It’s 2 a.m. and we’re snoozing into Sunday’s Central Standard Time (CST) in Manitoba

Provincial governments come and go in Manitoba, like elsewhere, but one of things that doesn’t change is my email reminder around this time every year: “Manitoba Municipal and Northern Relations reminds all Manitobans that daylight time will end in Manitoba early Sunday morning when clocks will be set back one hour,” the new NDP government’s Manitoba Municipal and Northern Relations department, presided over by Minister Ian Bushie, cheerily told me yesterday.

“Under the Official Time Act, daylight time ends on the first Sunday in November and resumes the second Sunday in March.

“The official time change back to central standard time will occur this year at 2 a.m., Sunday, Nov. 5 at which time clocks should be set back to 1 a.m.”

So at 2 a.m. in the morrow, we’re snoozing into Sunday’s Central Standard Time, (CST) in Manitoba, with our gratitude renewed for Scottish-born Canadian surveyor, engineer and inventor Sir Sandford Fleming, who we thank profusely for the extra hour of sleep.

While it has been gradually getting darker earlier in the evening since late June here in the Northern Hemisphere, the fact many of us, at least until tomorrow, can still travel home in waning daylight from work or school in the late afternoon in early November is in itself a credit to George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST), a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time.

Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island. Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°”  to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the  Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

It is Fleming, however, who deserves most of the credit for both the international dateline, and standard time zones, conveniently divided into hourly segments, dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead. As for the international date line, it is an imaginary line at the 180º line of longitude that runs from the South Pole to the North Pole separating two consecutive calendar days.

It was Hipparchus of Nicea, a Greek mathematician and astronomer, who around 150 BCE, proposed a global grid of longitude and latitude lines to measure position. It was a coordinate system for locating points on the surface of a sphere. The vertical axis measured “latitude,” and the horizontal axis “longitude.”

Immediately to the left of the international date line the date in the Eastern Hemisphere is always one day ahead of the date (or day) immediately to the right of the international date line in the Western Hemisphere. There is no regulatory body or agency that can say “yes” or “no” if a country wants to switch sides. The country simply lets the international community and mapmakers know. It is not a perfectly straight line, however, and has been moved slightly over the years to accommodate needs of varied countries in the Pacific Ocean. The Midway Islands are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) -11, and the Marshall Islands are in UTC+12. The two group of islands, on different sides of the international date line, share the same day and date for the last hour of the day. Samoa, which happens to sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, east of the international date line, went directly from Thursday – on Dec. 29, 2011 – to Saturday, Dec. 31 – without a Friday, Dec. 30. Talk about being anxious to party on New Year’s Eve!

Kiribati, north of Samoa and near the equator, south of Hawaii, previously straddled the dateline. The eastern part of Kiribati was a whole day and two hours behind the western part of the country where its capital is located and a time difference of 23 hours between neighbouring islands. There were nine islands on the eastern side of the international date line, and 20 per cent of the population. On Jan. 1, 1995 it added an eastward extension to its section of the dateline so all 33 of its islands would have the same date and all of Kiribati would be in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Since 1892, when Samoa had two Monday, July 4ths, it had been east of the international date line until Dec. 29, 2011, after switching sides to coincide its days better with trading partners in the United States and Europe. Now, Samoa does a lot more business with New Zealand, Australia, China and Pacific Rim countries such as Singapore, so it switched back to the western side of the international date line.

After missing a train in 1876 in Ireland because its printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m., Fleming proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world with 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time. Usually. China, however, has just one time zone, which makes the time zone uncommonly wide. In the extreme western part of China the sun is at its highest point at 3 p.m. and in the extreme eastern part at 11 a.m. In 1912, the year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China had created five time zones in the country, ranging from five and a half to eight and a half hours past Greenwich Mean Time. But in 1949, as the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that all of China use Beijing time.

Fleming was born on Jan. 7, 1827 in the town of Kirkcaldy in the lieutenancy area of Fife on the east coast of Scotland. He emigrated to Canada in 1845, settling in Peterborough in southeastern Ontario.

This year, as we shift back to Standard Time from Daylight Saving Time at 2 a.m. tomorrow, which means an extra hour of slumber for many, but also causes me to ponder the potential complications of moving the clock back an hour and repeating the hour from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. What happens when the clock jumps backward at 2 a.m. again to 1 a.m. for the second time that night and then repeats the hour? Would you have official log chronologies showing 1:13 a.m., 1:37 a.m., 1:56 a.m., 1:03 a.m. and 1:12 a.m. with the later two actually coming after the first three because they came after the clock fell back an hour? How would you distinguish which came first if need be, if someone needed to inspect the log months later (add the annotation 1:13 a.m. CDT or 1:03 a.m. CST?)

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Douglas explained to me years ago that “in a handwritten log the hour of ambiguity to which you refer can be simply resolved by appending the time zone (e.g. CST or CDT) to potentially ambiguous entries … e.g. “01:32 CDT” for the first pass through the hour of ambiguity and “1:32 CST” during the second pass.

