The world has few writers with the fervour to publicly trash the covers of their own books. The world has even fewer writers like Heather King. For that reason alone, King's newly released Shirt of Flame: A Year With Saint Thérèse of Lisieux is the one book I've read this year that I would suggest as a guidebook for the pilgrimage of ordinary life. If I were looking to provide a courageous, comprehensive book of apologetics, of course, I would recommend colleague and friend Michael Coren's Why Catholics Are Right. Anyone who at any time has felt the need to understand, answer for and defend the Church needs to read Coren's book and have it ready on the bookshelf. Shirt of Flame, by contrast, does not go bravely to the side of the Church, as Coren's does. It goes, rather, to the "heart nailed to a Cross" that is the deepest truth of Catholic faith. It goes there despite King's own freely confessed misgivings about her ability to even write the book, and her discomfort with what her publisher ultimately chose as a representative cover image. "I… had a huge conflict over the cover, which I find intensely incongruent with my own sensibility, and especially with the sensibility and spirituality of St. Thérèse," she recently told the U.S. quarterly magazine Dappled Things. "It's a chicklit, pastel cover, designed to be bland and non-threatening, the only redeeming feature of which is that it is slightly—but only slightly—less offensive than the one originally proposed, which was a la-la-la New Age girl in a swirly dress floating through an acid-green, flower-strewn pasture. That kind of Disney Christ cover says nothing that can be argued with and also nothing that's remotely truthful, compelling, interesting, challenging, original or real. Spirituality to me is blood, sinew, tendon, a heart nailed to a cross." The passage is worth quoting at length because it expresses exactly the kind of drive and directness to faith that fills the Shirt of Flame. It also helps to explain why King quickly dispenses with the publisher's trite "my year spent doing blah blah" trope, and just tells the story of her entanglement with St. Thérèse. From the outset, King makes clear she has no intention of merely spending an experimental, carefully monitored year following the "Little Way" of the 19th-century French nun who died of tuberculosis at age 24. On the contrary, she means to plunge headlong, and life long, down the path to sainthood blazed by young Thérèse Martin. A distinction is that King's commitment comes not in a chilly cloister surrounded by other religious as the 19th century gave way to the 20th, but in the heat and grit of Los Angeles' Koreatown neighbourhood during the first decade of the new millennium. The writer herself could hardly seem more distinct from her inspiration. The bourgeois daughter of deeply Catholic parents, Thérèse begged from childhood to be allowed to live the consecrated life. She literally threw herself at the feet of Pope Leo XIII imploring him to waive age-restrictions on entry to the convent at Lisieux. King, uh, not so much. As she acknowledges with characteristic honesty, she is a sober alcoholic who has suffered abortion, been divorced, gave up her calling as a lawyer to struggle as a writer, is often unsure how she will make it through the day and fully embraced Catholicism in middle age when the emptiness of almost everything else became overwhelmingly obvious. The power of Shirt of Flame is its capacity to convey the bracing truth that these are ultimately distinctions without a difference when the object of attainment is sainthood. Observing King laying her daily struggles against those of St. Thérèse, we see her seeking not mere comfort but hard correction and elusive wisdom by the comparison. We are reminded that becoming a saint is not a sudden eruption into glory. It is not the fruit, much less the pursuit, of ethical perfection. It is the grinding, quotidian doing of every little thing in a manner that moves us, however fitfully and failingly, toward the fullness of love that is Christ. Or as King puts it in a particularly simple and beautiful sentence, if we so much as bend over and pick up a pin off the floor with love, we have taken another step toward joining the communion of saints. Pick up this book by ordering it atwww.shirtofflame.blogspot.com. You will find a gift from a gifted writer inside—regardless of its cover.

