Newspaper columns

Illuminating the dark world of biotechnology

(The London Free Press – Oct. 28, 2000)

ST. THOMAS, CANADA – Is the human soul just a vast bundle of nerve cells? Francis Crick, the Nobel laureate who set modern biotechnology in motion when he discovered DNA a generation ago, says yes.

In The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search For The Soul, he suggests our joys and sorrows, memories and ambitions, personal identities and even our cherished notions of free will are nothing more than the biochemical reactions of a neural machine.

Brilliant as Crick is, the idea is more hollow than astonishing. It was the poet William Blake who said scientists, in trying to decipher that which should remain indecipherable, would “turn that which is soul and life into a mill or machine.”

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Something happened. Something big.

“Jesus Christ. Superstar. Do you believe what they say you are?” The jingle from the popular rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, catchy as it is, is an incredibly sad reminder that there are people who don’t have an inkling of this season’s joy.

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Promise Keepers are relevant any time

(LONDON FREE PRESS, June 2, 1998)

ST. THOMAS, CANADA – Regarding, Male spirituality about partnerships (May 17), Free Press assistant city editor Larry Cornies shows it’s easier to criticize the evangelical Christian men’s movement Promise Keepers than it is to understand it.

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Spirit of real St. Nick has much to teach us

Dear Editor: I am eight years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth. Is there a Santa Claus?

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Common decency needn’t be a difficult concept

I have had an opportunity to see the recent move of 33 rooming-house residents from Toronto to Aylmer, a transfer equated by some as Toronto “dumping its trash” into rural Ontario, through the eyes of personal experience. My family owned and operated a private rest home for the better part of 20 years, with tenants, patients as we called them, very similar to those at the Aylmer home run by Anne Borden Maxwell.

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