Hopewit

Peace on 9th Street, 2014 “Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt.” “Colourful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe.” “We [the religious authority] gave you strict orders not to teach in this [Jesus’] name," he said. “Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us guilty of this man's blood.” Peter and the other apostles replied: “We must obey God rather than human beings!” -Acts 5:28 & 29 Anabaptism’s history is laced with stories of civil disobedience. Even when certain torture and death would be the consequence, early Anabaptists refused to recant, refused to bow to civil/church authority’s demanding that their children be bapti...

The news this weekend was partly about the firing of Don Cherry and the termination of “Coach’s Corner” on Hockey Night in Canada . Then on Sunday here in Saskatchewan, it was primarily about the Western Final of the Canadian Football League , and in the evening, the sad rationalizations of the Roughriders’ loss to the Bombers. That’s a lot of sports for one weekend and for Rider fans and “Coach’s Corner” aficionados, not a happy one, apparently. Although I’m far from being an expert on professional sports, on how games are played and how the fact of hockey, basketball, football, baseball, curling fit into our culture in Canada, I’m apparently entitled to an opinion (at least if supporters of Cherry are right). I have questions of all those who are boldly arguing the meaning of Cherry’s firing or the Riders’ failure to defeat the Bombers . One: What is the basis of fan loyalty to professional sports teams and personalities? It seems logical to me that peop...

     Peace Sunday is a day near Remembrance Day when we are meant to join with others in contemplating the meaning of peace , thereby adding weight and commitment to what we’ve long recognized via the beatitudes to be our vocation under Christ . . . i.e. to be peace makers .  It’s hardly necessary to reiterate on this day that “war is bad, peace is good.” That’s already a given. Some would invoke the word evil to describe human war-mongering, but that would be making the age-old mistake of attributing the motivation-to- kill to an outside personality (most commonly known as the (d)evil). Both war and peace are birthed, nurtured and die in the arena of human consciousness. Peace Sunday as observed in the Christian Church has potential to do more than remind us that the human species has the capacity for enormous atrocity. It should be able to do more than urge us to be more tolerant, more patient, more attentive to each others’ needs, thereby givi...

Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die . . .  “ Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.” ― H.L. Mencken “ Our freedoms are vanishing. If you do not get active to take a stand now against all that is wrong while we still can, then maybe one of your children may elect to do so in the future, when it will be far riskier — and much, much harder.” ― Suzy Kassem The experience of what’s called an election is still fresh in our minds. Simplified, it’s a population’s opportunity to choose the candidates that will represent them in the nation’s governance body for the next four years. But it can’t really be that purely defined, can it? Candidates are not just our representatives, they owe allegiance to parties that engage in a variety of tactics making the entire process resemble a sports tournament more than a thoughtful, communal process for choosing the best managers of those affairs we citizens ho...