When my son was born, my Danish sister-in-law gave him a book of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. We have cherished it for eleven years, now. When he was smaller, we would read from it together at bedtime. Nowadays, he’s consuming more challenging books on his own — the Giver, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Land of Stories, etc. But his book of fairy tales from his Aunty Tine sits on his shelf, still loved. Maybe one day he’ll pass… Read more
My dad built me a treehouse when I was a kid. It wasn’t actually in a tree but stood on four sturdy posts over the sandbox he also made for me. My friends and I loved our hidden clubhouse. You could tightly squeeze maybe five kids in there if they were all small. This tiny hut on stilts in the far corner of my backyard served as many things. It was a post-office once, and the birch tree leaves scattered… Read more
So there’s this Catholic rag… Aleteia they call it. Y’all know how I feel about the Catholic Church and defenders of it, so I don’t approach new posts on Aleteia very charitably. A while back I was emailed this one: Why I cannot go back to being an atheist by Melinda Selmys and I thought to myself before reading any of it, that the answer to why this person can’t go back to being an atheist is likely because they became convinced a god… Read more
With the news, recently, that Nxivm’s leader, Keith Rainier has been found guilty of racketeering, sex trafficking and child pornography, I thought we could talk about cults. In my research, I was truly floored at just how many strange cults are out there, still drawing people in and promising them spiritual salvation. People are so absolutely desperate in their desire for some sort of meaning to their own lives that’s “out of this world” that they’ll literally buy anything. The… Read more
Sundown in the Paris of the prairies Wheat kings have all treasures buried And all you hear are the rusty breezes Pushing around the weathervane Jesus Deep in the Canadian winter, in 1969, a woman’s body was found, lifeless in a snowbank in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She had been raped and brutally murdered. Gail Miller was a nursing student. She was only twenty years old. At the time, three teenaged friends had just arrived in Saskatoon from Regina, after making plans to drive across… Read more
Mormons are great people. At least, the ones I’ve met are, with very few exceptions. As you might recall, I worked for a prominent Mormon businessman at one point in time, and I got to know some of his family and many of his fellow church members. They were all, for the most part, perfectly lovely people. Not only did they seem to have huge hearts, but they were also givers, and they left their faith at the door. I… Read more
I can’t stand condescending adults. You know the sort… the ones who talk to you like you’re five years old even though you might even be twice as old as them? It’s that tone, that waitress tone, “How are the first few bites tasting, here?” said like she’s operating a feathered puppet to coax a toddler into sharing his Lego Buzz Lightyear. That grating tone that adults usually reserve for small children. I don’t know what it is about me,… Read more
I started watching season three of the Handmaid’s Tale the other night, and it felt different from every other season. Of course, when I read the book as a teen, my brain wandered into a cloud of what-ifs? Could this sort of thing happen post-feminism? Is it something that should genuinely worry me? I concluded that Margaret Atwood was just an exceptional writer who knew how to highlight the weak spots in our civilization. I felt like she was posing… Read more
There once was a little girl who lived in Ontario, Canada. Makayla. She was just eleven years old when she was diagnosed with leukaemia. As horrifying as this diagnosis sounds, doctors were quite hopeful that the girl would survive, giving her a seventy-five per cent chance of beating the disease. As prescribed, the young girl underwent eleven weeks of chemotherapy. Unfortunately, her treatment stopped there. You see, Makayla belonged to the New Credit First Nation and was brought up to… Read more
Content Warning: Violent crime. When detectives arrived at the grisly crime scene just off the Las Vegas strip on July 8th, 2001, they found the body of a man that had been brutally murdered and left behind a dumpster. The victim, later identified as a homeless man from St. Louis named Duran Bailey, had suffered a multitude of injuries, not the least of which was having his genitals severed and tossed aside the dumpster. He had teeth knocked out, a cracked… Read more