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Religious believers are in debt to Julian Baggini for his refreshingly open-minded series seeking to establish common discursive ground between them and atheists. His desire to open respectful lines of communication, his cautions against both dogmatism and "dogmataphobia" on all sides, his critique of religious "conceptual claustrophobia", his debunking of the inflated claims of scientific knowledge – all these help clear the ground for constructive dialogue. So in explaining why I think his articles of 21st century faith are a complete nonstarter I do so with the hope that a more successful starting point might yet emerge. Baggini's strategy faces problems both of procedure and substance. Procedurally, it operates with an attempt to press upon religious believers a supposedly stark, logical choice between simply agreeing or disagreeing in toto with the precise wording of his own four articles. But this hustling move will not encourage the kind of dialogue in which each side might be open to learning something new through having their own view of the terms of the debate challenged. It isn't enough that, as Baggini rightly argued earlier, we be "open to a revision of belief". We also have to be open to a much more challenging reframing of our very questions. Take Baggini's second article of faith, that "religious belief does not, and should not, require the belief that any supernatural events have occurred here on Earth". Baggini acknowledges the complication that religious believers might operate with different readings of the term supernatural, but then brushes this aside as secondary. It isn't. For as he understands the term, it already seems to harbour a prejudicial philosophical dualism in which that which is defined as "natural" – and thereby supposedly amenable to rational, empirical investigation through the methods of the natural sciences – is pitted against that which somehow floats above the natural and is thereby necessarily a matter of speculative, unreasoning faith. But most religious believers could not accept such an understanding of the supernatural. Even more problematically, his understanding of the natural is, contrary to what he has implied earlier, itself a contestable philosophical presupposition that cannot be proved either by science or reason. So while I would certainly claim that my Christian faith requires me to believe that God brings about certain events on earth – including what he calls the spooky ones like the bodily resurrection of Jesus – I won't accept as a starting point for discussion Baggini's insistence that these be described as supernatural. The same preemptively prejudicial wording infects his article 3, which insists that religion "should make no claims about the physical nature, origin or structure of the natural universe". I agree that religious texts (at least the Hebrew and Christian ones I know) do not pretend to present scientific accounts of the nature or structure of the natural universe. They don't contain information of the kind yielded by astrophysics, meteorology or genetics. But the term "origin" is fatally ambiguous between ascertainable physical causes and the ultimate condition of existence of the universe. Christianity, at least, makes the monumentally important claim that the whole of reality – not just the natural universe but also human capacities such as reason itself – finds it ultimate source and continuing foundation in God. Of course, no discussion between atheists and believers could get started if Christians were to insist that their belief in God as creator must serve as common ground. But equally it is not admissible that atheists insist that such a belief in God as creator be ruled out in advance. Consider now an issue of substance. Baggini's article 1 requires those occupying his putative common ground to affirm that "to be religious is primarily to assent to a set of values, and/or practise a way of life, and/or belong to a community that shares these values and/or practices" and that "creeds" are secondary at best. But no one who wishes in any way to stand within historic Christianity could possibly assent to that reductionist assertion. Admittedly, Christians have sometimes been overly preoccupied with defending creedal assertions at the expense of communal practice. But to imply that an insistence that creeds are essential to religion is to be "hanging on to outmoded doctrines" is crassly pre-emptive. It will simply ensure that the "believers" who huddle together with Baggini on his supposed common ground are all rather like the theologian Don Cupitt, who ended up not believing in anything resembling a Christian God, and whom the atheist philosopher AJ Ayer, in a famous television debate invited (I paraphrase) to "come clean and admit you are on our side". Baggini wants a form of religion that is the "benign, unsuperstitious thing that liberals and agnostics have said it is all along". He will have no problem finding adherents to such a form, though they are a diminishing minority. But let's not kid ourselves that the ensuing debate would be of any interest at all to the vast majority of intelligent religious believers today. The first article of common ground I'd like to suggest to him is this: "We acknowledge that both atheistic and theistic beliefs can legitimately claim reasonable epistemic warrant and therefore proceed in debate on the basis of an attitude of mutual intellectual respect for each other's convictions." If he can accept that, then perhaps we can begin to work on article 2. If he can't well, what the heck, let's just start talking anyway.

