When Marlene West faced her family to tell them about her plans regarding her death she got a surprise — tears and grasping for words that just wouldn’t come.

TORONTO - Friendly volunteers checked bags. Police hovered discreetly at the back of the room. After weeks of spray-painted swastikas and arson, everybody expected the security and nobody talked about it.

Recent hate crimes wouldn't stop about 300 Muslims, Jews and Catholics from gathering at Beth Tikvah Synagogue to listen to ethicists and doctors speak about how to care for their dying parents.

{mosimage} When Fr. Eugene Funken was faced with 10 orphans whose homes had burned down in St. Agatha, Ont., in 1858, he started a charity.

When Sonya Pouyat took over leadership of Funken’s charity in the midst of “slash and burn” Ontario government policies in the 1990s, she started a business.

The state of our environment has captured the attention of Canadian investors.

A Harris/Decima poll of more than 2,000 Canadians for Investors Group found 56 per cent thought environmental considerations are an important part of socially responsible investment decisions. Environment out-polled such traditional ethical investment factors as alcohol and tobacco at 43 per cent, and weapons at 53 per cent. Only substandard human rights practices at 70 per cent and child labour named by 79 per cent were more likely to determine ethical investment decisions.

TORONTO - Grade 9 students at Pope John Paul II Catholic Secondary School probably won’t learn anything about Bali in their geography class this week. The Indonesian island might get a passing mention from their science teacher, but it’s not on the exam. But in religion class, Bali will definitely be a focus.

{mosimage}Sex sells. That seems obvious enough to anyone who owns a television. But cultural critic Paul Rutherford has looked behind this most obvious truth about advertising to figure out how and why we have been sold so much stuff using so much sex.

{mosimage}MONTREAL - What kind of society won’t admit religion? Apparently Canada.

Douglas Farrow believes Canada’s grand experiment in multiculturalism is doomed. Or rather that it dooms its citizens to cultural relativism, a moral quagmire and the absence of true community.

{mosimage}TORONTO - The Catholic Church’s historic mission to the native people of Canada is a big issue, and getting bigger. For the first time Statistics Canada reports there are more than one million Canadians who claim native ancestry. The aboriginal population grew 45 per cent between 1996 and 2006 — six times the growth in the Canadian population as a whole.

{mosimage}TORONTO - There’s more to the modern practice of capitalism than squeezing costs to watch the bottom line grow, according to the company that sells some of the most expensive electricity in Canada.

Toronto-based Bullfrog Power has hundreds of business customers in Ontario and Alberta willing to spend three cents per kilowatt hour more for electricity than average rates. That’s a 25- to 30-per-cent increase in their electricity bill.

{mosimage}If you pray for something for 100 years you might find the prayer refines itself in the light of new realities, and then perhaps the prayer itself deepens your understanding and broadens your horizon.