Churches
Bev Oda and the KAIROS fiasco
By Dennis Gruending Pulpit and Politics 2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved I have posted several pieces over the past year about the Harper government’s decision to deny project money to the ecumenical social justice group KAIROS. I have also written about CIDA Minister Bev Oda’s deceitful behaviour in the whole matter. For months [...]
Joe Gunn, public justice, Canadian churches
Dennis Gruending 2010. Used by permission. All rights reserved Note: Joe Gunn is executive director of Citizens for Public Justice, an Ottawa-based ecumenical group advocating for social justice. He has worked for churches and church organizations, mainly Catholics, in Canada and Latin America, and he was director for the Social Affairs office of the Canadian [...]
Catholics and child sexual abuse
Dennis Gruending 2010. Used by permission. All rights reserved It’s been a bad month for Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic hierarchy, and by extension a bad month for Catholics in general. The church has been rocked by more allegations, many of them now proven, regarding past sexual assaults by priests on young boys and [...]
Kings Glory Fellowship Association doesn’t file tax return What’s in a name?
It appears the public is being suckered by Calgarian street preacher Artur Pawlowski. And it appears a group called Kings Glory Fellowship Association may also have been suckered. And it appears Street Church Ministries may have been suckered too. Pawlowski is identified as head pastor of Kings Glory Fellowship Association, which, according to Equipping Christians [...]
Jason Kenney blames Bev Oda for KAIROS funding turndown
The Star from Immigration Minister Jason Kenney to KAIROS Your twin accusations that I accused the advocacy group KAIROS of anti-Semitism and that this is why the Canada International Development Agency did not approve a cost-sharing program with the group are false. I did not accuse KAIROS of being anti-Semitic. What I said was that [...]
KAIROS fights CIDA cuts
By Dennis Gruending 2009. Used by permission. All rights reserved In October, I attended a fundraising dinner and auction at Ottawa church to support a legal clinic to assist women in eastern Congo. In some of their stories, captured on a brief video, the women describe how they had been gang raped and brutalized by [...]
Pope Benedict has no sense of irony
Dammit Janet! …And in other news, bears shit in the woods. Pope Benedict XVI called on Christians and Muslims today to serve mankind with the “light of God’s truth” while warning that extremists in nations such as Iraq were exploiting religious differences for political and violent agendas. Speaking at the Al Hussein bin Talal Mosque, [...]
The Anglican Right and the Cramner Foundation of Canada
Cross-posted at Terrible Depths. As someone who defected to the Anglican church from my Baptist roots a few years ago, I have watched with interest as the Canadian and American provinces of that church gradually tear themselves apart over gay marriage and the ordination of women. That process took a large step forward recently when [...]
Inside a Canadian Mega-Church
Mega-churches and charismatic Christianity are often thought of as characteristically American phenomena. That isn’t always the case – the Toronto Blessing, as the name suggests, was a revival movement taking its inspiration from the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship in Canada. There are also mega-churches north of the border, though generally smaller and fewer in number [...]
Religious Rebranding Exercises
In 2003, tobacco titan Philip Morris attempted to reduce the harm being done to its less lethal subsidiaries, like Kraft foods, through a “re-branding” exercise: Philip Morris became Altria Group. The change was little more than skin deep, of course: the company remained otherwise identical (though Kraft has since been spun out again), and the [...]
