Advent: The ‘Prophets’ Candle’ has been lit

The first candle of Advent, lit around the world yesterday, symbolizes hope. It is sometimes called the “Prophets’ Candle” or “Prophecy Candle” in remembrance of the prophets, especially Isaiah, who foretold the birth of Christ. It represents the expectation felt in anticipation of the coming Messiah.

During Advent we are summoned to recall the history of God’s people and reflect on how the prophecies and promises of the Old Testament in the Bible were fulfilled by the birth of Jesus Christ. The Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke opt for Bethlehem, while Saint Mark and Saint John seem to lean more toward Nazareth as the birthplace of Christ.

As for the year, month or day of Jesus’ birth, you can likely rule out Dec. 25 for either of the latter two but perhaps settle on sometime between 7BC and 4BC for the year. Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, published in November 2012, wrote  Jesus was born several years earlier than commonly believed because the entire Christian calendar is based on a miscalculation by a sixth century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus, or in English, Dennis the Small.

Advent is the beginning of the Western liturgical year and commenced on Sunday, Nov. 27 this year, running through Christmas Eve.

In the Advent Wreath, the Prophets’ Candle symbolizes hope; the Bethlehem Candle symbolizes faith; the Shepherd’s Candle symbolizes joy and the Angel’s Candle symbolizes peace.

“The historical origins of Advent are hard to determine with great precision,” Father William Saunders, former dean of the Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College in Alexandria, Virginia, has written. “In its earliest form, beginning in France, Advent was a period of preparation for the Feast of the Epiphany, a day when converts were baptized; so the Advent preparation was very similar to Lent with an emphasis on prayer and fasting which lasted three weeks and later was expanded to 40 days.

“In 380, the local Council of Saragossa, Spain, established a three-week fast before Epiphany. Inspired by the Lenten regulations, the local Council of Macon, France, in 581 designated that from Nov. 11 (the Feast of St. Martin of Tours) until Christmas fasting would be required on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Eventually, similar practices spread to England. In Rome, the Advent preparation did not appear until the sixth century, and was viewed as a preparation for Christmas with less of a penitential bent.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

Spanish Flu on the cusp of no longer being the reference point for modern pandemic plague

Some 18 months after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus COVID-19 to be a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, the world stands on the cusp of it replacing the Spanish Flu influenza pandemic of January 1918 to December 1920 as the reference point – the benchmark, as it were – for measuring modern pandemic plague. That will occur very shortly as the United States crosses the threshold of 675,000 COVID-19 deaths in what is now the novel coronavirus’ fourth wave there; a toll that will then exceed that of the Spanish Flu of a century ago in America.

All pretty remarkable, since the name COVID-19 didn’t exist prior to Feb. 11, 2020 when the World Health Organization named what had been provisionally known as Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCoV and first reported from Wuhan, China on Dec. 31, 2019. COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

It is important to note the “in America” qualification. As Laura Spinney writes in her very timely 2017 book, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, our picture of the Spanish Flu pandemic, beginning in the waning last months of the First World War, just over a 100 years ago, is very much a reflection of the North American and European influenza pandemic perspective and experience, rather than that of say, India, South Africa or Iran, although the Spanish Flu, named not for its country of origin but rather because wartime press censorship was more relaxed in neutral Spain than either the Central Powers or Allied Powers in 1918, allowing for more early news coverage of the illness, which within months swept the world, much like COVID-19.

While some 675,000 Americans died over three years between January 1918 and December 1920 during the three waves of the Spanish Flu pandemic, the country’s population was 103.2 million. Today, the population of the United States is more than 331 million. The world population in 1918 was about 1.8 billion, compared to about 7.8 billion people today.

Also, while global death toll estimates for the Spanish Flu pandemic are speculative to some extent, it is generally accepted it killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people worldwide. COVID-19’s global death toll stands at about 4.7 million.


There are, of course, all kinds of similarities – and differences – between COVID-19 and the Spanish Flu pandemic: They are not the same type of virus; the former is a coronavirus, the latter an influenza virus. But compulsory masking as a public health-driven non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) has been similarly divisive in societies in both pandemics.

The rolling real time daily death count on the online COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore functions as our equivalent of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock,” circa 1947, and the clock itself, set at 100 seconds before midnight last Jan. 27, is being profoundly influenced by COVID-19.

“Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet,” writes John Mecklin, the editor-in-chief. “The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 13 Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains.”

The Center for Systems Science and Engineering, in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University’s Latrobe Hall in Baltimore, launched its a tracking map website with an online dashboard for tracking the worldwide spread of what was then known as the Wuhan coronavirus (2019-nCoV) as it appeared to be spreading around the globe in real-time in January 2020.

Lauren Gardner, a civil engineering professor and CSSE’s co-director, spearheaded the effort to launch the mapping website. The site displays statistics about deaths and confirmed cases of COVID-19 across a worldwide map.

“We built this dashboard because we think it is important for the public to have an understanding of the outbreak situation as it unfolds with transparent data sources,” Gardner said when Hopkins launches it last year. “For the research community, this data will become more valuable as we continue to collect it over time.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Hamilton Tiger-Cats lose, but there may be polyextremophiles in Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression, if not the Dallol crater itself

Naturally, surrounded as I was by Winnipeg Blue Bombers fans in Thompson, Manitoba yesterday, and my contrarian chosen Hamilton Tiger-Cats already sadly declawed early in the second quarter, before a national television audience no less, the conversation turned to Ethiopian lakes and nearby locales that hold no life. OK, the analogy may not be quite perfect but close enough, and what else is one to do in a roomful of Westerners who think of places like Toronto and Hamilton as “down east”?

Turns out, while the Dallol crater and its so-called Black and Yellow lakes, located in the Ethiopian Danakil Depression, may not support life, other parts of the larger Danakil do. Or not. Take note Ticats fans.

The Danakil Depression is located more than 100 metres below sea level in a volcanic area in northwest Ethiopia, close to the border with Eritrea, aptly named “Afar.” It is part of the East African Rift System, a place where the Earth’s internal forces are currently tearing apart three continental plates, creating new land, and it is arguably the hottest place on the planet, and one of the driest. Researchers in the field contend with sweltering heat, toxic hydrogen sulphide gas, and chlorine vapour that will burn their airways and choke their lungs without gas masks.

Picking up an article from the Madrid-based Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology, the London-based Institute of Physics (IOP) on its physics.org website reported Nov. 22 that “Scientists find a place on Earth where there is no life.” The lede notes: “Living beings, especially micro-organisms, have a surprising ability to adapt to the most extreme environments on Earth, but there are still places where they cannot live. European researchers have confirmed the absence of microbial life in hot, saline, hyper-acid ponds in the Dallol geothermal field in Ethiopia.”

The article goes on to explain the “infernal landscape of Dallol, located in the Ethiopian depression of Danakil, extends over a volcanic crater full of salt, where toxic gases emanate and water boils in the midst of intense hydro-thermal activity. It is one of the most torrid environments on Earth. There, daily temperatures in winter can exceed 45 degrees Celsius and there are abundant hyper-saline and hyper-acid pools with pH values that are even negative” (https://phys.org/news/2019-11-scientists-earth-life.html).

“A recent study, published this year, reports that certain micro-organisms can develop in this multi-extreme environment (simultaneously very hot, saline and acid), which has led its authors to present this place as an example of the limits that life can support, and even to propose it as a terrestrial analogue of early Mars.