“By explicitly writing the time zone as part of the time entry,” Douglas added, “you also bypass the time acts’ defaults for official time – as you might wish to do if you are making agreements across a time zone boundary where there is the possibility of geographic ambiguity of time zone.

“The above procedure is very clear in Canada, but unfortunately less so in the USA,” said Douglas. “We in Canada can refer to ‘official’ or ‘legal’ time, which can alternate between being a ‘Standard Time’ or being a ‘Daylight Time.’ In the USA, to allow regulation by the federal government, both ‘Standard Time’ and ‘Daylight Time’ must be considered a ‘standard’ to avoid having time changes be a state responsibility under the residual powers clause of their constitution. If you think you may have to deal with the American ambiguity, it may be worthwhile to include an explanatory note in the log, such as ‘CST is defined as UTC-6h, and CDT is defined as UTC-5h.’

“If the times are being logged in a permanent logbook, with entries in chronological order for a fixed reckoning of time (i.e. in the absence of clock adjustments), then a simple way of removing the ambiguity is to include in the appropriate place in the log an entry such as “02:00 CDT – log’s clock changed from CDT to CST – 01:00 CST.

“If the log is a computer log, by using the operating system’s timestamps (for example as the time recorded for a file’s modification) the problem disappears since these timestamps are recorded as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC – the modern version of Greenwich Mean Time) which is never subjected to Standard/Daylight changes. The operating system re-interprets these timestamps into its version of the correct local time in effect for the particular UTC timestamp, and this re-interpretation may unfortunately still be expressed ambiguously, but the underlying UTC timestamp can be used to resolve any ambiguity about time zones and Daylight/Standard time.”

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Your best life: Life in Christian cinema is often a game of Friday night high school football

 

The problem with sports being a metaphor for life is not that the claim is inaccurate: sports truly is a metaphor for life. The problem is the terrain of what constitutes a metaphor for life is a vast landscape. Within sports, virtually everything can and is described as being a metaphor for life.

When it comes to comparing values and ideals taken from sports and applied cinematically to life, I have a fondness for golf and high school and college football movies. While I don’t play golf (at least not yet) I did play a bit of high school football some many decades ago.

There’s strong evidence that sport strongly reinforces certain personal characteristics such as responsibility, courage, teamwork, mental focus, persistence, humility, commitment and self-discipline.

While there are all kinds of things that can rightly divide secular moviemaking from films made by Christian genre movie producers, high school football is the game field they both play, often scoring box office touchdowns on. Perhaps in no small part because Friday night high school football is in some ways best thought of as a secular religion south of the Mason Dixon Line. High school football teams usually play between eight and 10 games in a season, starting after Labor Day. If teams have successful league seasons, they advance to regional or state playoff tournaments. Some schools in Texas play as many as 15 games if they advance to the state championship game. Most high school teams play in a regional league, although some travel 50 to 100 miles to play opponents.

Among my favourite golf movies are Tin Cup from 1996, starring Kevin Costner and Rene Russo; The Legend of Bagger Vance, with Will Smith, Matt Damon and Charlize Theron, released in 2000; and Seven Days in Utopia, released in 2011, starring Robert Duvall and Lucas Black, based on the book Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia by Dr. David Lamar Cook, a psychologist who lives in the Hill Country of Texas, where the book and movie are set.

As for American high school football movies, Ranker, the social consumer web platform launched in August 2009, designed around collaborative linked datasets, individual list-making and voting, which attracts 20 million unique visitors per month, in fact, has a category simply called “The Best High School Football Movies.”

Ranked number one is Friday Night Lights the 2004 film directed by Peter Berg, which documents the coach and players of the 1988 season Permian High School Panthers football team in Odessa, Texas and their run for the state championship, based on the 1990 book, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger. The film won the Best Sports Movie ESPY Award.

Number two on Ranker’s list is Remember the Titans, made in 2000, and based on the true story of African-American coach Herman Boone, portrayed by Denzel Washington as he tries to introduce a racially diverse team at recently but voluntarily integrated T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia in 1971. It was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

In 2006, Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who are both associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, made Facing the Giants, their second Sherwood Pictures movie, about high school football and resilient faith. While the movie is admired and often still shown 11 years after it was made at Christian church movie nights, secular cinema critics have been less effusive in their praise.  Still, two scenes stand out for me, and are widely available on YouTube. The first is lineman and Shiloh Eagles team captain Brock Kelley’s 100-plus yard blindfolded “Death Crawl” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sUKoKQlEC4) with his 160-pound teammate Jeremy Johnson on his back, and soccer kicker turned placekicker David Childers’ 51-yard game-winning field goal in the Eagle’s 24-23 victory over the Richmond Giants (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uCj5_a3nbw).

When the Game Stands Tall was released in 2014. It stars Jim Caviezel, best known for portraying Jesus in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, here playing Catholic De La Salle High School Spartans’ football coach Bob Ladouceur (with Laura Dern as his wife, Bev Ladouceur), and telling the story of what comes after the record-setting 151-game 1992–2003 winning streak by De La Salle, a Catholic boys’ high school in Concord, California, just east of San Francisco. The movie is an adaptation of the 2003 book of the same name by Neil Hayes, then a columnist with the Contra Costa Times.  The movie was filmed in Louisiana.

