Volume 26 Issue 3

In the final days of January, a Christian acquaintance of mine started sharing social media posts supporting the “Freedom convoy” of truckers driving across Canada. The destination of this large moving protest was Ottawa, where the protesters planned to present their demands to federal leaders.

Writers speak out in support of sexual-abuse survivor
Re: “A survivor of sexual abuse speaks out,” Jan. 10, page 13.

I love that phrase that you use to describe yourself: “a fierce pacifist.”

Cree chief, lawyer and author Harold Cardinal speaks at a symposium on “Native Peoples” at the University of Waterloo, Ont., in 1976. The event was planned by Conrad Grebel College students, and attracted Indigenous students from other universities, as well as Dene and Haudenosaunee participants and civil servants.

Almost 400 years ago, the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from [people’s] inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Pascal was probably being hyperbolic, but he was making a profound point, one that aligns with something I discovered and wrote about during my own recent season of solitude:

A few months ago, my wife and I watched a film called CODA. Seventeen-year-old Ruby is a child of deaf adults (CODA). Her parents and brother, who is also deaf, rely on her to interpret the outside world to them. They need her to be present on the fishing boat on which they earn their living, to monitor radio communications and listen for warnings, among other things.

Mennonite Church Canada and MC U.S.A. are collaborating to create a centralized, comprehensive guidebook for regional churches, conferences and congregations that addresses prevention of abuse by lay and credentialled leaders, as well as leadership accountability. The prevention and accountability project is expected to be completed in early 2023.

At the beginning of this pandemic, long-term-care homes were hit hard, with residents contracting the COVID-19 virus and many of them died of it.

Walter Sguazzin, executive director of the United Mennonite Home in Vineland, Ont., is happy to declare that not one resident had contracted, or died, of COVID-19 and its variants during the first four waves of the pandemic.