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Free speech is under increasing attack in Canada. Over the past decade, ideologically emboldened political leaders, activists, and professional regulators have narrowed the field of allowable discourse and sought to punish any expression that ventures outside it. The latest threat to free speech in Canada involves an Ontario College of Psychologists (OCP) investigation of clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson for allegedly harming various individuals for his public comments on Twitter and The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Examples of Peterson’s supposed crimes on social media include calling for an end to unscientific, discriminatory vaccine mandates, retweeting Canada’s Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, and lambasting Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. One complainant submi...

The “surplus population” is, in fact, the population that the Constitution is made to protect. What do Ebenezer Scrooge and Planned Parenthood have in common? The fundamental answer to this question is more than a sentimental appeal to “the Christmas spirit” or a “cheap-shot” at the abortion industry. The answer is found in the writings of the British Anglican Reverend, Thomas Malthus. In 1798, Malthus wrote “An Essay on the Principle of Population” and worked and reworked the core ideas of this piece over the next several years. He never fundamentally changed from his one big thought: human population increases exponentially while food only increases linearly. Thus, there will always be a tendency in the human race for population to “overpower” food; hence there will be, in the words of S...

This is a still from the “Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story,” a film by Martin Doblmeier. (CNS photo/courtesy Journey Films) They had gotten a telegram from the Communist Party’s newspaper just before Christmas asking for their help, Dorothy Day wrote in her column in the January 1937 issue of Catholic Worker. She took the chance to challenge their political mind with the Christian insight. The Daily Worker held the hard Marxist idea that political needs determine what is true and false. The political needs were mainly those of the Soviet Union, then run by Joseph Stalin, who had only a few years before finished his near-genocidal war on the Ukrainian people. At the time the editor telegraphed, the newspaper proclaimed, with the rest of the world’s communist press,...

“If you’re feeling helpless in your vocation, if you’re feeling like you’re resenting parenthood or marriage, family life — we want you to be able to find hope; to be able to have some practical tools for getting yourself out of that rut and to be able to experience the joy of your vocation and the love of God — and experience God’s peace in your home. We really hope that our book accomplishes that for fellow Catholic parents,” said Debbie Cowden, co-author with her husband, David, of “The Prayer Book for Tired Parents: Practical Ways to Grow in Love of God and Get Your Family to Heaven” (Sophia Institute Press).  Debbie Cowden is senior digital media specialist at EWTN. The Cowdens live in Ohio with their three young children. Learn mor...

In January 2019, the Korean-flagged fishing vessel Oyang 77 sailed south toward international waters off Argentina. The vessel had a known history of nefarious activities, including underreporting its catch and illegally dumping low-value fish to make room in its hold for more lucrative catch. At 2 a.m. on Jan. 10, the Oyang 77 turned off its location transponder at the edge of Argentina’s exclusive economic zone – a political boundary that divides Argentina’s national waters from international waters, or the high seas. At 9 p.m. on Jan. 11, the Oyang 77 turned its transponder back on and reappeared on the high seas. For the 19 hours when the ship was dark, no information was available about where it had gone or what it did. In a recent study, I worked with colleagues at Global...

The “reasonableness of faith” is what Pope Benedict XVI taught to an age hostile to faith and lacking confidence in reason.  In his “Spiritual Testament,” written in 2006 and released upon his death, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wrote about faith, which was to be expected, but in a way unusual for a final testament. He desired that, after his death, the world hear one more time that the faith was reasonable and that philosophical and scientific approaches that claimed otherwise were themselves deficient in their reasoning.  In Life and Death: Faith! Benedict, the consummate scholar, makes an argument from the grave in his  “Spiritual Testament”: “It often seems that science — the natural sciences on the one hand and historical research (especially exegesis of Sacred Scripture)...

Soon after the funeral of Pope Benedict XVI, a video began circulating online, which appeared to show a man being denied Holy Communion at the Mass, as he knelt before a priest distributing the Eucharist and attempted to receive on the tongue. The video was apparently an excerpt from Vatican Media’s own broadcast of the funeral. And, of course, the video is without sound or context — any possible extenuating circumstances or additional information is not available to those who view it. There is only a story told in a few seconds of video — a man kneels, removes the hood of jacket, a priest says something to him and pulls back the sacred host, the man seemingly attempts again to receive it as he rises from the ground, and the priest seems to rebuke him. The man, and a woman behind him in li...

As Christmas approached last year, astronomers and space fans around the globe gathered to watch the much-anticipated launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. Though a wondrous piece of engineering, the telescope was not without its controversies — from being way over budget and behind schedule to being named after a former NASA administrator who has been accused of homophobia.  Despite the debates over the telescope’s naming and history, one thing has become abundantly clear this year — the scientific ability of JWST is remarkable. Beginning its science operations in July 2022, it has already allowed astronomers to get new views and uncover mysteries about a huge range of space topics.  The most pressing aim of JWST is one of the most ambitious projects in the recent history of...

Pope Benedict XVI considered the story of the Magi, the star, and the Baby Jesus a master story for the Christian life, and it is perhaps no coincidence that we will hear that story at The Epiphany of the Lord celebration so soon after his death and funeral. In 2005, Pope Benedict XVI became pope and one of his first major events was World Youth Day. The event took place in and around the cathedral in Cologne, Germany, which houses the relics of the three wise men, so the Epiphany story made an appearance in nearly all of his remarks. Below find words of his from several Cologne addresses, rearranged according to the themes presented in the Epiphany Gospel. The Journey We Take The Gospel says: “And behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them, until it came and stop...

Among the peculiarities marking the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI is the fact that he neither condemned nor ignored one of the most influential German philosophers of our era, Friedrich Nietzsche, the one who famously proclaimed the death of God in our times. In the first and most moving encyclical of his pontificate, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), released on Christmas Day in 2005, Benedict unpacked the significance of divine love in relation to human desire, or what the Greeks call eros. To do so, he quoted an aphorism from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it but degenerated — into a vice.” According to Nietzsche, Christianity ruins what is highest in us, the jubilant celebration of life that is erotic desire, by infecting i...

The arrival of a new year is traditionally associated with making resolutions. It’s a natural and salutary thing, because the change of the calendar is an occasion to take stock of ourselves, to see where we are and to make those course corrections we need to get us where we want to be. The cynical might say that we make resolutions to see how quickly we can break them. Will we fall? Maybe. Even likely. But we won’t fail unless, upon falling, we don’t get up again. That’s the difference between falling and failing: one letter, and a world of difference. Resolutions should not be whatever pops into one’s head. Take some time in these first days of 2023 and ask what you want to see different about yourself in the last days of 2023, provided God gives you them. What should I work on now to ac...