Not Quite a Heathen
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Kelli Korducki is a “Cultural Catholic:” she misses the rituals, pomp and circumstance, even if she doesn’t entirely believe in the faith.
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Do We Need More Holidays?
/Ontario has two statutory holidays with a religious origin, and they’re both Christian. Should we have days off for Chinese New Year or Diwali, too? Renee Sylvestre-Williams tackles this complicated question.
Read MoreTricked Into Catholicism?
/Heather Li wondered why her family was Catholic. The answer was surprising. Was her family tricked into Catholicism?
Read MoreThe Advantages of a Turban: An Interview with Suresh Bhalla
/How do you square being modern and being religious? That’s one of the questions Navneet Alang posed to local Sikh banker and philanthropist Suresh Bhalla.
Read MoreHouse of Lords: Ten Religious Buildings in Toronto
/Temples, synagogues and street corners: Denise Balkissoon takes you on a tour of a few religious buildings in Toronto that she’s visited.
Read MoreContents Under Pressure: A Queer Muslim Unsilenced
/“Being both Muslim and queer always seemed like mutually exclusive identities to me.” Rahim Thawer explores how he came to see queerness and Islam as compatible, at least in himself.
Read More'Cause You Gotta Have (an opinion on) Faith
/Why are we doing a religion issue at all? ” For a lot of people, faith is far less about certain clothing, symbols or rituals and much more about how they see the world.“
Read MoreTeachable Moment: Ethnic Cleansing vs. Taxes
/Yesterday, CTV hosted a six-minute debate on the Ontario NDP's proposed tax increase for people making $500,000 or more a year. The guests were Jim Doak of Megantic Asset Management and Armine Yalnizyan of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
During the discussion, Jim Doak twice referred to the proposed tax as a form of "ethnic cleansing." This bit of hyperbole rather distracted me from the issue at hand - how best to deal with the economic challenges facing Ontario in 2012. It's surprising that someone as accomplished as Jim Doak, a graduate of U of T and McGill, would confuse two things so inherently different. One is deciding what portion of one's salary is required for good governance. The other is terror, war and systematic murder.
Read MoreShame and the Shalwar Kameez
/My mom's not a jeans and t-shirt type of girl.
And now in her mid-50s, it's doubtful she'll ever be one. My mom feels most comfortable in the traditional Pakistani shalwar-kameez, a loose-fitting tunic top and flowing pajama-like pants that billow in the wind every time I see her walk out of our Mississauga home.
Her outfits often have unimaginable bright hues, anywhere from magenta to parrot green, colours that seem to blind you on a cold, tombstone-grey Canadian winter day. They always grab my attention.
Read MoreSlowly Learning to Love My Hair
/Septembre Anderson has the type of hair that is most feared: Black hair. Her hair is a revolutionary that refuses to be colonized.
Read MoreIt's Lucky to Have a Hairy Daughter
/Bhairavi Thanki thought being hairy was awful, until she found out it was lucky. “My parents once told me that they were fortunate to have a hairy daughter. It brings good luck they said. Excuse me, what?! I thought they were trying to make me feel better after one particularly gruesome waxing session.”
Read MoreLeave My Arm Hair Alone
/Scaachi Koul worries that her arm hair makes her unfeminine. “Leg hair removal felt unavoidable, and socially required, but I figured arm hair was okay to take to the mall. I was wrong. ‘Why do you have that?’ a male classmate asked, pointing to my arms. ‘You’re hairier than I am.'”
Read MoreYour Hair Looks Like a Telephone Cord
/Caroline Shaheed is no longer going to try and “tame” her Egyptian tresses.
Read MoreReflections on Asian Hair (A one-act monologue of sorts)
/Jef Catapang’s hair isn’t just thick, it’s thick enough to pierce skin. “Tools high school homies needed for cutting my hair: tweezers, baby powder, and poor rock-paper-scissors skills.”
Read MoreTake That, Mandy Moore: A Sikh Girl Goes Bang
/Navi Lamba had her first haircut at age 15, only to learn that she didn’t have white girl hair. “I didn’t have the Princess Diaries moment I had hoped for and was left with something a bit shorter and much puffier, with the odd curl protruding from of my head.”
Read MoreWho Let the Blondes Out?
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Kelli Korducki longed to be blonde so that she could star in her own telenovela. “Blondeness wasn’t exactly required. It was more like the silver bullet that could make even the most marginally negotiable amount of onscreen charisma sufficient for stardom.”
Read MoreThe Hair is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence
/Canice Leung has got pin-straight hair, the kind Chinese girls are born with, and the kind they pay lots of money to get. “It always seemed to me a bit like Hudson’s Bay traders selling beaver pelts back to the natives.”
Read MoreWhy I Love My Hairdresser or How the Hair Was Tamed
/Let’s talk about curls. Renée Sylvestre-Williams has found the hairdresser of her dreams.
Read MoreThe Best Brazilian Wax in Toronto
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Denise Balkissoon tries not to laugh as her hilarious Brazilian esthetician Perla Porto waxes on about Canadian shyness while waxing off her errant eyebrow hairs.
Read MoreI Am Not My Beard
/Jaime Woo is a Chinese guy, yet he can grow a beard. Weird. “In gay culture, men have decided to flee from the swishy, polished look of the late-90s and early naughts towards beards and tatts. I’m lucky, I guess, that my laziness happened to time in with the trend towards a more traditionally masculine look.”
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