TORONTO - I was walking along Queen Street in downtown Toronto with my friend and dwelling on the fact that I had flooded the entire grocery store where I work by leaving the produce hose on. I was scared about what I had to face the next day at work and upset that I made such a careless mistake.

Having just finished four years of university, I know a thing or two about working on Sundays. Often, I would give myself time to sleep in, sleep off a week of classes, tutorials, assignments and incredibly late nights, but then it was time to get up and at ’em for a long day of work. For many young people, church is not even a thought worth entertaining during the school year. “Are you kidding? I have four essays and two presentations to finish by Thursday!”

 

I  was 18 years old when I competed in a regional lifeguard competition. My boss agreed to pay us to compete. However, days before the competition, we were practising for several hours and my teammates were signing in at work for their practice hours. They knew that it was wrong, but they did it anyway. I was jealous because they were making money and I wasn’t so I signed in too, thinking “if I get caught, we’ll all get caught.” Our manager never noticed what happened and we got away with stealing.

{mosimage}REYKJAVIK, Iceland - Among the two per cent of Catholics in Iceland, many of whom are new immigrants from Poland and the Philippines, are young people making a difference.   

I  have been in a long-distance relationship for a few years. When we first started dating I was overwhelmed with joy. I felt the typical butterfly sensation people get when they first fall in love, sort of like the exhilaration of flipping upside down on a roller coaster ride.

Six Canadian youth of different faiths have helped the Tony Blair Faith Foundation to reach its $5-million , 500,000 malaria nets goal.

These six Faiths Act Fellows based in Toronto and Montreal were part of Canada’s inaugural Faiths Act Fellowship launched by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core. The interfaith initiative paired 30 young Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs and Humanists and was designed to show that when people of different religions work together to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, they can have a crucial role in reducing conflict and saving lives. The students spent the past 10 months building multi-faith relationships by encouraging different faith communities to work together to raise funds and awareness to tackle malaria and other global issues.

TORONTO - Peter Grbac  of Toronto has won the fifth annual Friars' Student Writing Award contest for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which runs Jan. 21-28 this year.

TORONTO - It is halfway through second period and I’m lying on my classroom floor, away from all of the windows and doors, alongside other classmates. The room is silent. Luckily, this is just a practice lockdown drill that schools must go through in case of an emergency.

TORONTO - The organizers for World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney, Australia, have discovered that the Toronto experience holds some valuable lessons. As the officials from Down Under who were in town just before Easter learned, the two cities have a lot in common.

Imagine getting the chance to study astronomy at the Vatican Observatory. It may seem hard to do, but it isn’t so hard for Nathan Deg, whose dreams have recently become a reality.