Released a year later in 2015 is Woodlawn is also a true story and in some ways a faith-based version of Remember the Titans, although Woodlawn is set slightly later (two years) and is situated in at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1973, a decade after Birmingham had Bull Connor as commissioner of public safety in 1961 when the civil rights “Freedom Riders” bused to the South, and where on Sept. 15, 1963 a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church, with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured.

Woodlawn opens with a prologue set three years earlier on Sept. 12, 1970 where legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the Crimson Tide’s iconic fedora-wearing legend, well played by Jon Voight, tries to ease tensions by inviting John McKay and his University of Southern California (USC) Trojans team to play at Legion Field in Birmingham, marking the first time a fully integrated team had come to play Alabama in the South. The Crimson Tide had one black player at the time. The game was a 42-21 Trojans rout.

Cut to three years later, when Woodlawn High School becomes integrated, with football coach Tandy Gerelds, played by Nic Bishop, welcoming the arrival of such talented black players as Tony Nathan, played by Caleb Castille.

Hank Erwin, played by Sean Astin, just sort of shows up at Woodlawn High School, introducing himself as a “sports chaplain” and asking to address the team. Tandy Gerelds reluctantly agrees. In his impassioned speech Hank asks the players to “choose Jesus” and, much to the coach’s amazement, most of the players agree, including Tony Nathan, who would go onto become a tailback for Alabama and later the Miami Dolphins. Erwin’s sons, Birmingham brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin, directed Woodlawn.

To understand the somewhat enigmatic self-proclaimed sports chaplain Hank Erwin, it is helpful to know something of the “Jesus movement,” which began on the west coast of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, spreading primarily throughout North America, Europe, and Central America. Members of the movement were often called “Jesus people,” or “Jesus freaks.”

Its predecessor, the charismatic movement, had already been in full swing for about a decade. It involved mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics who testified to supernatural experiences similar to those recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, especially speaking in tongues. Both these movements were calling the church back to what they called early Christianity and recovery of the gifts of the Spirit.

TIME magazine had a 1966 cover asking “Is God Dead?” They had another cover story in 1971 on “The Jesus Revolution.” And just one year later, in June 1972, more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative and Billy Graham, now 98, and the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it. And Hank Erwin was there for it.

The dramatic tension on and off the field is elevated by events such as Nathan refusing to shake Alabama governor George Wallace’s hand during an awards dinner, citing Wallace’s opposition to school integration, and Tandy getting in trouble with the local school board because of the team’s religious activities, including Hank Erwin getting the microphone plug pulled while delivering the Lord’s Prayer before the history-making 1973 game that attracted 42,000 spectators (another 20,000 were turned away), only to have the thousands of spectators spontaneously recite it for him.

Peter J. Leithart, a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and is president of the Theopolis Institute, wrote in a review in September 2015, after an advance screening of the film in Birmingham, in the Catholic journal First Things that “the acting is good, especially Jon Voight as Bear Bryant, Nic Bishop as Woodlawn’s coach, Tandy Gerelds, and Caleb Castille who plays Nathan in his first film. Technically, evangelical films have come a long way.”

Caleb Castille was originally hired as a stunt double for the British actor who was picked to play Tony Nathan, but visa complications left the Erwins scrambling to find a last-minute replacement. Only then did they discover Caleb’s audition tape.

Caleb Castille won two national championship rings with the University of Alabama before he sensed God was calling him out of football to pursue an acting career instead. His father, Jeremiah Castille, played with Tony Nathan on the 1979 Alabama Crimson Tide national championship team.

Still, Leithart was left dissatisfied by Woodlawn. “I think there are a number of reasons for that dissatisfaction, but at base the problem is theological (ain’t it always).

“Evangelicalism is a word religion. I’m a big fan of words, but even talking pictures aren’t fundamentally about words. It’s no accident that the hall of fame for directors has a large share of Catholics (Fellini, Hitchcock, Scorsese), Orthodox (Tarkovsky, Eisenstein), and sacramental Protestants (Bergman, Malick). This can’t be the whole story, of course, since aniconic Judaism has produced some of the world’s great filmmakers. But there’s something to it: Evangelical films over-explain, over-talk. They don’t trust the images to do the work.

“I suspect a more sacramentally oriented evangelicalism, an evangelicalism more attuned to types and symbols in scripture, would make better films.

“Evangelicalism is also a conversionist faith. The key crisis of life is the moment of commitment to Christ. In Woodlawn, most of the characters convert early in the film, necessarily so because the story is about the effect of the revival on race relations. But that means that the line of character development is flat. The really crucial character development has taken place in the moment of conversion. The main exception is Coach Gerelds, and not surprisingly, it’s Coach Gerelds who ends up being the dramatic focus of the film, the character whose emotions and motivations we get to know best.