“However, a French-Spanish team of scientists led by biologist Purificación Lopez Garcia of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) has now published an article in Nature Ecology & Evolution that concludes otherwise. According to these researchers, there is no life in Dallol’s multi-extreme ponds.”

Lopez Garcia says, “After analyzing many more samples than in previous works, with adequate controls so as not to contaminate them and a well-calibrated methodology, we have verified that there’s no microbial life in these salty, hot and hyper-acid pools or in the adjacent magnesium-rich brine lakes. What does exist is a great diversity of halophilic archaea (a type of primitive salt-loving micro-organism) in the desert and the saline canyons around the hydro-thermal site, but neither is found in the hyper-acid and hyper-saline pools themselves, nor in the so-called Black and Yellow lakes of Dallol, where magnesium abounds. And all this despite the fact that microbial dispersion in this area, due to the wind and to human visitors, is in Thermaltense.”

Jasmin Fox-Skelly, a freelance science writer based in Cardiff, took a somewhat more upbeat approach a couple of years ago, but one based on older data, in her Aug. 4, 2017 piece “In Earth’s hottest place, life has been found in pure acid,” for BBC Future, which describes it website as “something different” in “a complex, fast-paced world of soundbites, knee-jerk opinions and information overload.” BBC Future says it provides a “home for slowing down, delving deep and shifting perspectives” on “almost every topic that matters.”

“In a surreal landscape of colours, dominated by luminescent ponds of yellows and greens, boiling hot water bubbles up like a cauldron, whilst poisonous chlorine and sulphur gases choke the air,” Fox-Skelly’s story opens. “Known as the ‘gateway to hell’, the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia is scorchingly hot and one of the most alien places on Earth. Yet a recent expedition to the region has found it is teeming with life” (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170803-in-earths-hottest-place-life-has-been-found-in-pure-acid).

Fox-Skelly reported that Barbara Cavalazzi from the University of Bologna in Italy, part of a team conducting scientific expeditions in the area since 2013, found life in the Danakil Depression in March 2017, “after they managed to isolate and extract DNA from bacteria. They found that the bacteria are ‘polyextremophiles,” which means they are adapted to extreme acidity, high temperatures and high salinity all at once. It is the first absolute confirmation of microbial life in the Danakil acidic pools.”

So Spanish research? French research? Or Italian research? Life or no life (or some life) in the Danakil Depression?

You know, the sort of questions Hamilton Tiger-Cats fans were asking in their own ways for their applied football science research in Calgary yesterday, while the results were becoming demonstrably obvious on the field on each series of plays.

Science.

When I observed some of the Hamilton players appeared cold, someone helpfully suggested it was probably because the Ticats offence had been idling on the sidelines for so much of the game, and the Winnipeg defensive squad was likely in a similar predicament, even if not visibly showing it, Prairie stoicism and all.

You can also follow me on Twitter at:https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

Ryan Land leaves Vale after 8½ years to ‘pursue the next chapter in my career story’

Ryan Land has left Vale after 8½ years.

Land joined Vale, becoming manager of corporate affairs for Manitoba Operations, on May 9, 2011. He spent most of his time with the Brazilian mining giant working in Thompson, with his role growing to include managing organizational design and human resources. He was transferred to Sudbury, Ont. 14½ months ago in September 2018 for an expanded role with Vale as manager of corporate and indigenous affairs for Ontario and Manitoba.

He has also served as chair of the aboriginal relations committee of the Mining Association of Manitoba since April 2013, and as a member of the aboriginal affairs committee of the Ottawa-based Mining Association of Canada since October 2018. He has been a member of the aboriginal relations committee of the Ontario Mining Association since October 2018. As well, Land has been a member of the Manitoba liaison committee on mining and exploration since last June.

Land arrived in Thompson originally in August 2009 to become principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate.

In a public Facebook posting Nov. 14, Land says,”I am officially leaving Vale to pursue the next chapter of my career! I am taking this step without knowing what (or even where – though our first choice is Sudbury as we are thoroughly enjoying it here and the kids are thriving) is next. Even though it was time for a change, it is bittersweet for sure as I am so grateful for the opportunities, challenges and growth that Vale afforded me. I’ve worked with amazing people and from the beginning the company (and a key leader or two – they know who they are!) took a chance on me and allowed me to influence outcomes, innovate and become a champion for the success of others. No regrets, and also no idea what’s next. Yikes!”

Land ends his brief post by wryly quipping, “Another of my favourite quotes is by Emily Dickinson who said ‘The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.’ Soul ajar. Hopefully the ecstatic experience covers the mortgage!”

Land posted a similar public message on LinkedIn last week to his one on Facebook.

“As some of you already know, I have left Vale to pursue the next chapter in my career story,” Land wrote. “The move from educational leader to corporate affairs at a mining company was an enriching, challenging and ultimately rewarding career pivot and I am so very grateful for having had the opportunity. I worked with, for and alongside so many remarkable people and the last (nearly) 9 years provided me with a real chance to grow, stretch, collaborate, influence outcomes, build meaningful relationships and work on being a champion for the success of my colleagues, our stakeholders and rights-holders, and the communities we work in and near. Importantly, it afforded me a real chance to deepen my understanding of truth and reconciliation, and my responsibility within it.

“I am not in a rush, but I feel like excited about what might be next. We have grown to love Sudbury and the region and we’d love to stay, but I’m anxious to invest myself as a servant leader in a great organization and I appreciate that the best opportunity may not be close to our current home. I’d love to hear about possibilities and ideas you have for me, so please message me if you have advice, coaching or suggestions.”

His wife, Carmilla Land, has been a registered nurse since 2016.

A number of Land’s former Vale colleagues posted their well-wishes on LinkedIn in response to his departure from the company.

Patti Pegues, mine planning manager for Vale North Atlantic, wrote, “Best of luck Ryan. It has been a real pleasure working with you.”

Said Anuj Agarwal, manager of mines and technical standards, North Atlantic at Vale Canada: “You will be missed. It was a pleasure to know you and work alongside you.”

Whether it is a local day trip travel fall colour adventure to Onaping Falls, near Sudbury, or an international summer jaunt from San Sebastián to Tuscany to Prague to Brussels, Land is well known to friends and colleagues as a bon vivant, who immensely enjoys adventuresome travel, sampling fine local cuisine wherever he lands, and a suitable craft brew to complement the rest.

Before becoming principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate in August 2009, Land had spent the previous academic year in West Africa as principal of the Canadian Independent College of Ghana in Accra, a Canadian university preparatory co-ed college day and boarding school. The Canadian Independent College of Ghana is a licensed sister campus to the Canadian Independent College (CIC), a co-ed university preparatory college, formerly known as the North Wilmot School, which opened in 1964 and is located in Baden, Ontario. It is a member of the Council of Advanced Placement Schools in Ontario.

Land completed one year of a five-year contract in Ghana, but, as was allowed in his contract, resigned from the position for family-related reasons.

Aside from Accra and Thompson, Land was a teacher and eventually a principal in schools in a number of communities, including a Dené community, Leicester in England, rural Saskatchewan, and Steinbach and Winnipeg in Manitoba. He has a masters degree in educational leadership and undergraduate bachelor degrees in education and the arts.

