The city worker carried on with his duties moments before the eclipse — the one that a continent had awaited enthusiastically. A dozen people and their dogs gathered in Ottawa’s Richelieu Park with sunglasses, eclipse glasses, and phones. The worker rode in on his tractor, singularly focused on his task at hand. One by one he removed the buckets from…
Category: Reflections
We learn the most about a person by how they respond to a crisis. Israeli film director Guy Nattiv’s movie on Golda Meir focuses on just three weeks in the life and times of Israel’s first female prime minister. Through the lens of the Yom Kippur War, we see Meir at both her toughest and also at her most vulnerable.…
This cheeky British film — billed as a thriller — is in fact part mystery, part drama. It’s a slow burn set during the doldrums of summer and on the leafy grounds of an English country estate owned by a revered and secretive novelist. The story is told mostly from the point-of-view of the young, fledgling author and private tutor…
Robert served 12 years of a 20-year prison sentence for his involvement in the Irish Republic Army (IRA), and in the bombing of Belfast City Centre. Mark served as a British military officer during the Troubles. Today Robert is a prominent community leader in the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast, as well as a Sinn Féin party activist. Mark…
I used to buy my shirts and pants here. Today I came to this old Sears department store to cast my ballot in the advance vote for Canada’s federal election. Sears shuttered its Canadian operations four years ago and this cavernous department store at St. Laurent Mall in Ottawa’s east end has been closed ever since. Most of the store’s…
The featured letter in this past weekend’s Ottawa Citizen is from Patricia Willoughby, who captures well the value of café culture. The same extends to bistros and pubs too, as places that can become a “second home,” especially to those living in downtown apartments. I wrote more than one conference paper and bits of my PhD dissertation in the ornate…
As we consider and reconsider the role of social media in shaping public discourse, here’s a quote from twentieth century literary critic Lionel Trilling on fiction as a tool of introspection — an area where online echo chambers typically fail: “For our time the most effective agent of the moral imagination has been the novel of the last two hundred…
“Well hello, hello, oddly cloistered Human! How can I be of assistance?” asked the Red Cardinal in my garden this morning, as I fumbled with my camera on the balcony. Good bird, good bird. Now just stay exactly where you are. “I see,” Red popped his head to the right and glanced at the parking lot across the way. “You…
The most striking aspect of The Two Popes is that it avoids being didactic, offering instead a complex portrayal of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis) and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). Although Bergoglio is liberally-minded, outgoing and pastoral, while Benedict is more conservative, introverted and academic, the film avoids tropes, depicting each in a multidimensional light. Fernando Meirelles’ film,…
Fr. Joel Sember serves as pastor of three churches in the Diocese of Green Bay, Wisconsin. When he shared the audio recording of his most recent homily, entitled “The Problem with the Catholic Church is…,” I found it hard to suppress my curiosity. The homily’s theme was prompted by the cancellation of Saturday evening Mass at St. Anthony, one of…