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3 weeks ago | 
broadview.org | Julie McGonegal
Spirituality, justice and ethical living
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
broadview.org | Julie McGonegal
Imagine you’re at a family gathering when you’re cornered into a strained conversation on the existence of God between your fundamentalist uncle and your atheist cousin. After wondering what possessed you to come, you take a deep breath. Maybe, you suggest, all faith exists on a spectrum of belief and doubt. We each inhabit different places on that continuum at different points in our life journey — and you’re not really sure where you sit at the moment.
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Sep 15, 2024 | 
broadview.org | Julie McGonegal
Very Rev. Lois Wilson, a trailblazing leader whose life was marked by humility, service and a deep commitment to human rights, has died. She was 97. At an event this past February to launch the book For the Sake of the Common Good: Essays in Honour of Lois Wilson, she reflected on her decades of work for unity and justice, and spoke of her lifelong belief in collective action. “I hope that this helps unite us and spurs us on to do some things together.
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Aug 28, 2024 | 
broadview.org | Julie McGonegal
All of us eventually blow up the tidy, arranged narratives of our lives. Or they are dismantled for us. Few understand this as well as Nick Cave. In 2015, the Australian singer-songwriter, frontman of the revered genre-defying band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, lost his 15-year-old son, Arthur, when he fell from a cliff after taking LSD. Seven years later, his eldest son, Jethro Lazenby, died unexpectedly at age 31. Their deaths shattered Cave.
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Jul 18, 2024 | 
broadview.org | Julie McGonegal
Felicia Watkins wasn’t always an atheist. The rhythms and rituals of Catholicism shaped her early childhood: baptism, first communion, attendance at Catholic school. Her mother is Catholic and raised Watkins and her older siblings in the faith. But her parents divorced when she was six, and she started to have doubts. She prayed for her parents to get back together. It didn’t happen.
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Mar 25, 2024 | 
broadview.org | Julie McGonegal
Kirk Dunn is an actor, fibre artist and podcast host in Toronto. Over the course of 15 years, he created Stitched Glass, an expansive installation of three hand-knit tapestries styled after stained glass windows, each depicting iconography from one of the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Then, together with his wife, Claire Ross Dunn, he wrote a one-man play about that artistic journey called The Knitting Pilgrim.
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Jan 16, 2024 | 
broadview.org | Julie McGonegal
Canadians know writer Joy Kogawa for her celebrated 1981 novel, Obasan. Drawing on her own history, the book shines a light on the unjust internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. But poetry was Kogawa’s first love, and it might also be her parting gift to the world. Now 88, she has released what she calls her “last hurrah.” From the Lost and Found Department is a collection of revelatory poems about suffering and compassion, heartache and forgiveness.
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Jul 6, 2023 | 
broadview.org | Julie McGonegal
Emilio Rodriguez, a refugee and migrant rights policy analyst at Citizens for Public Justice, explains the recent changes to the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement that have closed unofficial border crossings like Roxham Road in Quebec. He spoke to Julie McGonegal about why human rights activists are alarmed. Julie McGonegal: What is the Safe Third Country Agreement? Emilio Rodriguez: It’s been in effect since December 2004 between Canada and the United States.
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Jun 21, 2023 | 
reviewcanada.ca | Julie McGonegal
Since starting high school in our small township flanking the agricultural countryside outside of Guelph, Ontario, my daughter has remarked more than once on the copiously white student body. While she’s amused by events like “Take Your Tractor to School Day,” she’s also aghast that there are only a smattering of students of colour, and she occasionally wonders aloud how it feels to be one of the two or three Black teenagers in the entire building. What troubles her most?
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May 9, 2023 | 
broadview.org | Julie McGonegal
Canada’s largest Protestant denomination is shrinking the fastest. The latest census paints a grim picture of The United Church of Canada, which lost a whopping 40 percent of affiliates between 2011 and 2021, falling to 1.2 million people from roughly two million. “Affiliates” are people who self describe in the census as having a United Church identity, but they may never go to church.