On April 27, 2010 trustees from the School District of Mystery Lake took the extraordinary step of publicly rebuking Land during a board meeting and announced that his probationary status as principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate which would normally be one year in duration, was being extended another year after a unanimous vote by the board of trustees, who had considered the option of terminating Land’s employment, but ultimately decided not to.

Trustees then twice in identical 5-2 splits on Feb. 22 and April 5, 2011, voted to remove him as probationary principal.

Then in mid-June 2011, trustees subsequently fired Land for cause – four months after they had removed him as probationary principal. At a trustees meeting the day before graduation, former superintendent Bev Hammond provided details of an investigation she said she had conducted, which she said found that students had had marks changed without doing remedial work, responsibility for which she later laid at the feet of Land in an interview with the Thompson Citizen. Hammond’s marks-changing investigation focused only on the years that Land was principal.

A year later, the saga, which generated strong feelings and emotions, with plenty of both pro and anti-Land sentiment, and national media coverage, ended when the school board and Land reached a deal, resulting in an arbitration hearing that had been set to begin June 18, 2012, being cancelled. Both Land and the SDML withdrew all claims against each other and ended litigation between the parties.

Land offered his resignation to the SDML June 14, 2012, effective Nov. 18, 2011. The school board accepted Land’s resignation and rescinded his termination.

Two years later, in what supporters saw as a rich case of poetic justice, Land would run for a trustee’s seat in the October 2014 municipal election for school board, where he not only won a seat, but was the top vote-getter among all candidates picking up 2,177 votes.

In between working for the School District of Mystery Lake and Vale, Land worked out of Thompson briefly in the run-up to the 2011 federal election campaign for then Elections Canada assistant returning officer Lou Morissette as a training officer looking after all the inland training for the polls.  A bit earlier, Land had been offered the position of part-time vice-principal of Hapnot Collegiate in Flin Flon, but turned it down, trustee Glenn Smith, chair of the Flin Flon School Division board of trustees, told the Flin Flon Reminder at the time.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

‘A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius’: Friday, Oct. 3, 2008

 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

“The first weekend of October 2008 was a point when people at the top of the global financial system genuinely thought, in the words of George W. Bush, ‘This sucker could go down,’” writes John Lanchester in his compelling July 5 essay  “After the Fall” in the London Review of Books. Lanchester, a brilliant economics writer, has also worked as a football reporter, obituary writer, book editor, restaurant critic, and deputy editor of the London Review of Books, where he is now a contributing editor. He was born in Hamburg, brought up in Hong Kong and educated in England. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS)  “at one point the biggest bank in the world according to the size of its balance sheet, was within hours of collapsing,” he writes. “And by collapsing I mean cashpoint machines would have stopped working, and insolvencies would have spread from RBS to other banks – and no one alive knows what that would have looked like or how it would have ended.”

Lanchester’s essay brought back a flood of memories for me from that surreal time almost a decade ago. By happenstance, I was travelling both times in that 2½-week period when the global economy came within a hairbreadth of seizing up in an unprecedented credit crunch.

At 1:45 a.m. on Sept. 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection following a mass exodus of most of its clients, drastic losses in its stock, and devaluation of its assets by credit rating agencies. Lehman’s bankruptcy filing remains the largest in U.S. history.

The name Lehman Brothers  would soon become shorthand for one thing – and one thing only: the collapse of the investment bank triggered the financial meltdown that resulted in the Great Recession, the most financially cataclysmic event since the decade of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1939.

I had watched the beginning of the unravelling Sept. 14 with the overnight Asian financial markets on the Sunday night before driving with Jeanette a few hours later from Thompson, Manitoba to Winnipeg the morning of Monday, Sept. 15. She was working that week in Winnipeg; I was tagging along with her on a week’s vacation at the Place Louis Riel Hotel.

In a spectacular stroke of good fortune, about 1,250 United Steelworkers Local 6166 workers in Thompson, Manitoba inked a new three-year collective agreement with Vale, the Brazilian mining giant, on Sept. 15, 2008 – the very day Lehman Brothers collapsed. The tentative deal had been reached three days earlier on Sept. 12. Workers voted 65.5 per cent in favour of the contract, which included wage increases in each year of the agreement consistent with their previous contract, and pension improvements.

Thompson, Manitoba, in fact, remained for some time one of the premier economic outliers in North America, part of a shrinking circle that in the autumn of 2008 still included Manitoba and Saskatchewan, North Dakota and some of the high-plains Texas Panhandle. The anomaly of the good times rolling on here in Thompson, along with our neighbours in North Dakota and Saskatchewan, made the Great Recession almost everywhere else in the world seem surreal at first.

On Sept. 15-16, 2008, the failures of massive financial institutions in the United States began, due primarily to exposure of securities of packaged subprime loans and credit default swaps issued to insure these loans and their issuers, rapidly devolving into a global economic crisis resulting in a number of bank failures in the United States and Europe and sharp reductions in the value of stocks and commodities worldwide.

The failure of banks in Iceland resulted in a devaluation of the Icelandic króna and threatened the government with bankruptcy. In the United States, 15 banks failed in 2008, while several others were rescued through government intervention or acquisitions by other banks.

Eighteen days after the failure of Lehman Brothers – Friday, Oct. 3. 2008 – Jeanette and me were in the air, this time abroad an Air Canada flight from Winnipeg to Toronto, where we had a scheduled layover for several hours, before continuing on a short-hop flight from Toronto to Kingston’s Norman Rogers Airport, where we were to pick up a rental car to travel to nearby Wellington for Jeanette to compete in the PEC half-marathon on Sunday, Oct. 5. This would be the weekend, as Lanchester writes in his essay, “when people at the top of the global financial system genuinely thought, in the words of George W. Bush, ‘This sucker could go down.’”  The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS)  “at one point the biggest bank in the world according to the size of its balance sheet, was within hours of collapsing,” as he notes, “And by collapsing I mean cashpoint machines would have stopped working, and insolvencies would have spread from RBS to other banks – and no one alive knows what that would have looked like or how it would have ended.”

Says Lanchester: “No one had ever lived through, and no one thought possible, a situation where all the credit simultaneously disappeared from everywhere and the entire system teetered on the brink.”

After arriving in Toronto mid-morning Oct. 3, 2008 on our flight from Winnipeg, as we sat in the pre-boarding area waiting for several hours to depart for Kingston, scores of travellers, myself included, sat with our eyes alternately glued to television screens and the airplanes out on the tarmac of Pearson International Airport. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 1.5 per cent that Friday and 7.3 per cent for the week. On a point basis, the Dow lost 818 points for the week, its biggest weekly point loss in seven years and the third biggest weekly loss ever.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index lost 1.4 per cent on the Friday and 9.4 per cent for the week. On a point basis, the S&P lost 114 points, the worst weekly point loss in seven years and the third biggest weekly loss ever.

The Nasdaq composite lost 1.5% that Friday and 10.8 per cent for the week. The 10.8 per cent decline was the worst in seven years and fifth worst ever.