“Theologically speaking, character development is ‘sanctification.’ A conversionist form of Christianity places less emphasis on sanctification than on conversion and justification. In films, that translates into drastic oversimplification of human psychology. For evangelicals, there are only two sets of motivations, as there are two kinds of people: Saved and unsaved. While that is ultimately true, it is not the whole story.”

Woodlawn, distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment, owned by David. A.R. White, raised in a small Mennonite farming town outside of Dodge City, Kansas, brothers Kevin and Bobby Downes, and Michael Scott, did impressively better perhaps with the very secular Rotten Tomatoes, which is by no means always kind to either evangelical or high school football films, and is the leading online aggregator of movie reviews from a mix of professional critics and its community of users, with an overall score of 77 per cent, and an audience score of 82 per cent (earning a “full popcorn bucket”) meaning the movie received 3.5 stars or higher by Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes users. Rotten Tomatoes noted under “Critics consensus: No consensus yet.” Rotten Tomatoes is part of Fandango’s portfolio of digital properties.

Next up for me perhaps is the college football movie from 2006, We are Marshall, which depicts the aftermath of the Nov. 14, 1970 airplane crash that killed 37 football players on the Huntington, West Virginia Marshall University Thundering Herd, along with five coaches, two athletic trainers, the athletic director, 25 boosters, and a crew of five. New coach Jack Lengye, played by Matthew McConaughey, arrives on the scene four months later in March 1971, determined to rebuild Marshall’s Thundering Herd and heal a grieving community in the process (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU4QBR-V79I).

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Holy Christmas, Batman … they’re thinking, talking and writing about Christianity

Several times a year (today being one of those times) I’ll see a post on my Facebook timeline from some old friend or colleague, who I haven’t seen for years, saying something to the effect, “Heard you(‘re) pretty religious.” Actually, that’s a verbatim quote from today on Facebook. But similar sentiments crop up several times a year, sometimes seemingly out of the blue, sometimes in relation to something I’ve recently written and posted on Facebook, or perhaps just re-posted from somewhere else. Usually it is framed more as a statement with a dangling question mark rather than a direct question.

The questioner in this case was a former roommate, who last I checked in with him on the matter about 30 years ago, was himself a committed atheist. And also a good guy, as we might say, principled and ethical. A good friend. A third member of our university roommate trio, who visited me after more than 20 years last summer, had also heard I was “pretty religious,” he told me. His wife, who I haven’t met yet, had suggested that before he visited, after reading some of my Facebook posts. My friend isn’t actually on Facebook himself but trolls his wife’s account from time to time, as do most Facebook objectors I know. A non-committal agonistic, he told me his response was sort of to shrug and say not to worry, “John’s always been a Catholic.”

When I hear or read this kind of thing, several things occur to me. One is the sobering fact that people I consider friends or former colleagues, who I worked with years ago, apparently in many cases find any connection between religion and me surprising and noteworthy enough to comment on. What, I wonder, does this say about how I lived my life in the years that I worked with or lived near them? As I said, sobering. And a bit rhetorical, as I’m not sure that I’d want them all to answer that, at least not on my timeline on Facebook.

As for their question, which might be paraphrased as, “When did you get religion?” how exactly does one answer that? I suppose Protestant evangelicals might point to their “born again” experience as that moment. Catholics …. well, infant baptism.

I can almost picture Pope Francis reminding me about the Sadducees, Pharisees and clericalism, should I start boasting about how religious I am. Pope Francis really is not a fan of legalism or legalists. He sees the Church as a big field hospital for sinners, of which he includes himself.

Given that I work 18 hours on Saturdays and Sundays, my parish priest might be surprised to hear how religious I am, too, given my mass attendance for the one mass I might attend weekly on Saturday nights at 6:30 p.m., after working 10 of those 18 hours, is pretty abysmal. No excuse. Sadly, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” many times and an after-work nap beckons.

But when I am awake, I do write about religion with some frequency. I also read about it, think about it and think it matters far more than most journalists understand. However, that’s not exactly a new realization that I’ve come to. Almost 18 years ago, I was among the 270 participants on both sides of that great divide, interested in the intersection of religion and politics in the public square, when I attended the first-ever Faith in the Media conference at the Carleton University School of Journalism in Ottawa for three days from June 7-9, 1998. The Peterborough Examiner, while it didn’t have a religion beat in 1998, graciously picked up the tab for their city hall reporter to go.

Toronto’s Roman Catholic archbishop at the time, Aloysius Cardinal Ambrozic, noted that the Church makes truth claims and demands, which are absolute, while the media tends to be liberal, and, as such, opposed to absolutes. “(The) media are adept at showing the ills of society, but not the remedies … Most of our media are not interested in Christ’s self-emptying death, only in sweating and weeping Madonnas. The media love religious kitsch.” But Ambrozic quickly added, “We, the religious professionals, are not very forthcoming sometimes, perhaps out of a fear of sensationalism. Nor do we always explain ourselves well. At other times we kowtow to the media when we should question its mindset.”

