By Glen Argan U.S. President Joe Biden is the most publicly religious American president since at least Jimmy Carter. Biden is knowledgeable of Catholic social teaching. He is comfortable talking about his faith, attends Mass weekly and prays his rosary regularly. Yet, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is not comfortable with Biden. The reason? He is an
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By Glen Argan In a famous fifth-century sermon, St. Leo the Great preached that Christmas is a time for rejoicing. “Sadness should have no place in the birthday of life.” Christmas was still a new liturgical feast at that time, unencumbered by the heavy weight of consumerism which has distorted its meaning today. No frantic gift buying, no long waits
Read moreBy Glen Argan The Chinese government has unjustly imprisoned Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. They are innocent pawns in a high-stakes game China is playing with Canada to secure the release of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies. The United States wants Wanzhou extradited to face fraud charges. Kovrig and Spavor deserve freedom, not to spend the
Read more(Published in The Catholic Register, June 21, 2020 By Glen Argan It’s astonishing that, amidst massive protests across the United States against police racism, RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki had to sort through various definitions of systemic racism to determine whether it was endemic to Canada’s national police force. At first, she claimed the RCMP was free of systemic racism before
Read more(Published in The Catholic Register, June 6, 2020) By Glen Argan Creation is a symphony, a symphony which only God hears in its fullness. I hope God is listening. I hope that in creation’s symphony, my out-of-tune voice will be gathered with the voices of more exquisite singers to sing a song of joy and praise to the beauty of
Read morePublished in The Catholic Register, May 21, 2020) By Glen Argan In Alberta, the province where I live, those hardest hit by the covid-19 pandemic are workers in meat processing plants. At High River’s Cargill plant, Canada’s largest meat-processing facility, 936 cases of covid-19 had been reported as of May 4 with hundreds more among people in the community who
Read more(Published in The Catholic Register, May 8, 2020) By Glen Argan One could almost hear the collective sigh of relief as governments across Canada announced the lifting of some restrictions imposed during Covid-19 pandemic. By the time you read this, Albertans will again be able to get their hair cut or styled and go shopping as retail stores open for
Read moreBy Glen Argan The question on many minds is, “When will life return to normal?” That implies another question: What is normal? For many, the answer would be something like, normal is when I return to my daily activities such as visiting family and friends, earning a living wage and the kids returning to school. For others, normal includes increased
Read moreBy Glen Argan Probably, most Catholics do not link Jesus’ Transfiguration on the mountain with the Exodus of the Old Testament. For us, it is a stand-alone, unique event which reveals Jesus as the Son of God. The Transfiguration surely is that (and more as well), but several allusions to the Exodus in St. Luke’s Gospel account make clear that
Read moreBy Glen Argan (Originally published in The Catholic Register) Authors of dystopian novels are bound to get a lot wrong. After all, they are looking into what they believe will be a dark future which is inherently unpredictable. The year 1984, for example, turned out to be nothing like George Orwell’s famous novel of the same name. Still, when I
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On the Threshold 