As I sat there that Friday morning almost 10 years ago now at Pearson, the possibility that there might be no money that day in the system to re-fuel the planes out on the tarmac, and a full ground stop, this time not terror-related but due to financial implosion, was every bit as likely as the ATMs ceasing to dispense cash, was no longer hypothetical or abstract. It was, as we sensed then, and know with certainty now, imminent. That’s how close a call it was. And would continue to be for five very scary months, from early October 2008 through early March 2009, as the world economy was in free fall. Terms such as deleveraging, subprime mortgage, London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), derivatives, credit default swap and bailout became part of our everyday vocabulary.

On Nov. 26, 2008, in an editorial for the Thompson Citizen, I wrote that “America may face financial tests such as of not been felt since the Great Depression. The words of Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his first inaugural address of March 4, 1933 ring as true today as they did some 75 years ago: ‘This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.'”

Bloomberg L.P., one of the world’s leading English-language financial news services, based in New York City, ran a remarkable story in January 2009, totalling up single-day job losses worldwide. “At least 21,000 jobs were targeted for elimination yesterday as employers from Hertz Global Holdings Inc. to Advanced Micro Devices Inc. grappled with recession-choked demand,” was how the story opened. “More than 20 companies said they were cutting jobs, ranging from Amonil SA, Romania’s second-biggest fertilizer maker, to Fiat SpA’s Magneti Marelli auto-parts division. Hertz, the second-largest U.S. rental-car company, said it will cut more than 4,000 jobs, as businesses and consumers slow travel because of the global recession.”

General Motors shares hit a low of $1.40 in morning trading March 6, 2009, marking their lowest point since May 23, 1933, reported the Center for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a 12-year low of 6,547.05 on March 9, 2009 – its lowest close since April 1997, and had lost 20 per cent of its value in only six weeks.

More recently, some Wall Street analysts have pondered the mystery of what appears to be seven-year economic cycles tied to shemitah years. And wondered why crashes often seem to come in September and October. Shemitahs, also spelled as shmitas, are grounded in the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel and still observed in contemporary Judaism. Back beyond the five great economic crashes of the last 44 years in 1973, 1980, 1987, 2001 and 2008, during the Great Depression, a solar eclipse took place almost 87 years ago on Sept. 12, 1931 – the end of a shemitah year. Eight days later, England abandoned the gold standard, setting off further market crashes and bank failures around the world. It also heralded in the greatest month-long stock market crash calculated on a percentage basis in Wall Street history.

In the months just ahead, we will mark those days of trial and tribulation a decade ago, when the world stood on the precipice of financial ruin, a victim of investment bankers’ inestimable hubris. A cautionary tale? Probably not. “The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones: the sycamores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars,” wrote Isaiah, the 8th-century B.C. Jewish prophet for whom the Book of Isaiah is named.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

  

Only historical amnesia prevents us from remembering 1938

It was the age of demagoguery in American politics. And, no, it wasn’t the 2016 Republican Party primaries and caucuses. It was the year 1938.

In an age-before-Trump, you need only to look back to the 1930s and the Canadian-born “Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin, from Hamilton, Ontario, later based at Royal Oak, Michigan in the Archdiocese of Detroit, and the anti-Communist and equally anti-Semitic Christian Front he would be the inspiration for in November 1938, although he didn’t personally belong to the organization, and denied that he was anti-Semitic. Historical opinion is divided on whether, or to what extent, Coughlin was anti-Semitic, but it is an uncontested fact his weekly magazine Social Justice reprinted in weekly installments in 1938 the fraudulent and notoriously anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery first published in 1903 that purports to expose a Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world.

Coughlin’s radio show was phenomenally popular. His office received up to 80,000 letters per week from listeners at its peak in the early to mid-1930s. By 1934, Coughlin was the most prominent Roman Catholic speaker on political and financial issues in the United States, with a far broader base of popular support than any bishop or cardinal at the time, with a radio audience that reached tens of millions of people every week. Historian Alan Brinkley wrote in his 1982 book Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression that by 1934 Coughlin  was receiving more than 10,000 letters every day” and that “his clerical staff at times numbered more than a hundred.”  Coughlin foreshadowed modern talk radio and televangelism.

In addition to his anti-Communist stance, and leaving himself open rightly or wrongly to accusations of antisemitism, Coughlin wasn’t the only clergyman to at least also flirt and even dance at times with Spanish fascism, German National Socialism and demagoguery in the United States in the late 1930s. American Protestant clergyman Frank Buchman founded Moral Re-Armament (MRA) in 1938, as an international moral and spiritual movement with Europe rearming militarily on the brink of the Second World War. “The crisis is fundamentally a moral one,” he said. “The nations must rearm morally,” Buchman said in London on May 29, 1938. “Moral recovery is essentially the forerunner of economic recovery. Moral recovery creates not crisis but confidence and unity in every phase of life.”

Buchman had earlier also founded the Oxford Group, in some important ways the predecessor to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Both the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament, under Buchman’s leadership, faced similar charges to what Coughlin did at times; and again, like in the case of Coughlin, historical opinion is divided, but on the evidence it is clear the German Nazi leadership was wary of Buchman and denounced Moral Re-Armament, which went onto do significant post-war reconstruction work in West Germany in the late 1940s, after the Second World War ended.

We barely know their names today, yet Coughlin had tens of millions of radio listeners in the United States, while Buchman influenced political elites worldwide.

And the legacy of Moral Re-Armament, close to home here in Northern Manitoba, is not insignificant. Just largely invisible.

Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas Archbishop emeritus Sylvain Lavoie, whose archdiocese includes Thompson, toured during university for seven months with “Up with People,” founded by American J. Blanton Belk in 1965, as a conservative counterweight to attract young people during the turbulent Sixties.

Belk was expected to be the heir apparent to Peter D. Howard, a British journalist, who succeeded Buchman as leader of Moral Re-Armament in 1961, but Belk broke away to incorporate Up With People as a non-profit at the encouragement of then Republican U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, who urged Belk to distance himself from Moral Re-Armament.

And Winnipeg-born Bob Lowery, for years the Winnipeg Free Press’ Thompson-based correspondent, in a life before journalism and living in Northern Manitoba, and immediately after the Second World War ended in 1945, had joined the Moral Re-Armament crusade to help rebuild war-torn Germany, staying there for more than 20 years until 1969.

During the Second World War he had served with the Royal Canadian Voluntary Reserve. Lowery had earned a philosophy undergraduate degree from the University of Manitoba in 1937.

Robert Newton Lowery was inducted by then governor general Roméo LeBlanc as a Member of the Order of Canada in 1996. In the citation accompanying the honour, LeBlanc noted Lowery was “known for his love of the North and has demonstrated genuine concern for the residents of northern Manitoba, working to redress social, economic and cultural differences through his involvement in all aspects of community life.”

In 1997 he was recognized with a Silver Eagle Outstanding Citizen Award from the Indigenous Women’s Collective of Manitoba. A park is also named after him here in Thompson.

He had moved to northern Manitoba in 1969, the same year he left Moral Re-Armament in West Germany, and become a correspondent for the Winnipeg Free Press, based here in Thompson.

In 1982 Lowery published the book The Unbeatable Breed: People and Events of Northern Manitoba in collaboration with photographer Murray McKenzie.

Lowery retired in 1997. He died at Norway House on Dec. 17, 2000.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Des Moines Register and PBS’ Frontline use Virtual Reality (VR) in news stories as journalism moves beyond Augmented Reality (AR) to fully ‘immersive’ storytelling

A year ago, I posted a piece here on newspapers beginning to embrace Augmented Reality (AR), technology making use of the camera and sensor in your smartphone or tablet to add layers of digital information – videos, photos, and sounds – directly on top of items in your newspaper.

