In the week that we looked into the online mirror and saw pornographic deep fakes of Taylor Swift staring back, Canada’s Catholic bishops published a compelling pastoral letter on Christian engagement with social media.

One winter when I was 13 and my brother was 14, we took a family trip to New Hampshire. To ski. Because my brother really wanted to. He promised he would teach me how to ski. My elderly dad, an avid outdoorsman and sports enthusiast, had never, however, in his long life, skied, and was wary of its potential dangers involving bone protrusions and close encounters with trees. He agreed to take us despite.

As the end of the Advent season drew near, I was blessed with an Emmanuel moment that became a Christmas gift that has kept on giving.

As a humourist I have often asked myself if my lighter reflections were appropriate in a time of such deep division and grief. As a columnist for over 10 years, there have been times when I have wondered if I should change tack, focus on darker or more politically edgy work, addressing the catastrophes of our times. It is surely fair to ask if one’s lightness, at a time of dark, is fitting or even welcomed. Truth be told, I continue to be torn. Humour, I know, has had a role to play in every context since the beginning of time, as a mediating influence, a salve or as a weapon to address contentious topics.

In his beautiful Apostolic Exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel,” Pope Francis reminds us that as pastoral people we have to accept tension between fullness and limitation, and not be concerned with immediate results.

Anna Farrow rightly points in her Jan. 21 story “Media buy-in drove graves social panic” to the preface of Chris Champion and Tom Flanagan’s book Grave Error. Champion and Flanagan stress that while contributors to the book do not speak with a unanimous voice, “all authors in this collection agree on the main point: that no persuasive evidence has yet been offered by anyone for the existence of unmarked graves, missing children, murder or genocide in residential schools.”

Sr. Nancy Brown, of the Archdiocese of Vancouver’s Anti-Human Trafficking Committee, says the Feb. 8 Feast Day of St. Josephine Bakhita should focus attention to combat the scourge.

Jordan Peterson put a target on his own back several years ago by speaking clearly and simply against mandated use of “gendered” pronouns and proper names. More recently, his critics have mocked him mercilessly as a cartoonish poster boy for the conservative “anger-tainment” industry.

In an article published in the National Post on Dec. 29, columnist Joseph Brean queried the meaning of the week between Christmas Day and New Year’s. It was a curious piece. Brean asked what the week is all about concluding that it is “this least wonderful time of the year (that) is either an under-appreciated winter interlude of nothingness, or a bland calendrical purgatory of suspended animation.”

On the evening of Saturday, Jan. 13, the Alberta Emergency Management Agency sent a province-wide alert on people’s cellphones stating that the province’s electrical grid was at high risk of having to implement rotating power outages. The day had been bitterly cold across Canada, including Alberta where all-time low temperatures were recorded.