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CURRENT EVENTS
274 Garry St. OPEN EMAIL
What people are saying: You are hard-pressed in these days and times to find as comfortable and beautiful a place such as this - Rhae Lynne Redekop, Winnipeg
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PAST STORE EVENTSideaExchange: The Aqua Books Conversation SeriesAqua Books, in conjunction with st. benedict's table, is pleased to present our award-winning monthly conversation series dealing with issues of faith, life, theology and pop culture. Following is a list of the provocative topics and well-spoken speakers that have graced Aqua Books since January 2005. (Well there were a couple of duds, but I'll never tell which.) You can now listen to the most recent lectures/discussions in their entirety on our podcast page, plus read a few transcripts from older events (also on that page). For upcoming ideaExchange lectures, click here. Saturday, March 6/10 7:30pmGoing Sideways This presentation introduces the philosophy and practice of voluntary simplicity as an alternative to our headlong rush toward extinction from over-consumption or falling back into poverty and barbarism. Might it be possible to gracefully step aside and strike out along an alternative pathway of personal, spiritual and cultural development?
Saturday, February 6/10 7:30pmTotally Pumped
Saturday, January 9/10 7:30pmSexual Slavery, Forced Labour and Extracted Organs
Saturday, December 5/09 7:30pmChristmas
Saturday, November 14/09 7:30pmGod's Economy in the Economic Crisis American Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove will be discussing his book God's Economy, hailed by Eugene Peterson as "a timely expose of Money’s conspiracy to blind us. It does more: it is an articulate witness that the light of Christ reveals life abundant all around…. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is bearing witness; he has been living for years now what he writes. Trust him. I trust him."
Saturday, October 24/09 7:30pmChristianity is Basically Amoral In this session, Chris Holmes revisits the figure of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a sequel to last season's session on Bonhoeffer’s resistance to Hitler), this time focusing on the great theologian’s perspective on ethics. Here is how he describes his session: It is widely assumed that living ethically involves the living of a principled life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer could not disagree more. For Bonhoeffer “there is no Christian ethic.” By calling men and women’s attention away from principles and to the concrete situation of crisis with which God confronts human beings in the giving of his will, Bonhoeffer presents an arrestingly refreshing concept of ethics. The presentation will follow and discuss Bonhoeffer’s early lecture “Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic,” a lecture which he delivered in Barcelona Spain in the winter of 1928 at the ripe young age of only 25.
Saturday, April 4/09 7:30pmFaith and Fourth
Listen to this podcast now. Saturday, March 7/09 7:30pmThe Simple Life In her recent book Flirting with Monasticism, Karen Sloan writes “Not everyone is called to the monastic life, but many of us would be blessed if we were able to live more monastically.” For those of us who won’t be taking up vows, can we reframe and adopt the three primary monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in an effort to live more monastically? This is a question of particular significance for a church community that bears the name of Benedict, one of the key founders of monastic life.
Listen to this podcast now. Saturday, February 7/09 7:30pmClimate Change Refugees With more and more evidence suggesting that climate change is likely to displace hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and even countries, one of the questions seldomed asked is that of the international - and even personal - responsibility for the people Carol calls “climate change refugees.” This conversation promises to be challenging, provacate, and probably more than a little unsettling, yet it may well be one of the most significant issues over the coming decades.
Listen to this podcast now. Saturday, January 10/09 7:30pmThe One Who Threw a Spoke into the Wheel Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one of the theological giants of the 20th century. At the age of 39 he went to death as a martyr, being found guilty of taking part in a conspiracy to assassinate the Führer. This talk will explore what drove Bonhoeffer-a committed pacifist-to partake in the plot to kill Hitler, and to disavow his pacifist convictions. It will also draw some lessons that can be learnt from Bonhoeffer and applied to our own day, as we participate in the struggle for justice.