Vancouver-based GVIC Communications Corp., which operates as the Glacier Media Group and owns the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News here in Northern Manitoba, launched Augmented Reality for editorial and advertisements throughout its Lower Mainland media properties in British Columbia in February 2013, teaming up with Dutch businessman Quintin Schevernels’ innovative Layar application, which can be downloaded on your iOS or Android smartphone or tablet. The Winnipeg Free Press also launched its own Augmented Reality (AR) in September 2014 with Blippar, a British first image-recognition smartphone app.

Revisiting the scene a year later, journalism is moving beyond Augmented Reality (AR) and finally to true immersive or Virtual Reality (VR), a tantalizing dream of sci-fi aficionados since the 1950s at least. Remember Virtual Reality (VR), the computer-simulated environment that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world or imagined worlds? Sure you do. Or at least one derivation of it known as simulated reality, as long your virtual memory goes back as far as Sept. 28, 1987 and “Encounter at Farpoint,” the pilot episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation, written by D.C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry, and the first appearance of the Holographic Environment Simulator, better known simply as the “holodeck.”

Data, who was fond of Sherlock Holmes, loved it and in later episodes would often play the 221B Baker Street detective in holodeck programs, often accompanied by Geordi La Forge in the role of Dr. Watson. Prior to the late 24th century, Federation starships were not equipped with holodecks. In 2151, the Starfleet vessel Enterprise NX-01 encountered a vessel belonging to an alien race known as Xyrillians, who had advanced holographic technology in the form of a holographic chamber similar to the holodeck, which Starfleet developed two centuries later. A holo-chamber was also later installed aboard a Klingon battle cruiser, given to the Klingons by the Xyrillians in exchange for their lives.

Here in the 21st century, most current virtual reality environments are primarily visual experiences, displayed either on a computer screen or through special stereoscopic displays, but some simulations include additional sensory information, such as sound through speakers or headphones.

Some advanced, haptic systems now include tactile information, generally known as force feedback, in medical and gaming applications. As for the origin of the term “virtual reality,” it can be traced back to the French playwright, poet, actor, and director Antonin Artaud and his 1938 book The Theatre and Its Double, where he described theatre as “la réalité virtuelle.”

While newspapers have added a lot of bells and whistles to our various online “platforms” in recent years, they’re not quite at the Holographic Environment Simulator or holodeck reality. Yet. But consider this. In its first Virtual Reality documentary last May, PBS’ Frontline, in an 11-minute immersive effort by filmmaker Dan Edge, took its viewers to the spot under a tree in West Africa, believed to be where the world’s most recent Ebola virus outbreak began in late 2013. The film launched on Google Cardboard, a virtual-reality system that requires an Android smartphone and a simple cardboard viewer. The hand-held box holds a smartphone before the viewer’s eyes. An app presents 360-degree environments, explored as viewers move eyes and heads to explore their surroundings. Frontline collaborated with Secret Location and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University to produce Ebola Outbreak.

Meanwhile,in Santa Monica, California, Nonny de la Peña and her company Emblematic Group are working on a Virtual Reality project for the Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix car race in which not only one, but two “players can experience what it’s like to be in the pit crew and race each other.

De la Peña’s been dubbed the “godmother of Virtual Reality.” She began her journalism career in print and was a correspondent for Newsweek in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but left the news magazine because it didn’t allow her to use the visuals she imagined for a story. For a time, she worked as a documentary filmmaker.

She discovered Virtual Reality through a pair of VR goggles during a trip to Barcelona. “Once I saw that experience, I couldn’t put people out there again,” she told Andreana Young, an editorial assistant at Editor & Publisher magazine, for an Oct. 1 story. “I want to bring them inside the story.” de la Peña said.

Her first Virtual Reality project, called “Hunger in Los Angeles,” illustrated what it’s like to go hungry in Los Angeles, and premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

She worked on the project with Palmer Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift headset. Last year, Luckey sold his Virtual Reality platform to Facebook for $2 billion.

Young put on a pair of Emblematic’s VR goggles for her story for a scene from Kiya, a collaborative story between Emblematic Group and Al-Jazeera America. “I stood near a woman on the phone with 911, who was telling the operator her sister, Kiya, was inside the house with her ex-boyfriend. He wouldn’t let her leave and he had a gun,” Young wrote.

“I was able to turn 360-degrees … observing the neighborhood around me. The scene changed, and I was suddenly standing inside the house where Kiya was being held hostage by her ex-boyfriend. I searched the home with my eyes; when I turned around images of baby furniture and a “Family Forever” decal hanging on the wall struck me as I listened to Kiya’s sisters begging her to leave with them.”

Kiya relied heavily on real-life audio recordings obtained from the scene, including 911 calls, and cellphone audio and video recordings and recordings from interviews that provided accounts of what took place.

Virtual Reality creates what developers call a “duality of presence” allowing the viewer to feel like they’re right there in the story, and that can have a greater impact than simply watching video or reading words on a page.

Devices such as Google Cardboard and the Samsung Gear VR have created opportunities for anyone with a smartphone to experience Virtual Reality. By placing a phone with a downloaded VR app onto the front of the device, viewers can watch Virtual Reality content right on their smartphone. On Amazon.com, a Google Cardboard kit costs less than $20. Even a 360-degree Ricoh Theta camera can be purchased for $400.

In September 2014, the Des Moines Register was one of the first newspapers to incorporate Virtual Reality into one of their news stories with its “Harvest of Change” project illustrating the life of today’s American farmer using satellite map imagery, photographs of the farm, the Unity 3D gaming engine, 360-degree video, coders and game designers.

The Associated Press recently announced a new Virtual Reality project called “The Suite Life,” an immersive experience through the Samsung Gear VR headset in which viewers can explore luxury hotel suites.

You can also follow me on Twitter at:https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

‘The sycamores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars’: Most recent shemitah year ended Sept. 13

Another shemitah year has come and gone. And the world as we know it has … well, it has carried on pretty much as before. Shemitah years, also spelled as shmita, have ancient roots dating back 3,000 years and are grounded in the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel and still observed in contemporary Judaism. During a shemitah year, the land is left to lie fallow.

More recently, some Wall Street analysts have pondered the mystery of what appears to be seven-year economic cycles tied to shemitah years. And wondered why crashes often seem to come in September and October. While we’re only halfway through that two-month period and the financial sky has yet to exactly fall, investors had a brief scare in August when China’s currency, known as the yuan or renminbi, fell in value more than it did in the previous two decades.

The Shanghai Composite Index tumbled 8.5 on Aug. 24 – erasing the last of its gains for the year in its biggest single-day loss since 2007.  The Shanghai Composite Index has plummeted nearly 40 percent since hitting a peak earlier this year.

Within minutes after the opening bell Aug. 24, the Dow Jones plummeted 1,089 points, the largest point loss ever during a trading day, surpassing the trillion-dollar “Flash Crash” of May 6, 2010,  which started at 2:32 p.m. EDT and lasted for approximately 36 minutes, sending the Dow down 998.5 points, its biggest intra-day trading drop until Monday. The Dow closed down 588 points Aug. 24, the worst one-day for the Dow since August 2011.