I had also been able to write about religion some during the early to mid-1990s at the Kingston Whig-Standard, where religious coverage was quite possible on weekends, especially if you initiated it. One of my more surreal moments of religion coverage came in June 1995, less than two months after Timothy McVeigh, radicalized after the Waco Siege and Ruby Ridge incident, killed 168 people when he bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, and I covered a conference in Kingston called “Take A Stand ’95: Defending Your Faith in the New World Order.”

Gary Kah, of Indiana, and Eric Barger, of Texas, two of the rising stars of the televised Bible prophecy circuit, told me it was tough going in the immediate wake of Oklahoma City to deliver their message. I imagined it would be.

McVeigh himself was a baptized Roman Catholic but self-professed agnostic, who would later receive the Roman Catholic Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick, formerly known as Last Rites or Extreme Unction, administered through a federal Bureau of Prisons chaplain, minutes before his execution in the federal death chamber at Terre Haute, Indiana on June 11, 2001.

While it may have been tough going at the time in 1995, Kah and Barger are still going – strong, or at least, so it seems.

And the interesting thing is that much of what they talked about that June day more than 21 years ago has come to pass.

A “cashless” society, biometrics, including palm geometry and retinal scanning;  these things are no longer the stuff exclusively of the religious right and tin foil hat meme.

Or how about Implanted  RFID (radio frequency identification) chips? … hmm … sounds kinda like something from the pages of a script for one of the late Iowa filmmaker Russ Doughten’s movies, such as his 1972 film, A Thief in the Night, followed by its three sequels – A Distant Thunder in 1978, Image of the Beast in 1980 and The Prodigal Planet in 1983. Doughten, who earned his master’s degree from Yale Drama School in 1954, died at the age of 86 in August 2013.

While one friend on Facebook today was musing, “Heard you(‘re) pretty religious” another a few hours later sent me a link to Laurie Goodstein’s keynote address at the symposium on religious literacy in journalism earlier this month at Harvard Divinity School for the Religious Literacy Project.

I had read part of her speech last week. “I’m glad that we’re all here because we now have urgent work to do,” Goodstein said in her keynote speech Dec. 8. “Religious literacy has probably never been more important, or more of a challenge. The grounds are shaking, the fissures are cracking open all around us, and the faultlines all seem to intersect. Race, class, gender and underneath it all like molten lava: religion.”

Goodstein is the national religion correspondent for The New York Times. After earning a B.A. from University of California Berkeley and an M.A. from the Columbia School of Journalism, she began her journalism career in 1989 at The Washington Post.

She started as news assistant before becoming a metro reporter and then national reporter. While at the Post in both 1995 and 1996, she won two major awards for religion newswriting, The Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year and the Supple Religion Writing Award.

She joined The New York Times in 1997. “Her work for the Times has covered a wide range of topics and religious traditions, offering a nuanced rather than monolithic view of American Catholics, evangelicals, and Muslims, among others,” said Harvard Divinity School. “In 2004, she won the American Academy of Religion’s award for best in-depth news reporting on religion, an award she won again in 2009. In 2015, she also won the Religion Newswriters Association’s award for excellence in religion reporting. Her recent work has covered American evangelicals’ support for Donald Trump, the possibility of female deacons in the Catholic Church, and Muslim opposition to ISIS.”

I grew up Roman Catholic in an extended family of mainly Protestants (primarily United Church, but with a smattering of Anglicans) with a few Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses also added to the mix. I still have my dad’s 1927 United Church certificate for perfect Sunday school attendance. He was a member of the United Church when he married my mother in June 1942 – an era when “mixed marriages,” as they were quaintly called, were still rather uncommon and somewhat frowned upon by both Protestants and Catholics.

Eventually my dad converted to Catholicism of his own accord. But it was strongly suggested to me by my parents during my childhood that religion wasn’t a particularly suitable topic for discussion at large extended family events given the plurality of beliefs and the conviction with which they were held. I thought religion and politics were about the two most interesting topics one could talk about at the dinner table, so this imposed considerable restraint on me. Still, if my Uncle Morley and Aunt Dot weren’t bringing The Watchtower or Awake! around to the house on visits (and they weren’t), it seemed a reasonable accommodation. My dad and Uncle Morley found their common ground in a boat fishing. All in all, my parent’s live-and-let-live theology has struck me as increasingly wise as I get older.

Christmas dinner next week for many means travelling long miles only to be thrust together in close quarters with other annually seasonally-close family members and friends who hold somewhat different cultural, political, sports or even religious beliefs than you do.

In terms of the latter, this happens even among Christians, hard as that may be to believe, marking the birth of the saviour some 2,000-plus years ago in Bethlehem – or is it Nazareth? Take your pick.

The Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke opt for Bethlehem, while Saint Mark and Saint John seem to lean more toward Nazareth.

As for the year, month or day of Jesus’ birth, you can likely rule out Dec. 25 for the latter two and settle on sometime between 7BC and 4BC for the year. Pope–emeritus Benedict XVI in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives wrote that 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.