Listen to this podcast now. Saturday, December 6/08 7:30pmAn Evening of Music and Story
Saturday, November 1/08 7:30pmThe Devil made me do it… Or did he? Listen to this podcast now. Saturday, October 4/08 7:30pmGod's Mind in the Music
Passionate about cultivating a critical thoughtfulness around issues of faith and theology, since 2001 he has taught yearly in the “Outtatown” program of the Canadian Mennonite University, and has also been called upon to teach in the Faculty of Theology at St John’s College Winnipeg and at various conferences and events. He is currently in the middle of a seven year appointment as a member of the Primate’s Theological Commission of the Anglican Church of Canada. Jamie Howison has planned and hosted ideaExchange at Aqua Books since its inception in January 2005. The original concept for iE was the brainchild of singer/songwriter Alana Levandoski. Listen to this podcast now. Saturday May 31/08 8:00pm Aqua BooksMary: Not Just for Roman Catholics Anymore
Monday, Apr 28/08 8pm Aqua BooksWhy people of faith should bother with politics
Monday, Feb 25/08 8pm Aqua BooksCongo Renaître - Congo Reborn
Saturday, Jan 26/08 8pm Aqua BooksMovies We All Need to Watch this Year
Saturday, Nov 24/07 8pm Aqua BooksOne of Us in Five? Listen to this podcast now. Saturday, Oct 27/07 8pm Aqua BooksThe Politics and
Pitfalls of International Development
Listen to this podcast now. Saturday, Sept 22/07 8pm Aqua BooksSomething Broken, Something Beautiful
Listen to this podcast now. Saturday, May 26/07 8pm Aqua BookssongExchange
Saturday, May 5/07 8pm Aqua BooksThe Politics and Spirituality of Hunger in Winnipeg
David Northcott is the Executive Co-ordinator for Winnipeg Harvest Food bank, which he co-founded in 1984. In the federal election of
2004, he was one of the star candidates selected by Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin. Like fellow star candidate Glen Murray, however, his attempt at achieving national office proved unsuccessful. He was defeated by fellow anti-poverty activist Pat Martin, the NDP MP incumbent in Winnipeg Centre.
Northcott received 9285 votes, or about 35% of the total cast. Had he won, Northcott might have emerged as a leading spokesman for the left wing of the Liberal Party.
He was also a founder of the Canadian Association of Food Banks, and has served on the board of the National Anti-Poverty Organization. For his efforts in this field, he has been named a member of the Order of Manitoba.
Northcott worked as the Executive Director for Palliative Care and Hospice Manitoba until he returned to Winnipeg Harvest in May 2006, where he resumed his role as Executive Co-ordinator.
Listen to this podcast now. Saturday, March 24/07 8pm Aqua BooksImages and the Selling of Charity
John Longhurst, Director of Communications and Marketing at Canadian Mennonite University, has 25 years experience in communications with non-profit organizations. He has worked as Associate Editor of the Mennonite Brethren Herald; directed communications for Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Canada and Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA); and as founder and editor of the Dallas (Texas) Peace Times. John is author of the book Making the News: An Essential Guide to Media Relations (Novalis, 2006). He regularly conducts workshops on media relations for non-profit groups. In 1998 he helped organize Canada’s first national conference on how the media covers faith, and helped found Canada’s Centre for Faith and the Media. John is a Faith Page columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press, ChristianWeek (Manitoba) and the Mennonite Weekly Review, and also writes regularly for various church-related publications. Listen to this podcast now. Monday, February 26/07 8pm Aqua BooksTwo Traditions:
Rabbi Lawrence Michael Pinsker, a native of Chicago, Illinois, was ordained by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Previously he has served pulpits in the Conservative movement in locations as diverse as Niagara Falls (New York), Chicago, and San Antonio, Texas. In 1985 he helped found the West End Synagogue, a new congregation on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Rabbi Pinsker accepted the position of Associate Rabbi and Scholar-in-Residence at Winnipeg's Shaarey Zedek in 2004. Rabbi Pinsker holds degrees from Antioch College and Temple University in Philosophy and Religion, and has been invited to teach on general cultural and religious topics as well as on Jewish issues at Niagara Community College, Niagara University, Texas Lutheran College, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, B'nai B'rith Summer Camp Institute of Canada, and at the Spirituality Diversity program at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg. A popular speaker on Judaism in programmes of interfaith dialogue, he reportedly still has thousands more of books and other materials awaiting shipment to Winnipeg to further enrich the life of learning he loves to cultivate. Listen to this podcast now. Saturday, December 2/06 8pm Aqua BooksChristian Music:
Listen to this podcast now. Saturday, October 28/06 8pm Aqua BooksPlaying God:
Listen to this podcast now. Saturday, September 30/06 8pm Aqua BooksThe Immortality of the Soul:
Listen to this podcast now. Saturday, April 22/06 8pm Aqua BookssongExchange Saturday, March 18/06 8pm Aqua BooksThree Minute Tragedies and Musical Catharsis:
Saturday, February 18/06 8pm Aqua BooksThe Ad-Man Meets Jesus:
Saturday, January 21/06 8pm Aqua BooksIn Through The Wardrobe:
Saturday, December 10/05 8pm Aqua BooksSanta Claus:
Saturday November 19/05 8pm Aqua Books Sheep to the Slaughter and Soldiers of God:
Does George Bush speak for Christianity? Or should Christians turn the other cheek when faced with history's Hitlers and Stalins? Saturday October 22/05 8pm Aqua Books Movie Going as Religious Experience
What do films do to people? What do people do to films? From Star Wars to Spiderman, films help identify questions about the universal experience to discern purpose, meaning and vocation as well as insight into the struggle between good and evil. A discussion around the role that films can and do play within culture, and its connection as religious experience. 
