In the liturgical calendar. Quinquagesima Sunday is so called because it precedes Easter by fifty days. The Epistle for the day, in both the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican, is taken from the fifteenth chapter of St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. It is probably the most famous…

The three main branches of Christendom, Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant, differ widely in doctrine and custom. But they all agree on one thing: that the foundation of their faith rests on three key events in the life of Christ, on the Nativity, the Passion, and the Resurrection. …

Prefatory note This profile of the late Anastáz Opasek, Abbot of the Benedictine monastery in Břevnov, Prague, is an attempt to pay tribute to a religious leader who came to symbolize, in many ways, much that was best about Czech idealism. He suffered imprisonment and other forms of persecution; but…

The diversity of modern Canada is much spoken of and written about. But there was never a time when Canada was not a multicultural country. Before the Europeans arrived, the indigenous peoples, Dene and Inuit, were diverse in language, way of life, and belief. And even when the dominant population…

Author’s Note Throughout the Alphabeticon series, the emphasis is on the life and work of men and women, past and present, who have affected the world, for better or worse, in some significant way; or on some aspect of world history, in a given period, that has had a significant…

The liturgies of the Christian churches, ancient and modern, are as the sands of the sea, multitudinous but easily washed away by the tides of change or dispute. But go back far enough, and we have to speak in a single, unitary mode. There was one Church, not yet split…

In Judaism, there is an ancient but enduring tradition of disputation. It dates all the way back to the faith’s very beginning, to when Abraham argued with God that if so much as one righteous man could be found in the doomed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities should…

Fond of Paris from his student days, now in his eighties, the visitor looks back. Here is the past: his own, and others’; much of it known, or learnt. Time was, he remembers, two years after the war, the liberated city took up the reins of a normal life without…

Every established belief values its own orthodoxy. The more it does so, the less it tolerates heresy. People who fail to toe the party line are cast out into the wilderness of official disapproval. This is sadly true of religious belief systems. It is equally true of some belief systems…