“As conscientious objectors, we believe Jesus commands reverence for each human life since every person is made in the image of God.” –From a letter sent by 13 Anabaptist groups in September 2019 When it was released on March 25, a report from the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service got little attention amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The few headlines that did appear focused on the commission’s recommendation that women should register for Selective Service. If it were to be implemented, the recommendation means that both female and male conscientious objectors to war would need to determine whether […]

“We need to create a parade that politicians want to get in front of.” That is how one participant at a forum on the living wage and public sector employers put it. At the heart of decent work is fair pay – the ability to earn a living wage. Not a poverty wage. But enough to meet your needs and fully participate in the life of your community. But the growth of low-wage and precarious employment has become one of the defining labour market challenges in our time and one of the root causes of growing income inequality. In 2017, […]

Author Nick Hornby has made a nice living writing about male characters that seem to muddle through life with either a misguided purpose or little purpose at all. High Fidelity, About a Boy—and even Hornby’s memoir Fever Pitch—move along those thematic lines. All of those books became the basis of movies (Fever Pitch twice, in fact—one British and one American adaptation) where the protagonists fail to live up to others’ expectations of them. Juliet, Naked is Hornby’s latest story to hit the big screen. While it follows similar patterns of the other Hornby-based movies, Juliet differs in that the characters […]

Too many films designed for younger audiences tend to dumb down their stories. They follow a certain arc that includes humor, fighting, and a chase scene or two, followed perhaps by a moral that’s good enough but fairly tepid. It is carried out with such an imaginative array of characters and complications that it doesn’t feel like a typical movie for younger audiences. But some films depart from this tendency and actually respect their viewers’ intelligence. Kubo and the Two Strings is a recent example. The film uses stop-motion animation, which gives the picture a certain depth. It’s an American […]

What can one woman do to halt the sad practice of children as young as 9 or 10 working long hours in roasting or freezing factories in countries around the world where few rules and regulations prevent it? Adults, as well, work in inhumane conditions all around the globe, sometimes even in North America, where production demands mean getting up at 3 a.m. and working 12 days straight. No weekend off. Eleanor learned early on about buying gifts which helped women and children have more opportunities for schooling because of fair trade. Eleanor Held is one young woman who, as […]