So our long slide down the slope of civilized savagery proceeds. Agence France Press reports the first public case of a Dutch patient euthanized even though she had never formally requested death or followed the required legal protocols. The woman, identified only as being 64 years old and from the south of Holland, was reportedly killed illegally in a hospital last March. The medical board that approves each act of euthanasia in Holland knew she had never formally asked to have her life ended. It also found she was far too cognitively diminished by Alzheimer’s to make a rational choice in her fate. Still, her killing was excused because some years before she said she wanted to die rather than endure the ravages of the disease’s late stages. Groups favouring medical execution jumped on her death as a happy, progressive precedent. “It’s a message for doctors who often refuse to euthanize patients with advanced dementia because they haven’t expressly demanded it,” said a spokesperson for the Dutch Association for Voluntary End of Life. A clear message, indeed. And not just for doctors. Rather, for anyone who cares about the transformation of health care into killing care. Alas, its alarming note of sophisticated barbarism came too late for a group of Quebec politicians who visited Europe last summer to inquire on the state of the continent’s medicalized-death industry. Four members of the Quebec National Assembly’s special committee on legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide toured the “final exit” wards of Belgium and Holland. The foursome returned home loudly declaring no evidence exists of a “slippery slope” toward a wholesale slaughter of the invalids in the Benelux countries. Maryse Gaudreault, MNA for the riding of Hull and chairman of Quebec’s special committee on legalizing euthanasia, insisted publicly that safeguards in Holland and Belgium are sufficient to prevent abuse. Doctors, Gaudreault said, are strictly limited to killing only those who meet ironclad administrative requirements. Yet even as Quebec’s intrepid euthanasia explorers were packing their bags for their European trip, Dutch doctors were reportedly breaking out the needle and syringe, and brazenly breaking the law, to end a woman’s life. No slippery slope? Well, okay. But then why are so many people sliding into graves before their natural time is up? And that’s just the problem with slippery slopes, isn’t it? By their nature, they are impossible to recognize once we’re on them because the very act of getting onto them is an exercise in denial. We’ll take only the first step. We’ll stop sliding soon. We really haven’t slid that far. This is where we meant to be all along. There never was a top of the slope anyway. Such denial is particularly seductive in our age of immense material comfort when almost every detail of life is upholstered, cushioned, wrapped in the velour of the smooth, the warm and the easy. It’s all protection against the wrenching dislocation of cause from effect, which is the necessary condition for the civilized savagery in which we now exist. The great British writer, G. K. Chesterton, argued in his book The Everlasting Man against the thesis that civilization emerged from savagery (or barbarism). No, Chesterton said, savagery (barbarism) and civilization have always existed in the world, and in the human heart, in parallel, like the front and back planes of a slope. History, he argued, is the movement back and forth between the two conditions, an oscillation rather than an evolution. We must never forget that Chesterton’s message was one of everlasting hope. Yet we seem, in the 86 years since The Everlasting Man was published, to have slid civilization and savagery ever closer together until the two are almost one. In conditions of immense material splendour, we deal out death with zeal to rival the cannibals, headhunters and human sacrificers of yesteryear. The difference is that our death needles slide into arms neatly and cleanly. Our machines of suffocation simply go silent and no screams sound. Our clear plastic suction tubes bear the corpse’s blood away before it can stain the ground. Most profoundly of all, our language has acquired an elasticity that not only denies cause and effect but makes appreciation of it impossible. How, for example, can we possibly appreciate what we are doing by deliberately injecting a 64-year-old Alzheimer’s patient with fatal drugs when, in our new language, killing is caring, assisted suicide is free will and death is just another consumer desire? There is, we are assured, no slippery slope. And down we go, sliding all the way.

