Informed ethics
A man saw the title of the book I was reading with my morning coffee. It was something religious-sounding, so he engaged me about faith. Eventually he asked what I did, and I said I teach at the nearby Christian university. I teach sociology. “Oh, sociology?” he said. “Then you can’t really be a Christian.”…
Murky lessons from a political firestorm
As the partisan jostling over SNC Lavalin wanes, we can more clearly examine the ethical questions at the core of a scandal that Mennonite cabinet minister Jane Philpott stepped right into the middle of. Philpott and former justice minister and attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould brazenly called out the Prime Minister, sacrificed promising political careers, took…
Revisiting a third way
J. Lawrence Burkholder’s experiences as a relief worker in China in 1947 caused him to think about the nature of power. His dissertation, “The problem of social responsibility from the perspective of the Mennonite church,” was completed in 1958 but not published at the time because it challenged Mennonite teachings. Burkholder called for Mennonite social…
Is ‘you do you’ an ethical base for living?
When discussing the question of ethics in the church or in society at large, there is an increasing cacophony of voices laying claim to the ideological space governing the collective sense of right and wrong. What’s more, the loudest and most prominent voices tend to drive home the idea that what is right for one…
A Fistful of Dollars
Yesterday I swung by the University of Winnipeg to pick up a book. On my way back to the car I noticed a flash of colour standing out against the dirty white snow on the curb. Lying there, as though nestled on some heavenly cloud was a bundle of cash. There lay $100 dollars staring…