Brent crude, the benchmark for oil prices worldwide, closed Aug. 24 at $42.80 a barrel, its lowest close since March 11, 2009. Oil prices tumbled more than five per cent Aug. 24, with U.S. light crude closing at $38.24 a barrel, its lowest close February 2009. The week of Aug. 16-22 marked oil prices’ longest weekly losing streak since 1986. Today, Brent Crude LCOc1, the key indicator for global crude prices, was selling for $47.34 a barrel; meaning there has been no significant recovery in price over the last month or so, nor is any expected anytime soon.

And while the Shanghai Composite Index and China have been making most of the bad-news financial headlines of late, consider this:

• The Dow Jones Industrial Average all-time closing high was 18,312.39, set on May 19.  The Dow closed at 16,001.89 today, down 2,310.5 points from its peak 4½ months ago;
• British stocks are down about 16 percent from the peak of the market;
• French stocks have declined nearly 18 percent;
• Italian stocks are already down 15 percent.

Jonathan Cahn is a New Jersey-born messianic Jewish rabbi, meaning he accepts Jesus Christ as the messiah, and is best known for his book The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery That Holds the Secret of America’s Future, in which he compares the United States and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on America to the destruction of ancient Israel. He started Railroad Avenue Hope of the World Ministries in Lodi, New Jersey in 1988 as “an end-time ministry for an end-time world,” describing it as being devoted to “giving out the Word of God to all peoples – to fulfill the Biblical mandate and Great Commission of God – to bring salvation to the Jew, to the Gentile, and to all unreached peoples of every land.”

In his sequel to The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery That Holds the Secret of America’s Future, called The Mystery of the Shemitah: The 3,000-Year-Old Mystery That Holds the Secret of America’s Future, the World’s Future, and Your Future!, Cahn argued that the five great economic crashes of the last 40 years – 1973, 1980, 1987, 2001 and 2008 – all occurred in shemitah years. The book rocketed to become an instant bestseller, listed at number eight overall on Amazon.com, and number one in Amazon’s Christian prophecies section.

Cahn argued if the Shemitah was not observed by the people, it would become a curse, as described later in Leviticus Chapter 25 in the Bible’s Old Testament. That’s what happened, Cahn said in 586 B.C., a shemitah year, when the First Temple in Jerusalem fell and the Jews of the Kingdom of Judah went into captivity in Babylon for 70 years. The year following the destruction of the rebuilt Second Temple on the original site of Solomon’s Temple in 70 A.D. was the first year of the seven-year sabbatical cycle. In the Jewish calendar, counting from creation, this was year 3829. By counting sevens from then the next shemitah year will be the year 5775 after creation, which runs from Sept. 25, 2014 through Sept. 13, 2015.

Deuteronomy, another Old Testament book, says in Chapter 15, “At the end of every seven years you shall grant a remission of debts. “This is the manner of remission: every creditor shall release what he has loaned to his neighbor; he shall not exact it of his neighbor and his brother, because the Lord’s remission has been proclaimed…” Before you decide to stiff the bank on your October mortgage payment, it might well be worth noting it is not a carte blanche release apparently, as the same chapter in Deuteronomy also says, “You may collect from the alien, but if you have any claim against your brother for a debt, you must relinquish it….”

Cahn said shemitah can have several meanings. It can mean a “release” – and in ancient Israel debts were canceled and land returned to its original owners,

But it can also mean “to fall, to collapse, to shake,” he said.

Back beyond the five great economic crashes of the last 40 years in 1973, 1980, 1987, 2001 and 2008, during the Great Depression, a solar eclipse took place 83 years ago on Sept. 12, 1931 – the end of a shemitah year. Eight days later, England abandoned the gold standard, setting off further market crashes and bank failures around the world. It also heralded in the greatest month-long stock market crash calculated on a percentage basis in Wall Street history.

But Cahn was guarded and careful not to predict what would happen in the recently completed shemitah year.

“The phenomenon may manifest in one cycle and not in another and then again in the next,” he wrote. “And the focus of the message is not date-setting but the call of God to repentance and return. At the same time, something of significance could take place, and it is wise to note the times.”

Cahn also noted the fact that 2014 and 2015 are marked by a series of blood moons – a pattern that began on Passover 2014 and will conclude on the Feast of Tabernacles in 2015. There was one last night, accompanied by a full lunar eclipse.

April 15, 2014 marked the first Blood Moon of the 21st century. In astronomical terms, the total lunar eclipse on April 15, 2014 was the 56th eclipse of the Saros 122 series, a series that began on Aug. 14, 1022 and is composed of 74 lunar eclipses in the following sequence: 22 penumbral, eight partial, 28 total, seven partial, and nine penumbral eclipses. The last eclipse of the series is on Oct. 29, 2338.

Blood moon is a term of more religious than astronomical significance. In the Old Testament Book of Joel, Chapter 2, verse 31, the minor prophet says: “And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.”

In Bible prophecy, this is always first and foremost about Israel and the Middle East, and what, if anything, such portents hold. The April 2014 and April 2015 total lunar eclipses align with the Jewish Feast of Passover. The October 2014 and September 2015 total lunar eclipses aligned with the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles. Yori Yanover, writing in the Brooklyn, New York-based Jewish Press Oct. 6, 2013 observed, “The prophecy in Joel, like most prophecies, is surreal, beautiful, and open to many interpretations.” But he also notes that two of these Blood Moons will “shine over the Passover seder” on April 15, 2014 and April 4, 2015. “Whenever this happened in the past, enormous events took place in Jewish history.”

The tetrad phenomenon of a string of four Blood Moons, partially or completely eclipsed, last occurred twice in the 20th century – and both times on the night of the Passover seder in 1949-50 and 1967-68. The first came after the establishment of the State of Israel, which resulted in Israel officially taking a seat at the United Nations on Nov. 5, 1949, while the latter occurred after the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel re-captured the Old City that included the Temple Mount for the first time since 70 AD.

The last Blood Moons tetrad before the 20th century was in 1493-94 – a year after the Christian expulsion of Jews from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Catholic monarchs.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Michael Coren leaves the Roman Catholic Church – again

The Catholic blogosphere has been all atwitter in recent days over the defection of one of its highest profile Conservative writers, Canadian pundit Michael Coren, who was received on Sunday, April 19 into the Anglican Communion; to wit at the Cathedral Church of St. James on Church Street in Toronto, greeted outside by Rev. Canon Susan Bell, an honorary assistant at the cathedral and canon missioner for the Diocese of Toronto. St. James Cathedral is both a parish church ministering to the historic St. Lawrence neighbourhood and a cathedral church.

Coren, 56, was born in England and raised in a secular home, which he has described as “semi-culturally Jewish.” He says he became a Christian in 1984 and was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1985 when he was 26. His wife, Bernadette, and four children are Catholic. They met in Toronto at a Chesterton conference held in 1986 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the death of the legendary Catholic apologist – and perhaps someday saint – Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton. Coren moved to Canada from Britain in 1987.