The recent appointment of the Ontario College of Trades’ board of governors has drawn mixed reaction from the construction industry and renewed concerns about the new entity for some. Karen Renkema, Ontario Road Builders’ Association Director of Government Relations, said there’s still concern over the transparency and accountability of the College and said there isn’t a lot of information being shared with stakeholders. ... the recent report by Hamilton-based think-tank Cardus, called College of Trades: An Impossible Institution, expressed “very real” concerns about the structure of the College and its ability to properly function and serve the industry. The OGCA will bring the report to the new minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, Glen Murray. Read the whole news story on Cardus' College of Trades report, here.

Among the great joys of my life were the dinner conversations shared with my father. They swirled in a world of politics, philosophy, theology, western aspiration/alienation, the meaning of change and the precious nature of useful tradition. Not everyone was as fascinated by the profundity of our thinking as we were, of course, but I miss their ebb, their flow, their depth and, yes, their provocation. Dad died two years ago, and while I remain lonely for his voice, except when I hear it in mine, that which he imbued in me—a fascination with the vitality of the public square—has only quickened. I'd like to think the same wonder flows yet in the veins of my children who, while their views may diverge dramatically, share in the common life of a family. The branches of that family stretch from coast to coast and across the Atlantic whence they all once came. Most of its members could speak for years on the issues that fascinated my father and me and never agree on a single point. Most would probably just as soon not speak of them at all. They vote in different ways, have a variety of views on God and see the country and the world through multiple windows of perception. But, when they gather as they did this summer for two family weddings, their differences are set aside (or at least tolerated) because they share a common life and love. Societies are founded in the common life of a family, formed between mother and child in the womb and nurtured ever forward. The bonds become looser and more strained as their borders expand from the private, nuclear unit and that, in turn, demands the cultivation of the common ground that is vital to a healthy public square. This is why the new Cardus periodical publication Convivium (faith in our common life), is so vital to the sustenance—some would say resuscitation—of the conversations that hold us together. Its publisher is a friend and former colleague, Peter Stockland, a past editor of Reader's Digest, editor-in-chief of the Montreal Gazette and (surely the most distinguished item on his resume) former editorial page editor of the Calgary Herald. Its editor is Bishop Carroll graduate Father Raymond de Souza, who manages to maintain a single persona despite multiple roles as economist, Kingston-area parish priest, Roman Catholic chaplain at Queen's University and regular columnist for the National Post. Its aspiration is to be a useful vehicle in the restoration of a rich public square in which all perspectives—including those based in faith—feel welcome and engage in reasoned and persuasive debate. As Father de Souza said recently at an event in Calgary, once we lose faith in our common life, all we have left is fundamentalism. And fundamentalism in all its manifestations—religious, ideological and secular—has nothing to offer to debate. It eschews reason and persuasion in its definition to force itself onto others. It is, if you catch my drift, an unhelpful and extreme resolution to the tension between freedoms and order that is the hallmark of mature, stable liberal democracies. Convivium (a place of conviviality such as the dinner table once shared with Dad) clearly has its feet founded in the Roman Catholic philosophical tradition, and over the years, Stockland and de Souza have established their pedigree. Asking if Stockland is inclined to a conservative view is, it must be said, very much a "is the Pope Catholic?" kind of question. Yet both men are aware through their histories and through the nature of the Convivium project itself that polemic requires the enrichment of diversity. Thus were their pluralistic aspirations laid bare with the inclusion in their premier edition of Bill Blaikie's lament for the social gospel movement that once so inspired the Canadian left. "Actions...are very rarely rooted in a spontaneous idea," says Cardus president Michael Van Pelt. "Most often they're rooted in ideas that have been bandied about for many years. Poetry is written about them. Debates rage in the pub over them. And then suddenly, they're done. But the conversation came first. We want Convivium to be a place where that conversation takes place in Canada." It is, for now, unlikely that this project will make the custodians of these and other similar pages tremble, but it may inspire. Its aim is to revive the public nature of intellectual traditions that were once the meat and drink of our discourse. There is little evidence, based on its initial edition, that it will do anything less.

