Definitely Not DWR

There are few modern spectacles more interesting than Richard Dawkins speaking warmly about Christianity. Not converting. Not recanting The God Delusion. Not wandering into Evensong with a softened heart and a sudden interest in incense. But speaking warmly, nevertheless. Dawkins has called himself a “cultural Christian.” He remains an atheist, which is what makes the admission interesting. He is…

“Human beings are very good at noticing the stupidity of outsiders and very bad at noticing when our own side has started laundering emotion through principle.” It is easy to pick apart other people’s bad arguments. Too easy, sometimes. When the subject is gender ideology, the temptation is worse because so much of the public argument really does arrive as slogans, emotional coercion, category…

This week’s choral interlude stays close to the world of Evensong: quiet, formal, and inward, but with an intensity that gathers slowly until the room seems to tighten around the music. If Rheinberger’s Abendlied is the golden evening window of the choral tradition, Purcell’s Hear My Prayer, O Lord is the same room after the light has almost gone. It has that Evensong-adjacent stillness, but with…

  The double-slit experiment is one of those scientific ideas people love to borrow badly. It is strange, genuinely humbling, and easy to misuse. That makes it perfect material for people who want reality to be less stubborn than it is. The basic version is simple enough. Fire particles through two slits without measuring which slit they pass through, and over time they produce an interference…

Good intentions are not enough. That should be obvious, but much of our public life now behaves as if noble language can rescue bad thinking. Before people declare what is compassionate, just, inclusive, hateful, dangerous, or necessary, they need some reliable way of knowing whether their factual claims are true. That order matters. If the tools used to find truth are broken, captured, or…

I do not especially care whether someone voted Liberal, Conservative, NDP, or something stranger from the pamphlet table. A democratic country still needs citizens who can look at reality without first asking whether the facts are useful to their team. Canada is not in a healthy place. The economy has posted two straight quarters of contraction on an annualized basis, which is why the phrase…

Most social lies do not begin as lies. They begin as little acts of politeness. You laugh at a joke that was not funny. You say “no problem” when there was, in fact, a problem. You sit through a meeting where everyone knows the plan makes no sense, but nobody wants to be the person who slows the room down. Ordinary life requires tact. Not every uncomfortable truth needs to be hurled across the…

Check it with your favourite religion/ideology. The quote has a wide range of applicability.

A recent post from a Women’s Liberation Front activist should be read less as a complaint than as a warning about how institutions train dissenters to accept contempt as normal. She describes years of opposing gender-identity legislation in California: travelling to Sacramento, meeting legislative offices, testifying at hearings, and trying to explain to ordinary people what the policies actually…

The text is the Song of Simeon from Luke 2:29–32: Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word;for mine eyes have seen thy salvation,which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;to be a light to lighten the Gentiles,and to be the glory of thy people Israel. Arvo Pärt’s Nunc dimittis did not grab me right away. At first, I found it almost too still — spare,…

Why AI May See Patterns We Can’t, and Why That Still Won’t Make It God Prime numbers look disarmingly simple until you spend more than five minutes with them. A prime is a whole number that can be divided only by itself and one. That is all. Two is prime. Three is prime. Five, seven, eleven, and thirteen are prime. Twelve is not, because it can be divided by two, three, four, and six. Fifteen is…

The previous essay argued that we have stopped teaching self-control. The next question is what replaced it. Too often, the answer is fragility. Not deliberately. No parent sets out to make a child brittle. No teacher wants students less capable at the end of the year than they were at the beginning. The shift came wrapped in kind language: safety, validation, accommodation, trauma-awareness,…

One of the most important childhood traits is also one of the easiest to make sound old-fashioned. Self-control. The word itself feels dusty now. It carries the smell of scolding, punishment, stiff collars, and adults who confused obedience with virtue. Modern childhood has moved in the other direction. We speak more fluently about affirmation, expression, accommodation, trauma, identity, and…

Truth is the lifeblood of any serious civilization. Not comfort, not ideological harmony, and not the temporary social peace that comes from teaching people to suppress what they can plainly see. A society can survive mistakes. It can survive corruption. It can survive periods of confusion and even mass foolishness, provided enough people remain willing to describe reality honestly when the…

Jane Elliott’s famous classroom exercise functions less like an argument and more like a secular parable. The audience is presented with a moral test. Nobody stands. The silence becomes confession. The lesson is declared revealed. But notice what is happening structurally. The participants are not asked to examine evidence, define terms, compare variables, or challenge premises. They are placed…

The CBC’s problem is not that it experimented with satire, hidden cameras, or uncomfortable encounters. Those tools have existed for decades. Political comedy often works by creating discomfort. The issue exposed by the CBC/APTN controversy is narrower and more revealing: the apparent belief that some Canadians are legitimate targets for deception and public humiliation, while others must be…

“Have mercy, my God, for the sake of my tears! See here, before you heart and eyes weep bitterly. Have mercy, my God.”   One of the most quietly devastating pieces ever written. “Erbarme Dich” (“Have mercy”) comes from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, arriving just after Peter denies Christ three times and breaks down in shame. The aria does not rage or collapse into theatrical grief. Instead, it…