Given these antecedents it perhaps should come as no surprise then that Roman Catholics and their Protestant brethren some five centuries almost after the Reformation still don’t see eye-to-eye on some of the theological fine points of Christianity. In fact some evangelicals are pretty sure Catholics aren’t really Christians when it come right down to it and remain “unsaved” if they’re not “born again.”

The Catholic response is often a dismissive exercise in pulling rank and saying, in essence, “we were here first” and we are therefore synonymous with being “the Church.” As in one and the same in an unbroken line from Saint Peter to Pope Francis.

How this might play out at a Catholic-Protestant Christmas dinner has been nicely illustrated by Chris Castaldo, lead pastor at New Covenant Church of Naperville in Naperville, Illinois. Castaldo, who was raised as a Catholic and who had an uncle who was a cardinal,  several years ago did a 4:38-video promo for his book, Holy Ground: Walking with Jesus as a Former Catholic, where he plays the role of the Catholic brother, “Vito” at the Christmas dinner because, he says, he was a natural as a former Catholic – and “a Long Island Guido” – to play the role.

“Pastor Dave,” Castaldo’s good friend, Lon Allison, pastor of teaching and evangelism and missions at Wheaton Bible Church in West Chicago, Illinois, plays the Protestant minister.

The video, which can be seen at http://vimeo.com/2702601, is based on a true incident that happened to Castaldo as a minister at College Church in Wheaton, but whereas the actual incident happened right in the church, the fictional video setting has been moved to the family Christmas dinner. To say more about it here would make me a spoiler.

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Standardizing time: Canada’s Sir Sandford Fleming

Thank Scottish-born Canadian surveyor, engineer and inventor Sir Sandford Fleming if you’re getting an extra hour of snooze time Sunday morning.

“Under the Official Time Act,” the Province of Manitoba helpfully reminded me in an e-mail Thursday, Oct. 29, 2015 at 2:06 p.m. (CDT), “daylight saving time ends on the first Sunday in November and resumes the second Sunday in March.The official time change back to standard time will occur this year at 2 a.m., Sunday, Nov. 1 at which time clocks should be set back to 1 a.m.”

While it has been gradually getting darker earlier in the evening since late June here in the Northern Hemisphere, the fact many of us can still travel home in waning daylight from work or school in the late afternoon in late October is in itself a credit to George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST), a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time. Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island. Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°”  to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the  Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

It is Fleming, however, who deserves most of the credit for both the international dateline, and standard time zones, conveniently divided into hourly segments, dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead. As for the international date line, it is an imaginary line at the 180º line of longitude that runs from the South Pole to the North Pole separating two consecutive calendar days.

It was Hipparchus of Nicea, a Greek mathematician and astronomer, who around 150 BCE, proposed a global grid of longitude and latitude lines to measure position. It was a coordinate system for locating points on the surface of a sphere. The vertical axis measured “latitude,” and the horizontal axis “longitude.”

Immediately to the left of the international date line the date in the Eastern Hemisphere is always one day ahead of the date (or day) immediately to the right of the international date line in the Western Hemisphere. There is no regulatory body or agency that can say “yes” or “no” if a country wants to switch sides. The country simply lets the international community and mapmakers know. It is not a perfectly straight line, however, and has been moved slightly over the years to accommodate needs of varied countries in the Pacific Ocean. The Midway Islands are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) -11, and the Marshall Islands are in UTC+12. The two group of islands, on different sides of the international date line, share the same day and date for the last hour of the day. Samoa, which happens to sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, east of the international date line, went directly from Thursday – on Dec. 29, 2011 – to Saturday, Dec. 31 – without a Friday, Dec. 30. Talk about being anxious to party New Year’s Eve!

Kiribati, north of Samoa and near the equator, south of Hawaii, previously straddled the dateline. The eastern part of Kiribati was a whole day and two hours behind the western part of the country where its capital is located and a time difference of 23 hours between neighbouring islands. There were nine islands on the eastern side of the international date line, and 20 per cent of the population. On Jan. 1, 1995 it added an eastward extension to its section of the dateline so all 33 of its islands would have the same date and all of Kiribati would be in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Since 1892, when Samoa had two Monday, July 4ths, it had been east of the international date line until Dec. 29, 2011, after switching sides to coincide its days better with trading partners in the United States and Europe. Now, Samoa does a lot more business with New Zealand, Australia, China and Pacific Rim countries such as Singapore, so it switched back to the western side of the international date line.

After missing a train in 1876 in Ireland because its printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m., Fleming proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world with 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time. Usually. China, however, has just one time zone, which makes the time zone uncommonly wide. In the extreme western part of China the sun is at its highest point at 3 p.m. and in the extreme eastern part at 11 a.m. In 1912, the year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China had created five time zones in the country, ranging from five and a half to eight and a half hours past Greenwich Mean Time. But in 1949, as the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that all of China use Beijing time.

Fleming was born on Jan. 7, 1827 in the town of Kirkcaldy in the lieutenancy area of Fife on the east coast of Scotland. He emigrated to Canada in 1845, settling in Peterborough in southeastern Ontario.

