Father Raymond J. de Souza

Originally Published: Thursday, May 31, 2007

The summer movie season is underway and, as the Post’s editorial board deemed worthy of notice, this week marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Star Wars. For men of a certain age – including me – the film provided much of the architecture for the fantasy worlds of our boyhood. On the occasion of the sixth Star Wars film’s release two years ago, I wrote in these pages my own theology of Star Wars, and readers who were patient enough to indulge me then ought not to be burdened so again.

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Originally Published in the National Post: Thursday, May 24, 2007

At the Memorial Cup this weekend in Vancouver, the title of “Great Canadian Hockey Mom” will be awarded during a ceremony at the final game. The contest invited essays from young hockey players about their mothers. (more…)

Originally Published in the National Post: Thursday, May 17, 2007

This week’s English-language release of Pope Benedict XVI’s new book, Jesus of Nazareth, was a historically unprecedented act – which, given the long history of papal precedents, in saying something. The 350 pages of closely printed text are written in Benedict’s private capacity as the scholar-theologian Joseph Ratzinger. (more…)

Originally Published in the National Post: Saturday, May 12, 2007

At a certain point in reading God is not Great, Christopher Hitchens’ broadside against religion as a false, immoral, man-made construction, I half-expected Hitchens to write that if God were real and omnipotent, and consequently Hitchens so wrong, then God should have arranged things so as to prevent him from writing his book. But the book exists! So God couldn’t stop it. And why couldn’t he stop it? The simplest answer is that he does not exist!

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Originally Published in the National Post: Thursday, May 03, 2007

VATICAN CITY – Not everyone who comes here does so to exercise the soul. There are many who come, not to seek the Lord, but to understand something more about history, or to behold the sublime achievements in art and architecture, or simply out of curiosity. There are also a few who come to exercise the mind – scholars who find in the Vatican a congenial home for the work of scholarship.

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