Saturday June18/05 8pm The Organ is Dead...Long Live the Saxophone:
Saturday April 30/05 8pm The Psalms, The Blues and the Telling of Truth
Read this transcript now. Saturday March 19/05 8pm Good Friday:
Does God have a blood lust? With help from controversial Catholic theologian James Alison and philosopher René Girard, Loewen will be taking on the thousand-year-old Theory of the Atonement. Read this transcript now. Saturday February 19/05 8pm Jesus as Superhero:
Does God want us to be healthy and prosperous like the TV preachers say? Or is there value in suffering? Read this transcript now. Saturday January 22/05 8pm Our Guitars are Tuned to Despair:
Can we find hope in despair? Read this transcript now. |
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Mark Burch is an author, educator, and group facilitator. He has practised simple living since the 1960s, and since 1995 has been offering workshops and courses on voluntary simplicity. He is a former lecturer at The University of Winnipeg, former Director of the Campus Sustainability Office, and former Co-Director of the Simplicity Practice and Resource Centre. He has been a featured guest on CBC-TV's Man Alive and What On Earth?, CBC Radio's Ideas, Vision TV’s The Simple Way, and a regular radio columnist on Discovering Simplicity for CBC Winnipeg. Mark has written four books on voluntary simplicity, most recently De-junking: A Tool for Clutterbusting. Mark Burch has taught meditation, intensive journaling, and T’ai-chi. He is a global citizen tending an organic garden who lives in Winnipeg.
ideaExchange curator Jamie Howison is a priest of the Anglican Church of Canada and the founding pastor of saint benedict’s table. A graduate of the University of Winnipeg and of Trinity College, Toronto, he has worked in ordained ministry since 1987, serving in parish ministry, as pastoral care at Marymound - a treatment centre for adolescent girls - and as chaplain and dean of residence at St John’s College, Winnipeg.
Passionate about cultivating a critical thoughtfulness around issues of faith and theology, Jamie Howison has planned and hosted ideaExchange at Aqua Books since its inception in January 2005. The original concept for iE was the brainchild of singer/songwriter Alana Levandoski.
Stuart Taylor is currently the Executive Director of International Development Enterprises Canada – a Winnipeg-based non-profit that raises the incomes of families living on a dollar a day through design of extremely low-cost technologies and development of markets that work for low-income customers and producers. Stu holds a Master’s degree in epidemiology from the University of Ottawa, where he developed a keen interest in international health. From 1998 to 2003 he worked with the Canadian Foodgrains Bank as the program analyst, with a focus on the nutritional impact of food aid and food security projects. With his family, he moved to Zambia in 2004 to serve as a volunteer with the Mennonite Central Committee. Together with his wife – an agronomist and former Agriculture Representative with Manitoba Agriculture – he assisted a national church to develop a food security component to its HIV/AIDS programme. They returned to Canada in 2006, at which point he took on his current role with IDE Canada. He has three young daughters and is making steady progress in his facility with crayons, glue and bedtime stories.
With an estimated 27 million victimized around the globe, human trafficking includes everything from forced sexual labor in brothels, to the debt bondage that produces the jeans we wear and the cell phones we put in those jean pockets, to the harvesting of human organs for sale. Next to trading weapons and drugs, trading people produces the greatest profits for international organized crime in our increasingly globalized world.
A complex and troubling issue, we wrestle with the question of how to respond meaningfully and effectively.
Dennis Hiebert is the Chair of the Department of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Providence College. Val Hiebert is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Providence College. Last spring they taught over a dozen workshops in local high school classrooms in an attempt to raise awareness among current youths about human trafficking.
Gerry Bowler received his Ph.D. in History from King's College, University of London, and now teaches medieval and early-modern history at the University of Manitoba. He has published on subjects such as Renaissance monarchy, theological justifications of violence, the religious content of The Simpsons and the relationship between Aristotle and professional wrestling. In addition to co-authoring Europe in the Sixteenth Century (Longman, 1989), Dr. Bowler is a leading authority on the history of Christmas and its cultural significance. His books The World Encyclopedia of Christmas (M&S, 2000) and Santa Claus: A Biography (M&S, 2005) have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Russian.
Aiden Enns was managing editor of Adbusters magazine from 2001 to 2003, and is also the founder of Buy Nothing Christmas. Raised as an urban Anabaptist, he finds hope in struggling for justice. Ched Myers, an activist theologian in California, advises Aiden: “Have one foot in the church and one outside. And keep your weight on the one outside.”
