Twenty years ago, on the Feast of the Annunciation 1995, St. John Paul II published one of his signature encyclicals, Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life). It’s important to return to the richness of that teaching, as many who oppose the Church’s pro-life witness having been making mischief with Pope Francis’ remark that Catholics should not be obsessed with abortion.

I had the pleasure this past week of hosting George Weigel, one of the Church’s leading public intellectuals, in Toronto and Kingston. I had long wanted to host Weigel, a mentor and friend and colleague for more than 20 years, and thought that 2015, the 10th anniversary of the death of St. John Paul II, would be the perfect year to do it.

A country that deems it progressive to kill your grandmother but conservative for the state to dictate your choice of hat might be going, in a technical sense, nuts.

Basketball superstar LeBron James and the National Basketball Association have joined best-selling author Sheryl Sandberg in promoting gender equality, the timing coinciding with International Women’s Day on March 8.

I have been staunchly against the death penalty since I started visiting the now-defunct Kingston Penitentiary as an undergraduate, meeting weekly with a group of prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment.

A friend who attended a commemoration Mass at a church in Montreal’s Villeray neighbourhood at the end of February e-mailed me this compelling observation shortly afterward.

As I wrote last week from Jerusalem, just months after the massacre at a synagogue in Har Nof, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood, I felt a duty to make a visit, to pray for the dead and to offer, in a small way, solidarity with those who suffered the desecration of their house of worship.

JERUSALEM - Where is it safe for Jews to live?

The paradox of technology has always intrigued me: it offers great benefits, but not without costs. This interest in the paradox goes back to high school when at Neil McNeil in Scarborough we studied science fiction books like 1984, Brave New World, The Last Western, Future Shock and others that predicted and exposed sinister sides of technology.

In 35 years of journalism, I’ve had two significant encounters with jailhouse views of life and death. Memories of both came back sharply standing in Canada’s Supreme Court earlier this month when nine justices declared doctor-assisted killing legal.