Count me among the significant majority of Albertans opposed to our governmentöĎÓăĘÓƵapp proposed Alberta Pension Plan (APP). Despite our serious concerns, the province would like us all to support the plan. So we are headed to a season of “public relations” aimed at convincing us that a patently preposterous proposal is both realistic and in the interests of the people of this province.

What does it mean to be holy? To grow in holiness is to persevere in the life in Christ, to live out our baptism every day. The end goal of the life in Christ is to become a saint, to be divinized, to become like God. In sum, it is to achieve what we Byzantines call theosis: participation in the life of the Most Holy Trinity. This means that we must die to self each day and join ourselves ever more fully to Christ; we must strive to be Christ-like. St. John the Baptist summed this up when he declared, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). This process of decreasing requires repeated acts of the will: to pray daily, to confess regularly, to receive Holy Communion at least weekly, to undertake corporate and spiritual works of mercy, to be disciplined in our lives and to earnestly desire these things.

Human hearts are miracles. Pumps made of solid muscle to move blood and oxygen to the rest of the body. And our spiritual hearts are the core of our emotional, social  and spiritual selves. Strong and vulnerable miracles at the core of who we are. And God invites us to receive and maintain “hearts of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26).

I will be a foreigner to the speaker and the speaker a foreigner to me

1 Corinthians 14: 11

I have lived between languages my whole life and have always been intrigued by their glorious complexity. As a young student of English I grew up academically being told there was one correct grammar, an appropriate accent (which I apparently didn’t have in English or French) and that spelling was locked in stone and correct or incorrect.

Delegates at the recent Conservative PartyöĎÓăĘÓƵapp National Convention voted to support a ban on treating gender dysphoria in children with pharmaceutical and surgical interventions.

Gender is a nothingburger. I don’t mean that gender is irrelevant, but that “gender” doesn’t have a life of its own. ItöĎÓăĘÓƵapp virtually synonymous with “sex.” Because of this fact, I shall from now on render gender as “sex-gender.” Hyphens are fantastic. They keep things together that go together — especially those in danger of separation: “What God has joined together, let no man tear asunder.”

Steps have featured prominently on my social media feeds in the last week, as back to school pictures get posted. I love the glimpse into the lives of all the kids and teens, eager and annoyed, performing and resisting the annual tradition. I love the schools and the streets, busses and front steps in the background. There are so many stories behind the photos; I can feel the courage and hope that lives under the images.

My mother was a hospital nurse for many years, and she would often regale us with her nursing experiences during the Second World War and beyond. I vividly remember her saying that she dreaded a full moon, since despite scientific evidence to the contrary, it seemed to stir up something within the patients in the psychiatric ward.

In June of this year, I wrote an article for The Catholic Register on the life and ministry of Fr. Charles Robert (Rob) Brennan, SJ. At the time, Fr. Rob was in palliative care at the Jesuit residence in Pickering, Ont. In my opening sentence, I noted that in 2020 he had said that the only vocational aspiration that remained to him was a “good death.” As it turns out, his prayers, and the prayers of his many friends, were answered and Fr. Rob enjoyed, indeed truly relished, several months’ worth of dying.

When Lanark, a county on the outskirts of Ottawa, terminated its contract with one child care licensing agency at the end of August, it was a surprise to the agency and families. Parent fees doubled and 12 child care spaces were lost as two daycares closed.