This year, as we shift back to Standard Time from Daylight Saving Time at 2 a.m. tomorrow, which means an extra hour of slumber for many, but also causes me to ponder the potential complications of moving the clock back an hour and repeating the hour from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. What happens when the clock jumps backward at 2 a.m. again to 1 a.m. for the second time that night and then repeats the hour? Would you have official log chronologies showing 1:13 a.m., 1:37 a.m., 1:56 a.m., 1:03 a.m. and 1:12 a.m. with the later two actually coming after the first three because they came after the clock fell back an hour? How would you distinguish which came first if need be, if someone needed to inspect the log months later (add the annotation 1:13 a.m. CDT or 1:03 a.m. CST?)

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Douglas explains that “in a handwritten log the hour of ambiguity to which you refer can be simply resolved by appending the time zone (e.g. CST or CDT) to potentially ambiguous entries … e.g. “01:32 CDT” for the first pass through the hour of ambiguity and “1:32 CST” during the second pass.

“By explicitly writing the time zone as part of the time entry,” Douglas he added, “you also bypass the time acts’ defaults for official time – as you might wish to do if you are making agreements across a time zone boundary where there is the possibility of geographic ambiguity of time zone.

“The above procedure is very clear in Canada, but unfortunately less so in the USA,” said Douglas. “We in Canada can refer to ‘official’ or ‘legal’ time, which can alternate between being a ‘Standard Time’ or being a ‘Daylight Time.’ In the USA, to allow regulation by the federal government, both ‘Standard Time’ and ‘Daylight Time’ must be considered a ‘standard’ to avoid having time changes be a state responsibility under the residual powers clause of their constitution. If you think you may have to deal with the American ambiguity, it may be worthwhile to include an explanatory note in the log, such as ‘CST is defined as UTC-6h, and CDT is defined as UTC-5h.’

“If the times are being logged in a permanent logbook, with entries in chronological order for a fixed reckoning of time (i.e. in the absence of clock adjustments), then a simple way of removing the ambiguity is to include in the appropriate place in the log an entry such as “02:00 CDT – log’s clock changed from CDT to CST – 01:00 CST.

“If the log is a computer log, by using the operating system’s timestamps (for example as the time recorded for a file’s modification) the problem disappears since these timestamps are recorded as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC – the modern version of Greenwich Mean Time) which is never subjected to Standard/Daylight changes. The operating system re-interprets these timestamps into its version of the correct local time in effect for the particular UTC timestamp, and this re-interpretation may unfortunately still be expressed ambiguously, but the underlying UTC timestamp can be used to resolve any ambiguity about time zones and Daylight/Standard time.”

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1957 settled the dates for Thanksgiving in both Canada and the United States, but make mine Thanksgiving on Sunday, not Monday or Thursday, this year

If I had my druthers, all things being equal, I’d probably be waiting until Monday night to sit down to my Canadian Thanksgiving turkey dinner.

My general preference over the years has been to celebrate the Thanksgiving feast on, well, Thanksgiving, which if you’re in Canada, has meant on a Monday, more specifically, the second Monday of October since Jan. 31, 1957. While that’s been the settled date now for close to six decades, such has not always been the case.

Historically, up until 1957, the Thanksgiving holiday – and even the word “holiday” might be bracketed by quotation marks – was somewhat of a moveable feast, and in that way not dissimilar to the American Thanksgiving holiday, which, while it falls later than our annual harvest observance, also moved around until 1957 when it began to be consistently celebrated on the the fourth Thursday in November across the United States.

None of that is going to matter too much this year because I’ll be marking Thanksgiving on Sunday a day early (truth be told, a lot of Canadians seem to have their turkey dinner on Sunday rather than Monday, especially if travelling has been part of the equation.) In my case, it’s not travel causing the change; it’s the fact I am now a public sector worker, who belongs to the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU) and is employed technically by the governing council of the University College of the North (UCN), and tasked with … opening the Thompson campus library on Monday evening, as it is part of my normal work schedule. This requires two forms and two approvals (by only one supervisor, however): one for personal unpaid leave at my request for Sunday evening, when I also normally work, so we can keep the library closed when it would otherwise normally be open, and another for paid overtime authorization for the statutory holiday Monday. My contribution to simplicity this year will be to eat my Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow instead of Monday.

Whether you celebrate Thanksgiving this year on the second Sunday of October tomorrow or second Monday Oct. 12 or on the fourth Thursday in November, as our American friends will on Nov. 26, celebrate Thanksgiving for exactly what the holiday, a moveable feast date, says it is – a time to give thanks for our abundance, our bounty and great good fortune to live in these two richly blessed lands of plenty

The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to the English explorer, Sir Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Orient. Frobisher didn’t succeed but he did establish a settlement in Northern America. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, maybe in the eastern Arctic, maybe in what is now Newfoundland and Labrador, to give thanks for surviving the long journey.

The second Canadian Thanksgiving after Frobisher’s in 1578 was held in Nova Scotia in the late 1750s. Residents of Halifax also commemorated the end of the Seven Years’ War and the Treaty of Paris of 1763, where France formally ceded Canada to the British, with a day of Thanksgiving.

