Features

In the modern world, most of us live highly specialized lives. We generally assume that it is more efficient to trade our time for pay and then to pay other people for their time rather than doing things like growing food and making clothes ourselves.

Rod Andrews knows what it is to be forever connected to a chunk of land and a way of life. There's a special quality in his voice when he talks about the family farm, on Alberta's Coal Trail between Delburne and Red Deer.

Edmonton doctor Jeff Gusdal says that he recently calculated that he and his wife, Hanae Kiyooka, could have been among the "one percenters," the wealthiest segment of the world's population.

The diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador is a place of contrasts. In its centre, St. John's, wealthy property developers rub shoulders with fishermen and oil workers just back from Alberta's Fort McMurray. In its farthest-flung regions, priests drive for hours to visit remote parishes in Labrador.

These contrasts are present, too, in the life of the church.

The five novels (at least two more are planned) that comprise George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series defied conventional cinematic adaptation: with numerous characters, far-flung locations (everything from deserts to great cities to a wintry wasteland) and complex plots, each of the books was too involved to fit within the confines of even a long movie.

It was 8 p.m. on December 22, the day after Toronto's catastrophic 2013 ice storm.

The Anglican Journal asked readers to tell us about things they have done that have made Christmas more meaningful. Here are some stories.

The Bible has a number of passages about new beginnings, including Isaiah 43:19: "Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth,...

ZEALOT: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth By Reza Aslan Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2014 ISBN 978-0-8129-8148-3; 296 pages How credible is a book about the historical...

The Very Rev. Hon. Lois Wilson is an outspoken anti-poverty activist, a critic of political oppression and an advocate for the environment, and she is also a woman who has spent her career building bridges in Canada and abroad between people of various faiths and none who want to see the advent of a more just world.?

For much of her 75 years, Mary Teya has been a voice for the church and for people in her home community of Fort McPherson, N.W.T., and far beyond.

Compassion can be a powerful force for change. The Anglican Journal takes you to three communities where it is at work for and with youth.

Cultivating compassion was the goal that the Rev. Jeffrey Metcalfe and his wife, Julie Boisvert, a teacher at Grosse-Ile School, had in mind when they created a youth pilot project called the Social Justice Club in their parish in the Magdalen Islands, a small archipelago in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

One feels pity, but one has compassion. Compassion is a proactive principle at Christianity's core: going beyond passive sympathy for another's plight and acting to alleviate it.

Once we postulate a "difference," we legitimize a dichotomy-between how we want to be treated and how we treat others.