Oh, religion! Along with politics, it's one of the things you're not supposed to talk about in polite company. Well, we at the Ethnic Aisle thought: nuts to that! As if we've ever been polite. And thus the Religion Issue was born.
Photograph by Shaeekh Shuvro
Simon Yau wonders whether the Christian-flavoured Burger’s Priest is kinda weird. Would Hamburgers Halal or Buddha Burgers be as popular?
Does circumcision make you Jewish? Lea Zeltserman is a diversity-loving Torontonian married to a non-Jew who found herself planning a bris for her unborn child.
Kelli Korducki is a “Cultural Catholic:” she misses the rituals, pomp and circumstance, even if she doesn’t entirely believe in the faith.
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.
Heather Li wondered why her family was Catholic. The answer was surprising. Was her family tricked into Catholicism?
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.
Temples, synagogues and street corners: Denise Balkissoon takes you on a tour of a few religious buildings in Toronto that she’s visited.
“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.
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.“
The Wellness Issue
Our Renee Sylvestre-Williams wrote about whether we in Ontario should have more religious, more inclusive religious holidays. We later then had a Twitter chat - or as we call them, an Ethnichat - about the topic. It turned out to be a complicated, provocative topic! For those who couldn't make it, we've selected some of the responses in a Storify below: