Next week, Pope Francis will issue a new encyclical which will add to a train of teaching that can be traced back to the Second Vatican Council or, if you can imagine it, to the eighth century BC.

Every year, as my children got older, the return-to-school routine got less exciting.

The contested renaming of Montreal’s Lionel Groulx Metro station testifies to the power of Catholic history to shape our politics even as Catholic cultural memory dims.

Awkward floated to my lips a few times last week before I saw the pattern. The stumbling and crashing of growing children and adolescents finding themselves in bigger bodies than the days before. Constant adjustments during mask practice sessions. Remembering the diapers and the keys and the shoes, only to forget to pack lunch in a new season’s morning routine. We are making it through, but it is painfully awkward.

Sr. Deirdre Byrne is a remarkable woman. Many of you have heard her life story because of the address she gave to the Republican National Convention in August.

In a recent interview with Global News, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that his government will put forward an “ambitious agenda” for a green recovery. “We know the world is going towards lower carbon,” he said. It appears that he is willing to stake the fate of his minority government on such an agenda.

Statues typically honour those who have done great deeds. They are built so we do not forget our past. To forget the past is to lose hope for a better future. Without a memory of the past, our only vision of reality is that of the present. We are stuck in the ideology of today, reduced to a one-dimensional world. Memory opens horizons.

In mid-August, Unilever urged ice-cream trucks selling Good Humor products to play a newly-created jingle.

At dinner during a recent event, a young journalistic rising star of decidedly Calvinist conviction acknowledged G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy ranks among the most inspiring books he’s read.

Music is a great comfort. It raises deep issues of the soul and then expresses them in a way most of us never could. Many kinds of music are deeply spiritual, from Gregorian chant to country to rock.