“I could not remain in a church that effectively excluded gay people,” Coren told Joseph Brean of Toronto’s National Post newspaper in a May 1 story headlined,”‘I felt a hypocrite’: Author Michael Coren on why he left the Catholic Church for Anglicanism.”  Coren went on to tell Brean, “That’s only one of the reasons, but for someone who had taken the Catholic position on same-sex marriage for so long, I’d never been comfortable with that even though I suppose I was regarded as being a stalwart in that position. But I’d moved on, and I felt a hypocrite. I felt a hypocrite being part of a church that described homosexual relations as being disordered and sinful. I just couldn’t be part of it anymore. I could not do that. I couldn’t look people in the eye and make the argument that is still so central to the Catholic Church, that same-sex attraction is acceptable but to act on it is sinful. I felt that the circle of love had to be broadened, not reduced.”

The Anglican Church of Canada into which Coren has been received is an autonomous national church within the Anglican Communion consisting of over 800,000 members on parish rolls. The Anglican Communion, representing those in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury, derives their forms of worship and the orders of their bishops, priests and deacons from the Reformation settlement in England. Anglicanism worldwide shares a common liturgical and theological tradition, catholic and reformed, which is expressed in local contexts in a wide variety of languages and customs. While each national or regional church within the communion is autonomous, the Archbishop of Canterbury is its spiritual head and the chief sign of its unity.

The first Anglicans in Canada were 16th century English explorers led by Martin Frobisher and his chaplain, the Rev. Robert Wolfall.

The Anglican Church did not become established in Canada, however, until the consecration of Charles Inglis as bishop of Nova Scotia in 1787. The head of the Anglican Church of Canada is the primate – Archbishop Fred Hiltz of the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

Personally, I’ve always found Michael Coren’s politics way too conservative for my taste, and his tone mean-spirited at times, although he showed evidence of mellowing in recent years, even while still a Catholic.

He penned a column on religious bookstores for the long-defunct Idler, a Canadian general interest magazine for intellectuals edited by David Warren, which was sort of a forerunner to The Walrus, for the November-December 1991 issue where he wrote: “The Evangelicals may be intolerant, small-minded, and repellent, but at least they hold a consistent set of beliefs.”

This is also not Coren’s first defection from the Catholic Church. He also left in 1994 to attend several evangelical churches, including Baptist, and also attended Anglican services, after he wrote a June 1993 Toronto Life profile on Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic, then archbishop of Toronto, in which he accurately quoted Ambrozic as using the words “frigging” and “bitch” and calling the late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco “a conservative Roman Catholic and not a bad fellow.”

The Catholic Church “circled its wagons around Ambrozic” and Coren, who had been a Roman Catholic for about eight years, “was deluged with hate mail,” Toronto-based freelancer Ron Csillag, who joined Religion News Service in March 2002 and covers eastern Canada, noted in a Sept. 2, 2011 obituary story on Ambrozic in the Globe and Mail.

Eventually, Coren returned to the Catholic Church and became one of its chief polemicists with the publication of two books, Why Catholics Are Right in 2011, and The Future of Catholicism in 2013.

And now he’s gone. Again. Defected this time to the Anglican Communion.

While I may have found an earlier version of Coren mean-spirited at times and nasty in his conservative tone, much of the reaction in the Catholic blogosphere and media over the last week or so has been even more mean-spirited, nasty and personally vindictive than vintage late 1980s and 1990s Coren.

Michael Voris founder of Saint Michael’s Media in Ferndale, Michigan  a religious apostolate of on-demand video programs, including The Vortex, on the website ChurchMilitant.TV, was vitriolic and boorish, as is his custom, whenever the Catholic Pharisee is indignant and offended, which is pretty much daily. It’s not that Voris is wrong in his Catholic theology; he’s not, at least in the most legalistic sense. But it’s a good thing it was Jesus and not Voris who met the Samaritan woman at the well or wasn’t there when Jesus invited he who was without sin to cast the first stone at the adulterous woman. At best, Voris plays lip service to things like mercy.

Voris, a former third degree member of the Knights of Columbus, who left the fraternal order as a matter of conscience after three years as a knight in 2011 because he said the national or supreme and some state councils were “nothing more than a [insurance] business” with “no real sense of attachment to the teachings of the faith” may not think of himself as being without sin, but he needs no invitation to cast a stone – first, middle or last – anywhere, anytime. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, was metaphorically stoned by Voris not long ago for being grand marshal of New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day parade March 17, a parade in which the OUT@NBCUniversal was allowed to march and publicize its identity, the first time an LGBT advocacy group has been allowed to march in the annual parade.

To be fair to Voris, who is a very smart guy with a Sacrae Theologiae Baccalaureus from the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, or Angelicum, in Rome, some of his criticism of the Knights of Columbus, however stinging, has been right on the money. Such as last month when he went after the Indiana State Council of the Knights of Columbus for refusing to back a resolution:

(1) clearly and publicly declaring support for the teachings of the Catholic Church on marriage as described in the Catechism of the Catholic Church;

(2) adopt and administer a policy consistent with teachings of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to provide councils with guidance as regards the rental of or use of halls and other facilities owned by or affiliated with the Knights of Columbus; and

(3) take all necessary legal steps to defend these policies in accordance with the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Given the options to adopt the resolution, reject the resolution, vote no action on the resolution or refer the matter to Indiana state officers, the knights voted “no action.” The issue arose in late December last year after Knights of Columbus Council #934 in Madison, Indiana backpedaled on  their decision to not rent their hall to two lesbians, Alexandria Marie Shields and Taylor Butcher, for their wedding reception last month (ironically, the same weekend as the Indiana State Knights of Columbus convention).

In addressing Coren’s defection to Anglicanism, Voris had this to say on The Vortex May 5: “Michael Coren … has placed his immortal soul in deep jeopardy by renouncing the Catholic Church and joining a church founded by a man based on divorce and murder. Cut it up and make it attractive in whatever way you want, but that is what has happened here … the so-called worship offered up by King Henry’s church based on divorce and murder is fake worship because there is no Eucharist in that man-made religion.

“He later adds he began reading Anglican theologians. No such thing. There are no theologians outside of the Catholic Church – not legitimate ones, because they do not have the necessary graces to study in Catholic faith the things of God. They have nothing to offer because anything they offer begins with the supposition that the Catholic Church is not established by the Son of God … He says it doesn’t really matter what religion you belong to as long as you have a relationship with Jesus Christ.

“And there it is, perfectly summed up – the whole stinking rotten filth of Protestantism: that the person decides for himself.”

The real stink here is Voris’ tone. It is one thing to be combative and even a bit abrasive in one’s intellectual discourse; it is quite another to be the worst advertisement on Earth for the Catholic Church. Any non-Catholic – and even some practicing Catholics – seeing Voris’ 5:27 rant here at http://www.churchmilitant.com/video/episode/the-vortex-michael-coren, are likely going to wonder why it took Coren so long to leave the Catholic Church again – or why he came back in the first place (the Eucharist is what Coren said on that point).

Carl E. Olson, editor of Catholic World Report, an orthodox Catholic perspective online news magazine, who had been publishing a monthly column by Coren since September 2013, has written a much more measured response, which you can read here: http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/3851/michael_coren_goes_anglican_denounces_catholic_moral_teaching.aspx

Olson grew up in a devout Fundamentalist Protestant home in western Montana. After two years of art school, he attended Briercrest Bible College, an Evangelical Bible college in Saskatchewan, graduating with an associate’s degree in 1991. His wife, Heather, is a graduate of Multnomah Bible College in Portland, Oregon. They married in 1994 and entered the Catholic Church together in 1997.

