{mosimage}There’s a joke about Christopher Hitchens circulating around the Internet: “What’s the difference between Christopher Hitchens and God? God doesn’t think He is Christopher Hitchens.”

Editor’s note: The following article is a response by Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, to the June 3 Catholic Register editorial, The wrong road, in which we criticized the adoption by Amnesty International of a policy of defending a woman’s access to abortion as a right.

Editor’s note: In September 2008 the Quebec government will replace the options in religious and moral education in public schools by the imposition of a single multi-religious course of ethics and religious culture along with the forbiddance, in public but not private schools, of all confessional religious education. This commentary on the issue is written by Jean Morse-Chevrier, president of the Catholic Parents Association of Quebec and first published in Le Devoir on June 4 in French. The author provided this English translation to The Catholic Register.

Forget not the widow, the orphan, and slave
O God please remember the helpless today
Call on Your children repairing the breach
There is no place too far that Your mercy can’t reach.
                           - Charlie Hall , recording artist

This week’s mail brought the annual status report on the child we support through Christian Child Care International (CCCI) . She lives in Haiti, the poorest and most densely populated country in the Western Hemisphere.

Having taken the current set of Grade 8 students from my parish through Confirmation some insights on the process came to light. I suppose this could be considered a good news/bad news account.

It seems increasingly odd that we should have difficulty getting informed news reports and commentary on religion in the mainstream media. After all, as virtually everyone concedes, religion is news, although largely bad news it would seem.

{mosimage}What qualities constitute a real man in the early 21st century? What model could a modern dad look to for inspiration and guidance to get him through challenging times? These are meaningful questions in Canada 2007, amid the ongoing attacks on the traditional family, and we need to look no further for our model than St. Joseph, foster father to Our Lord.

{mosimage}“One is closer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth” goes the old saying. I have always known this. But I hadn’t particularly thought of the divine in connection with compost until I read God of Surprises.

{mosimage}Current events in a country bridging Europe and Asia are offering an important object lesson about the Muslim world: it is not monolithic and there are significant forces for religious pluralism and democracy within it.

The Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats are in agreement on maintaining Ontario’s public funding for two education systems: public and Catholic.  One key question I still have today: why should Catholics get full funding and no other religious groups get any public support?