Christianity, Hinduism and Judaism: The interfaith life of Kamala Harris

In Canada, the faith of political leaders is no big deal. We know that both Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre were raised Catholic, Jagmeet Singh is Sikh and Elizabeth May is Anglican. But beyond that, there’s little interest in how often they go to religious services or what role faith plays in their political decisions. 

Not so in the U.S., where the faith of politicians is a very big deal. Which prompts the question: Now that Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic Party candidate for president, what is her faith background? 

Read more in my Free Press column about how Harris combines Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism in her life and family—and how that may represent the growing character of American religious life today.

Photo: Kamala Harris at First AME Church of Los Angeles, 2020. U.S. Senate photo. 

Questions on my mind: Should Joe Biden follow his faith about staying or leaving? Do Canadian faith groups have anything to say about hate? How long should a sermon be?

Should Joe Biden follow the example of Pope Benedict XVI when deciding whether to stay or go? That’s one of the questions on my mind this week, along with wondering if faith groups have anything to say about the increase in hate in Canada and how long a sermon should be. (Hint: Much shorter than you might think.) 

Read my latest column in the Winnipeg Free Press.

"Grief on the go:" How spiritual care providers in hospitals cope with the traumas and challenges of their work

How do spiritual care providers cope with the challenges and trauma of their jobs?

How do they keep going, keep on providing comfort, solace, guidance, prayer or just a listening ear for patients and their families facing some of the most emotional, traumatic and life-changing moments of their lives? 

That’s what I was interested in learning. So I talked to four of them to find out. 

Read their responses in my feature article in the Free Press.

 

Anglicans on the prairies pursue reconciliation through new name: Northern Lights

Sometimes reconciliation involves grand actions that garner a lot of attention, like Pope Francis issuing an apology on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church to Indigenous people in Canada or the city of Winnipeg changing the name of Bishop Grandin Boulevard to Abinojii Mikanah.  

But other times it’s about things that are quieter and happen mostly out of sight — but which are also significant. 

That’s what happened in late May when the Anglican Ecclesiastical Province of Rupert’s Land, which includes ten Anglican dioceses in Manitoba, Northwestern Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta and the Arctic, changed its name to the Ecclesiastical Province of Northern Lights. 

Read about it in my column in the Free Press.

Are people really at religious services as often as they say they are? The cell phone knows

 

According to surveys in the U.S., somewhere between 22 per cent to 30 per cent of Americans say they attend religious services weekly, depending on what polling organization is providing the results. 

But is that really true? After all, it’s widely known that people routinely over-represent behaviours they think they should be doing more of on surveys—like going to church. 

Devon Pope, a professor of behavioral science and economics at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, decided to find out if people were really going to services as often as they said they were. But how to do it? 

The answer was simple: cell phones. 

Just like with our online activity, our physical actions are tracked by companies using our cell phones. Using geolocation data, Pope found that only about five per cent of Americans are actually at a religious service on their primary day of worship — far fewer than those who tell survey takers they are there. 

Read more, including implications for Canadian religious service attendance, in my recent Free Press column.

New institute to research religion and religious trends in Canada

Hardly a week goes by that I don’t look south with envy at all the research being done in the U.S. about the role religion plays in politics, culture and society at large in that country.

Want to know about attendance at religious services? Whether non-religious Americans think conservative Christians exert too much political power? How many evangelicals actually attend church? It’s all available.

As someone who writes about religion, I love that kind of information. But much of it doesn’t translate into the Canadian context. I have often wished there were groups like that in Canada working to make sense of the religious landscape in this country.

That’s why I was happy to learn about the new Institute for Religion, Culture and Societal Futures (IRCSF), a new hub for empirical research related to religion, spirituality and emerging forms of communities of belief and practice in Canada.

The Institute will specialize in four main areas of research: religious trends in Canada, the interaction between religion, spirituality and culture, religion and spirituality in schools and the realities and the future of Catholic life in Canada.

Read about it in my recent column in the Free Press.

Religious groups debate impact of Canada's proposed Online Harms Act

When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was asked to describe his test for obscenity in 1964, he became famous for his response: “I know it when I see it.” 

Could a similar test be true for hate speech? That’s the question some are asking over the federal government’s proposed Online Harms Act. 

The act, which was introduced in Parliament in February, will hold online platforms like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) accountable for the content that foments hatred, incites violence or promotes extremism or terrorism. It will also require them to actively reduce the risk of exposure to harmful content. 

But just as people have long debated Stewart’s view about what constitutes obscenity, Canadian religious groups are asking what will constitute hate speech in the act, who gets to decide what it is, and whether the Act is the best way to address it. 

Read my column about it here.