Olson also later graduated from the University of Dallas, a private Catholic liberal arts school in Irving, Texas with a masters degree in theological studies in 2000.

Olson asks not unreasonably, “How far, then, should the circle of love be broadened? Does it bother Coren that the Catholic Church also considers adultery, polygamy, pornography, and incest to be serious sins? Is he bothered that polygamists and people in incestuous relationships are ‘effectively excluded’ by the Catholic Church? Where does he want to draw the line? And why?”

Olson, and others, including Dorothy Cummings McLean, a columnist for the Catholic Register in Toronto, have quite rightly criticized Coren for clandestinely taking professional Catholic writing and speaking fees for somewhere between a year and a year and a half while making his under-the-radar journey into to the Anglican Communion, long attending services before his formal reception April 19. Point well taken methinks. “As a Roman Catholic in communion with the Holy See, I do not believe that an Anglican – above all a secret one – can  speak authoritatively about ‘the Catholic Church,'” wrote  Cummings McLean in a May 7 article headlined, ” Professional Catholics must be professional and Catholic” found at: http://www.catholicregister.org/opinion/cummingsmclean

Lea Singh in her Culture Witness blog posted at http://leazsingh.blogspot.ca/2015/05/so-long-michael-coren-newest-member-of.html on May 3, “So Michael Coren has become Anglican. Not surprising at this point, considering his about-face in 2014 on the issue of homosexual relationships, but still a sad and disappointing twist in the life story of a man whose words and books inspired many Catholics in Canada and elsewhere.

“In particular, one revelation rather stunned me: that he has been quietly attending the Anglican church for about a year.

“What this really means to me is that Michael Coren knowingly misled his Catholic audience. He continued functioning publicly as a Catholic apologist, writing articles for Catholic publications and circulating on the Catholic speaking circuit, without disclosing this very pertinent bit of information that would surely have given many of his Catholic promoters serious pause. Did Coren see no conflict between his public role as an outspoken Catholic and his Sunday attendance at another church?”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Advent and the Matthean Judgment

The word Advent, as derived from the Latin word adventus, means “coming” or “arrival.” Adventus is in turn the Latin translation of the Greek word parousia, meaning “presence” and commonly used to refer to the Second Coming of Christ.

During Advent we are summoned to recall the history of God’s people and reflect on how the prophecies and promises of the Old Testament in the Bible were fulfilled by the birth of Jesus Christ. The Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke opt for Bethlehem, while Saint Mark and Saint John seem to lean more toward Nazareth as the birthplace of Christ.

As for the year, month or day of Jesus’ birth, you can likely rule out Dec. 25 for either of the latter two but perhaps settle on sometime between 7BC and 4BC for the year. Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, published in November 2012, wrote  Jesus was born several years earlier than commonly believed because the entire Christian calendar is based on a miscalculation by a sixth century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus, or in English, Dennis the Small.

Advent is the beginning of the Western liturgical year and commences on Advent Sunday, Nov. 30 this year, running through Christmas Eve.

In the Advent Wreath, the Prophet’s Candle symbolizes hope; the Bethlehem Candle symbolizes faith; the Shepherd’s Candle symbolizes joy and the Angel’s Candle symbolizes peace.

“The historical origins of Advent,” which began this year Nov. 30, “are hard to determine with great precision,” Father William Saunders, dean of the Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College in Alexandria, Virginia, has written. “In its earliest form, beginning in France, Advent was a period of preparation for the Feast of the Epiphany, a day when converts were baptized; so the Advent preparation was very similar to Lent with an emphasis on prayer and fasting which lasted three weeks and later was expanded to 40 days.

“In 380, the local Council of Saragossa, Spain, established a three-week fast before Epiphany. Inspired by the Lenten regulations, the local Council of Macon, France, in 581 designated that from Nov. 11 (the Feast of St. Martin of Tours) until Christmas fasting would be required on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Eventually, similar practices spread to England. In Rome, the Advent preparation did not appear until the sixth century, and was viewed as a preparation for Christmas with less of a penitential bent.”

The Anglican Church of Canada produces a worthwhile Advent series annually in podcast format.  This year’s effort is called “Sealed in the Same Spirit” and was offered in Edmonton last August by a special delegation from the Episcopal Church of Cuba, and produced by the Anglican Church of Canada. The first brief two-minute-and-34-second podcast can be heard here at http://15e51a4c89abec992ec0-2c07a39145fe51fb75e38d44722ddba4.r44.cf2.rackcdn.com/2014-01.mp3

Also worth another listen to this Advent is “In Days to Come,” the first in a series of six podcasts for last year’s season of Advent, produced by Winnipeg’s Signpost Music and Saint  Benedict’s Table (named after St. Benedict of Nursia, the sixth century Italian monk who founded western monasticism).

The first 2013 Advent episode, again produced for the Anglican Church of Canada, featured  Jamie Howison, an Anglican priest, who is the pastoral leader of Saint Benedict’s Table, talking about the medieval practice of contemplating “the four last things” – death, judgment, hell and heaven, bringing the peace, joy, hope and love of the Advent wreath (borrowed by the rest of us from German Lutherans in the 16th century) into sharper relief in the context of the Matthean Judgment, the name used for the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. You can listen to the episode here: http://6ea032789d8200a5f5e1-53f66bb87b41c0fa2b150aea4f98a852.r94.cf2.rackcdn.com/2013-01.mp3

“Judgment, it would seem,” said Howison, “rides on these very basic human matters of compassion in action as a preacher, I really have to acknowledge the goatiness of my own day-to-day life. Reading this particular parable, I’m not sure I’d fare all that well on the day when the Son of Man comes in his glory.”

Howison, the founding pastor of Saint Benedict’s Table in Winnipeg, is a graduate of the University of Winnipeg and of Trinity College, an Anglican college at the University of  Toronto, and has worked in ordained ministry since 1987, serving in parish ministry, as pastoral care co-ordinator at Marymound – a treatment centre for adolescent girls. Marymound got its starts in April 1911 when five Roman Catholic Sisters of the Good Shepherd came to Winnipeg at the invitation of juvenile court Judge Thomas Daly, who was seeking an alternative to prison for young women and girls he encountered in his court. St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier had founded the Congregation of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Angers, France in 1835. She was canonized a saint on May 2, 1940 by Pope Pius XII.

Howison also has served as chaplain and dean of residence at St. John’s College, an Anglican college on the University of Manitoba campus in Winnipeg. He has ministered full-time with Saint Benedict’s Table since the autumn of 2004.

From 2004 through 2010, Howison served as a member of the Primate’s Theological Commission of the Anglican Church of Canada.  In the winter of 2011, he spent a month as scholar-in-residence at the Burke Library of Union Theological Seminary in New York, the oldest independent, ecumenical, Christian seminary in the United States, and another month as a resident scholar at the Catholic Benedictine Collegeville Institute at St John’s Abbey in  Collegeville,  Minnesota, during which time he wrote on the theological vision of the jazz musician John Coltrane.

Signpost Music, which co-produced the “In Days to Come” Advent podcasts, is the creation of Steve Bell, the 54-year-old Juno-winning singer-songwriter, and his business partner and manager, Dave Zeglinski.

Howison and Bell have also written a fair bit of music together, including “Hear Our Prayer,” off Bell’s 1992 album Deep Calls to Deep.