Christmas came early to our house this year. Very early. Pre-Advent early.

In a third-season episode of the insanely good TV series Breaking Bad, students at chemistry teacher/ drug lord Walter White’s high school gather in a gym for a post-modern public grief ceremony.

At a recent conference in Montreal on religious freedom and education, the principal of Loyola High School pinpointed the threat facing people of faith.

Only in an age permeated with paradox could the victories of the gay rights movement present a model for religious believers in the public square. Yet whether one agrees or disagrees with what gay activists have achieved over the past 40 years, there is no doubt the strategic course they have followed has been wildly successful and worth emulating as a result.

Being a Western Canadian who has lived for many years in Quebec, it is more natural for me to want to bury a Trudeau than to praise one.

It is early Saturday morning deep in mid-summer and I am lacing up my shoes in the locker room at the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association before a long run. If someone were to look up the word “bliss” in a dictionary, my smiling face might well appear as the definition.

It is both proper and gratifying to see the success of World Youth Day in Rio as a massive, marvelous “yes” to Christian faith.

To read the coverage and study the ghastly pictures from the Quebec village of Lac Mégantic is to know that hearts must be asking where was God during this tragedy.

The Parti Quebecois’ so-called Act Respecting End of Life Care, the horrifying Bill-52, is cynicism wrapped in subterfuge blanketed by the blackness of ideological blindness.

There was a small moment at a recent McGill University conference that put the very large debate about public religious faith into clear perspective. Rabbi Lisa Gruschcow, appearing on a panel called Taking the Temperature: Religion and Secularism in Canadian Society, spoke eloquently and effectively about the delicate balancing of neutral secular governance with public manifestations of religious freedom.