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is an author, speaker and new monastic. He’s written on Christian peace-making, race issues and the church, radical prayer, the new monasticism, and (most recently) on what he calls “God’s economy.”
Christopher Holmes not only teaches theology at Providence College, but also lives and works as a theologian in the local church. He preaches regularly at his home parish of St Margaret’s in Winnipeg, and has been welcomed as a guest preacher at saint benedict’s table.
Bramwell Ryan is a journalist and producer. He specializes in multi-platform content and creates video, audio, print, photographic and web material for media outlets and NGOs.
His stories range from coverage of the largest caribou herd in the world to underage prostitutes in Bangladesh; grave robbers in Haiti to post-tsunami rebuilding in Sri Lanka; the life of a Swiss shepherd to AIDS testing in rural Zambia.
As a content producer and controller, an ex-publisher, ex-editor and ex-producer of newspapers, magazines and radio/television, Ryan is fascinated by the collapse of the media (as we know it). There are parallels between the panic and angst in today’s media and the spiritual exhaustion with the state of the church when Martin Luther grabbed a hammer and headed to the church in Wittenburg.
Kara Mandryk holds a Doctorate in Worship Studies from The Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies, and is Assistant Professor of Worship and Christian Spirituality at Providence College.
Carol Thiessen holds an MSc in Global Ethics from the University of Birmingham, UK (2005), and her dissertation work focused on climate change refugees and the requirements of justice. She currently teaches development ethics in International Development Studies at Menno Simons College, and has written a number of climate change guides for the Manitoba NGO “Climate Change Connection”.
After the release of her first album, Unsettled Down (Rounder Records), in 2005, 
David Pankratz is the Director of the Institute for Community Peacebuilding, a program of Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg. Prior to holding this position, he provided humanitarian assistance in numerous countries, including Zambia for 3 years and Iraq for six months in 2003. An accountant by training, he now focuses on program delivery and administration in areas of peace and conflict, particularly with refugees.
He and his wife, Janet Schmidt, live in a large house in Wolseley which they share with others in a 'household' arrangement. David Pankratz has an MBA from Laurentian University.
Stu Clark is the Senior Policy Advisor at the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, a coalition of Canadian church-related development organizations. As well as being
Canada’s largest food aid programming agency, the Foodgrains Bank also supports broad based food security programming and public policy advocacy in the area of trade policy, aid policy and human rights policy. Stu Clark is the Chair of the Trans-Atlantic NGO Food Aid Policy Dialogue (TAFAD), a consortium on European and North American NGOs dedicated to the reform of the international food aid regime.
The Reverend Dr. David Widdicombe completed his D. Phil. Degree at the University of Oxford where he studied with Prof. Oliver O’Donovan and Prof. Rowan Williams, now Archbishop of Canterbury. Dr. Widdicombe has experience in small town and rural ministry and university chaplaincy and has served on the staff of two Anglican Cathedrals, all in British Columbia. For the past thirteen years he has been the Rector of St. Margaret’s Church, a thriving Anglican parish near the centre of Winnipeg, and teaches church history and systematic theology for St. John’s College, University of Manitoba.
The release of Jaylene Johnson's sophomore CD, “Finding Beautiful” was met with stellar reviews and acclaim, including a Western Canadian Music Award Nomination in 2004. In addition to a spring tour with Juno Award winner, Jill Paquette, she spent the fall of that year touring solo for three months, beginning in Campbell River, B.C. and making her way to the Maritimes by car. On her way home from the East Coast, after finishing a final gig in Thunder Bay, she found herself in a head-on collision with a semi-truck on the TransCanada highway.
The unexpected halt to her career as she knew it, however, turned out to be only a “bump” in her musical road. Despite being unable to self-promote or play live in 2005, her music found its way to several placements through SONY Pictures TV, for shows such as CBS’s Joan of Arcadia and ABC’s Beautiful People, and the DVD release of Season 6 for Dawson’s Creek. With her back pain now in check and her undaunted passion as a singer/songwriter, Jaylene has spent the better part of the year reconnecting with the music community and establishing her
network in the industry. She attended Canadian Music Week in March, spent two weeks co-writing in Nashville in April, and sat on a panel for SOCAN at the NXNE music conference in June. Her music has been featured numerous times on CBC radio and receives regular spins on stations such as Shine FM in Edmonton and Calgary, Winnipeg’s CHVN and Canada’s first Triple A format station, Café 100.7 FM. She has also been rebuilding her live show, performing in and around Winnipeg whenever possible, and played the Trout Forest Music Festival in North-Western
Ontario in August. Currently she resides in Winnipeg where she spent the summer writing for a new project which she hopes will be underway soon. For more info, visit