Setting Sail: Conversations before General Synod
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Called to be partners
I often use the images of icebergs, landmines and pyramids, when reflecting on cross-cultural communications, especially in light of the legacy of residential school abuse.
read more‘My hope is that we will journey together’
When I was about 10, I too was sent away to school in Kenora, Ont., where I attended the Celia Jeffrey Residential School. I remember vividly looking back toward home mile after mile, not knowing where I was going.
Of my time at Celia Jeffrey School I clearly remember many nights I went to bed crying [...]
Gladys Cook: ‘I am the church’
Gladys Cook of Portage La Prairie, elder of the Dakota Sioux people, holder of the Manitoba Premier’s Award and of a Canada 125 medal, member of the Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples, remembers as a young woman being called a peacemaker, even though she felt herself filled with hate and anger. “It shows how much [...]
read moreA hard act to follow?
You are a priest; will yours be a hard act to follow? It’s an important question for me. I am the interim minister who will come to look after your parish for a few months while it searches for your successor. I am part of the “float” or part-time clergy who make up the interim [...]
read moreThe unsung evangelists of Melanesia
It is five-thirty in the morning. A bell made from a gas cylinder is rung. In the darkness over 100 young men, aged between 18 and 35, wake up, get up from their mats and prepare for prayer. In the chapel they kneel in silence. The sun is rising and light streams through the window [...]
read moreThe value and completion of theology
The term “theology” means “the science of God.” It was first used in ancient Greece, in the works of Plato and Aristotle, to distinguish a scientific from a mythological knowledge of God. That conception of theology, as a science, was inherited in ancient times by Jews and Muslims as well as by Christians. Thus, the [...]
read moreDeath by degrees
On a winter afternoon in Toronto not that long ago, a series of shots rang out in a high school parking lot and when the confusion had cleared, three young people lay in the snow with bullet wounds. Several days later, a newspaper sent a reporter out to the same schoolyard to ask some of [...]
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