benedict styles it, the fruit of long research and his personal "search for the face of the Lord."
Fr. Raymond J. de Souza, National Post, May 17
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A comeback for Sodom
The Dead Sea is freakish enough as it is, an isolated body with the world's saltiest water, far below sea level and, moreover, the lowest point on Earth's surface. Thanks to the progress of agriculture and industry in Israel, Jordan and Syria, the River Jordan, the sea's water source, is now a rivulet, and sewage-ridden at that. The likelihood that the Dead Sea will be dry in 2050 adds a new layer of deadness, but there is a proposal to keep it alive by pumping in salt water northward from the Red Sea by a "Red-Dead Conduit." On Monday, the National Post reported on criticisms of the conduit scheme by The Friends of the Earth Middle East.
Gerald Owen, National Post, May 18
Rescuing worlds of Meaning
I was reading a copy of the University of Alberta alumni magazine not long ago when I ran across a short article about a new research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council -- that agency every recovering liberal arts grad student in Canada remembers as either a benevolent god or a savage one. The story involved the fate of the Cree language archive of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Roman Catholic missionary order that was the first organized European presence in far Western Canada. With the Oblates gradually closing up shop in the West, a keen-eyed education prof and a priest have spotted an opportunity to collect and study rare books and manuscripts that were "gathering dust" in personal collections, public archives and a back office of Edmonton's francophone Faculte St.-Jean. An article in the Western Catholic Reporter observes that "the collection consists of Gospels, grammars and dictionaries written in Cree by the likes of Father Albert Lacombe ... between the 1800s and the 1970s."
Colby Cosh, National Post, May 18
Blacks and Jews band to defuse controversy
Jewish and black leaders in Toronto stood side by side yesterday to quell the "rage and frustration" that followed a decision to block a controversial black American lawyer and activist entry to Canada. Malik Zulu Shabazz, leader of the New Black Panther Party, missed a speaking engagement at a rally at Queen's Park on Tuesday because he was not allowed across the border. The New Black Youth Taking Action network, which was responsible for organizing the protest, angrily blamed the "Jewish lobby" for the ban. The tension had to be dealt with in a "mature manner," black religious leader Reverend Don Meredith said yesterday at a press conference convened in the headquarters of the Caribana Festival.
National Post, May 19
Earlier: Stories about Malik Zuliu Shabazz and anti-Semitism
You can't always get what you want
Perhaps you shouldn't necessarily get what you desire, either, when you discover that happiness can lie in satisfaction
Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun, May 19
Children cramp our style
The abortion debate is back. The indomitable Ms. Choice is being hectored and picketed by Ms. Right-To-Life. Each side follows a Greek model: it's Hippocrates (do no harm) versus Taigetos (the name of the mountain from which Spartans threw off their unwanted children). The difference between Spartan society and ours is that for Spartans "unwanted" meant "substandard," whereas for us it means "inconvenient." We don't want standard or even superstandard children if they cramp our style.
George Jonas, National Post, May 19
Earlier: Stories about abortion
Backstop
Ottawa, we learned last week, will at last have a new archbishop. Pope Benedict XVI has appointed a Jesuit, Terrence Thomas Prendergast, to assume the pastoral care of the diocese' half-million Catholics, succeeding the Most Reverend Marcel Andre J. Gervais. We've been waiting for this appointment for some time.
David Warren, Ottawa Citizen, May 20
Locked-out workers disrupt special mass
A church service marking the arrival of Sulpician monks in Montreal 350 years ago was disturbed yesterday by locked-out workers from one of Canada's biggest cemeteries. Workers protested and made noise outside Notre-Dame Basilica as dignitaries and other churchgoers attended service.
Canadian Press, May 21
Jewish, and uncircumcised
It's no longer just a medical debate. A small but growing number of Jewish parents are questioning why they should circumcise their sons -- and are deciding to reject a fundamental tenet of their faith
Globe and Mail, May 22
Sikh anger surprised CSIS
Sikh extremism in Canada mushroomed far more quickly than Canadian security officials were prepared for, a former CSIS agent told the commission of inquiry into the investigation of the 1985 Air India bombing Tuesday.
Toronto Star, May 22
The 'art' of the disgusting
The locus of obsession for all religions is the body. Both Judaism and Christianity, perceiving Man as created in God's image, are consumed with corporal decency: appropriate limits to physical self-display, permissible latitude to sexual desire and the proper degree of respect for the body's integrity. With lesser or greater sectarian rigour, both insist on covering nakedness, hallowing sexual drives and protecting the body, live or dead, from indignities. Like traditional religion, paganism is both judgmental and prescriptive -- except that where traditional religion preaches decency in the service of holiness, paganism promotes (ever-escalating) indecency in the service of sensation for its own sake.
Barbara Kay, National Post, May 23
Earlier: Body Worlds draws large crowds -- and controversy
Website promotes hate, B'nai Brith member says
Human-rights complaint prompts publisher to remove 18 articles with alleged anti-Semitic material
Globe and Mail, May 24
Buddhists celebrate a happy day
On the founder's birthday followers visit temples, cleanse their minds
Vancouver Sun, May 24
Hail to the hockey moms
At the Memorial Cup this weekend in Vancouver, the title of "Great Canadian Hockey Mom" will be awarded during a ceremony at the final game. The contest invited essays from young hockey players about their mothers. The judges are Bobby Orr, David Branch, president of the Canadian Hockey League, and Linda Staal, who has two sons in the NHL, and two more in the Ontario Hockey League, presumably headed to the big league soon.
Fr. Raymond J. de Souza, National Post, May 24
May 24/2007
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