We celebrated Thanksgiving in Upper Canada on June 18, 1816 to mark both the  Treaty of Ghent on Dec. 24, 1814, which ended the War of 1812, and another Treaty of Paris almost 11 months later on Nov. 20, 1815, ending the war between Great Britain and France. Lower Canada had already had their Thanksgiving celebration almost a month before Upper Canada on May 21, 1816.

The cessation of the 1832 cholera epidemic, which claimed 9,000 lives, more than half of them in Lower Canada, was reason enough to have Thanksgiving on Feb. 6, 1833. The restoration of  peace with Russia at the Congress of Paris and a third Treaty of Paris after the three-year Crimean War was enough for the United Province of Canada, made up of Canada East and Canada West, to have Thanksgiving on June 4, 1856. The first Thanksgiving Day after Confederation was on April 15, 1872, to give thanks for the recovery of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) from a serious illness.

In 1879, Parliament declared Nov. 6 a day of Thanksgiving and a national holiday.

Over the years many dates continued to be used for Thanksgiving, the most popular for many years being the third Monday in October. After the end of the First World War, both Armistice Day, as it was then known, and Thanksgiving were celebrated on the Monday of the week in which Nov. 11 fell.

Ten years later, in 1931, the two days became separate holidays and Armistice Day was renamed Remembrance Day.

Finally, on Jan. 31, 1957, Parliament proclaimed, “A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed … to be observed on the second Monday in October.”

In the United States, Thanksgiving is also a complex feast, perhaps even more so than in Canada. Originally, the Pilgrim Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony celebrated their first Thanksgiving Day on July 8, 1629. The following year, John Winthrop gave his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he rightly predicted the colony would be metaphorically, as from salt and light in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, known as the “city on a hill, ” watched by the world.

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop said. “The eyes of all people are upon us … we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”

Almost four centuries later, their purposes perhaps not quite as lofty, Americans now celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It is the single-biggest domestic travel weekend of the year for Americans going home, wherever that might be, to visit family. While technically speaking, American Thanksgiving is a one-day holiday, like here in Canada, except on a Thursday instead of a Monday, for all intents and purposes it is part of a very long weekend (officially the Wednesday and Friday are not holidays in the United States, just the Thursday, but virtually no one – aside from unfortunate retail store clerks – works the Friday, as those of us who have lived there know.) Just try and get a government official on the telephone after mid-afternoon Wednesday, or all day Friday of American Thanksgiving week if you wish to test this hypothesis.

While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well (as it is this year), even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such was the case in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

To understand the rationale more fully, harken back to that bygone era where it was quaintly considered bad form for retailers to display Christmas decorations or have Christmas sales before the celebration of Thanksgiving, as opposed to the current day-after Halloween kick-off. Or is it the day after Labor Day now Christmas sales start? One of the two methinks.

Roosevelt, however, had waited until Oct. 31 to announce his thinking on the matter of moving up Thanksgiving by a week 23 days later. The short-notice change in dates affected the holiday plans of millions of Americans; while there was plenty of confusion and many were inconvenienced, others hit pay dirt.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

The Thanksgiving winners in 1939 lived in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. Those three states observed two Thanksgiving holidays that year; the just-proposed Thursday, Nov. 23, and then they did it all over again a week later on the originally scheduled holiday on Thursday, Nov. 30.

Now, that’s something to express gratitude for, unless your were a turkey taking a double-hit on your numbers possibly in  Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. All told, 23 states and the District of Columbia, of the 48 states in those pre-statehood days for Alaska and Hawaii (both joined the union 20 years later in 1959), recognized Nov. 23 as Thanksgiving in 1939, while 22 states stuck with the original Nov. 30 date as planned.

Gradually, the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving, with some see-sawing back-and-forth and general waffling, took a more permanent hold throughout the United States. Texas was the last state to change its holiday law, observing the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving when there are five Thursdays in the month for the final time on Thursday, Nov. 29, 1956.

The considerable, and for a time in the early 1940s, still ongoing confusion surrounding when Thanksgiving should be celebrated was not surprisingly diffused in the popular culture as ripe material for laughs through cinema, as well as radio. “In the 1940 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon Holiday Highlights, directed by Tex Avery,” Wikipedia notes, “the introduction to a segment about Thanksgiving shows the holiday falling on two different dates, one ‘for Democrats’ and one a week later ‘for Republicans.’”

In the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, a classic black-and-white film, which I borrowed in DVD format from the Thompson Public Library a few years ago, there is a delightful parody where a November calendar appears on which an animated turkey jumps back and forth between the two weeks, until he gives up and shrugs his shoulders at the audience.

And speaking of turkeys getting the last laugh, no discussion of American Thanksgiving is complete, of course, without addressing the issue of the Presidential turkey pardon. In a piece called “Why presidents pardon turkeys — a history” by Domenico Montanaro, PBS Newshour last November offered the comprehensive history of the practice, which you can read at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/presidents-pardon-turkeys-history/#.VHbAtv1lVLA.facebook

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