Pope Benedict may or may not bless the Occupy Wall Street movement. But an Eastern European former Marxist atheist intellectual has told protesters that they should really preoccupy themselves with the Holy Spirit. Leading up to November’s G20 economic meeting in France, and as the Occupy Wall Street movement entered its second month, media whoop-whoop made it sound like Benedict’s arrival at the barricades was imminent. The story turned out to be a torque job so clumsy it would make an apprentice mechanic at Dollar Bill’s Easy Autos blush. Upon release of a document by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace calling for changes in regulation of global financial markets, Cardinal Peter Kodowo Appiah Turkson was asked if the Vatican is aligning itself with the protest that began Sept. 17 in New York and has spread to other cities, including Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Montreal. The cardinal prudently replied that all people have every right to demand business be done differently, and the right applies as much on Wall Street as anywhere. No Benedict. No barricades. Naturally, reporters rushed to file stories claiming that what wasn’t said was actually what was said. It was left to their audiences to conclude, yet again, that truth is an infinitely variable concept in the journalistic mind. Still, there was a positive to the predictable media inflation-deflation cycle. It awakened some reporters to Benedict’s 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate, which articulates the very model of economic justice that the naïve and incoherent OWS mobs gurgle to express. To the extent the Holy Father remotely “blessed” the occupation movement, he did so two years before it was even born and, by extension, through Catholic social teaching dating back to Rerum Novarum in May, 1891. Such prudential distancing was a laudable contrast to camera- mongering celebrities who showed up hoping to get shine time for their “person-of-the-people” personas. Among them, of course, was moviemaker Michael Moore, that roly-poly panjandrum of pseudo-populist poppycock. Moore styles himself a documentary maker. His work relates to documented truth as a man on a train relates to the lights of a prairie town at night. There’s the same sliding recognition of something passing by outside, and then the dark again. Being a mere passerby did not dampen Moore’s urge to speak for #OWS, as the movement was immediately twitterized. He happily appeared on TV interviews in the United States and Britain championing the cause about which, as with his films, it turned out he knew little. Pressed by an interviewer on how the occupiers would replace capitalism, Moore blinked like an owl in an optometrist’s chair and elucidated: “Capitalism is evil. It has to be ended.” Well, that clears things up. Actually, it fell to the Slovenian academic and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek to clarify what the OWS movement should be, which might be very different from what it might be. Zizek is a rock star philosopher. Not just a rock star given to “philosophizing” like U2’s Bono, but a renowned academic philosopher who is also the clown prince of social media. In one YouTube clip, he verbally spanks some privileged Western vegans for their “decadence” in refusing to eat meat. In another, he meditates on the cultural significance of the direction toilet water drains in different parts of the world. In his serious writing, he is an atheist obsessed with understanding St. Paul. Speaking to OWS protesters in New York, Zizek warned against turning their days occupying Wall Street into down payments on nostalgia. “Carnivals come cheap,” he said, challenging them to take seriously the serious work they have begun. Then he put that work in a religious, indeed explicitly Christian, frame. “The conservative fundamentalists who claim they are ‘really’ Americans have to be reminded of something: What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the Holy Spirit is here now, and down there on Wall Street are bankers who are worshipping blasphemous idols.” Who knows when a public intellectual of Zizek’s stature last used such language at a protest rally? Yet his words will hang in the air — at least until Pope Benedict really brings his blessing to the barricades.

A few years ago, the city updated its City Centre Plan, foreseeing as many as 70,000 more people living in the city core. The think-tank, Cardus, thankfully read the report and noticed that places of worship were completely ignored in the report except with regard to conservation of heritage sites. So, it's important for us to have this debate. Read the rest of the article here.

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