By Dennis Gruending

The Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan is poised for sale to the highest bidder, and shareholders, not to mention company executives, stand to stuff their pockets from a deal when and if it occurs. The company has spurned as inadequate an offer of $38.6-billion (U.S.) from an Australian-based giant called BHP Billiton and has also been in talks with other companies, including two from China. The great and tragic irony for the people of Saskatchewan is that in 1989 a provincial government sold Crown-owned PCS for $630 million, a minute fraction of what it may sell for now. It’s like selling your house and having the new owner flip it for 60 times the price. What has this to do with a blog called Pulpit and Politics? Let’s start with the morality of greed, market fundamentalism, and the common good.

I was a young journalist with a ringside seat in Saskatchewan in 1975 when a government led by Premier Allan Blakeney took over half of the potash industry. I later wrote a biography of Blakeney called Promises to Keep and the potash story is told in that book. Potash (potassium chloride) is used as a component in farm fertilizers, which are in growing demand, notably in China and India, countries that have enormous populations to feed. Saskatchewan has the largest potash deposits in the world. (Read on …)

By Dennis Gruending

I travelled with my family in India in 2008 and my most useful guide was the writing of a Scot named William Dalrymple. This past spring we travelled in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan and found that Dalrymple has done it again in his book From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, which was first published in 1997. Dalrymple searched out and described Christian communities in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel (including the occupied West Bank), and Egypt. While the book is a bit dated, it remains a compelling and useful resource describing the disturbing reality that Christians are either being forced out or are leaving the countries that he profiles. The most accommodating nation in the region is Syria and even there Christians fear for their future.

Dalrymple says that the great flowering of Christianity in the Middle East began after the Roman emperor Constantine declared in the 4th century that Christianity would be the official religion of the empire. The golden age, embodied in the Byzantine Christianity, lasted for about 300 years, until the rise of Islam in the 7th century. During that time, Dalrymple writes, “the Levant was the heartland of Christianity and the centre of Christian civilization.” But he writes that Christianity is suffering “a devastating decline in the land of its birth.”

Dalrymple certainly is not anti-Muslim. He says that for centuries the predominantly Muslim countries of the Ottoman Empire practiced a far greater tolerance for Christians and Jews in their midst than Christian countries of Europe did for either Jews or Muslims. “Only in the 20th century has that tolerance been replaced by new hardening in Islamic attitudes,” Dalrymple says, adding that this is in great part due to a series of humiliations visited upon Muslim countries by the West. “Almost everywhere . . . the Christians are leaving,” he says. (Read on …)

By Dennis Gruending

France’s National Assembly recently approved a bill that would make it illegal to wear in public garments such as the niqab or burqa, which incorporate a full-face veil. Similar laws are in force or being contemplated in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. Supporters of the legislation say that veils are a provocative symbol of Muslim fundamentalism that has no place in a secular country. They say as well that the veil is more of a cultural than a religious symbol and that it is not essential to Muslim worship. Those who would do away with the veil see themselves as liberating women from a certain oppressive interpretation of Islam. On the other hand, opponents of the legislation say that it is discriminatory against Muslims, that it offends religious liberty, and that it is not the business of the state to tell people how they should dress. (Read on …)

By Dennis Gruending

I wrote in a recent post about Marci McDonald’s book The Armageddon Factor, which traces the growing political influence of Canada’s religious right. McDonald has clearly struck a nerve – two bodyguards accompanied her at a recent Calgary event to promote her book. Reviews and interviews with her (and her critics) have been everywhere since the book was released in mid-May. On the week ending June 5th, The Armageddon Factor was ranked second on The Globe and Mail’s list of hardcover sales among Canadian titles. McDonald and her work have also been the object of close attention among reviewers, Op Ed writers and bloggers. Let’s look at some of the comments.

Charge from the right

The charge from the right was led by the National Post and featured some of its regular polemicists. They included the ubiquitous Ezra Levant, who in his subtle and gracious way described McDonald as a “bigot” against Christians, Jews and Sikhs. On his blog he called her a “Christian hater” and described her as  “bigoted, sloppy, error-prone, smug.” On his Twitter feed, Levant said this: “Watching Marci McDonald on TV. What a hateful bigot. If she spoke this way about Jews, she’d be run out of town as an anti-Semite.” Levant and some others throw this latter accusation around rather casually these days. (Read on …)