Migrants and Refugees

An ongoing collaboration between the Rabba Roots community program and Good Shepherd Ministries will see the eighth annual dinner event on Super Bowl Sunday, providing upwards of 100 overnight shelter guests with hot gameday-style meals and a night of sports entertainment. 

St. Mary of Egypt Refuge is embarking on the third year of its commitment to provide comfort and support for survivors of sex trafficking.

Saying the family is the basic building block of society was once a “motherhood and apple pie” sentiment. Motherhood and apple pie, being, of course, a cliché alluding to all that is both normal and good. We need a new cliché. Today motherhood itself is no longer “motherhood and apple pie.” 

I have always been frustrated by moments, especially in political speeches, where half a well-known adage is presented as proof of concept, completely ignoring the original context and the fuller saying. We see this often when someone cherry-picks part of a saying to prove their point but leaves out significant context that might disprove their argument as a whole.

People are curious and beautiful and mysterious. One of the things I love most about humans is our capacity to make meaning. It is endlessly fascinating to me that many people can be in the same room, experiencing the same objective reality and come away with such beautifully different perspectives and subjective understandings of what has happened. We are all living in the stories of our lives, whether we acknowledge them or not. 

Ash Wednesday is on the horizon. While Catholics are getting ashes on our foreheads, much of the rest of the Western world will be buying chocolates and flowers. I don’t remember Ash Wednesday falling on Valentine’s Day previously. Google says the last time was in 1945, a little before my time.

An excerpt from Pope Francis’ message for Lent “Through the Desert God leads us to Freedom.”

Today we are faced with unbelievable violence in the Holy Land. We who follow the nonviolent Jesus can feel only deep pain, and an urgent call to bring an end to the violence both of Hamas and the Israeli government.

The director of the B.C. Aboriginal Network on Disability Society perfectly summarized last week’s delay in extending doctor-delivered death to the mentally ill. “It’s not like a win or anything,” Neil Belanger told Register reporter Anna Farrow.

For Gilda and Carmine Benincasa, their love story began inside a school in their Italian homeland.