[PHOTO] The Toronto Spiritualist Temple

The Toronto Spiritualist Temple
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Located on 704 College Street in the middle of Little Italy, the Toronto Spiritualist Temple with its modernistic 1960s church architecture is a church that's part of the Christian Spiritual Ministries Inc. The Church's website describes the congregation's history here.

The founder and first Moderator, Rev. Roy F.C. Stoddard, first established the TORONTO SPIRITUALIST TEMPLE, a predecessor organization, October 6, 1963, under the auspices of THE INTERNATIONAL SPIRITUALIST ALLIANCE.

Branch groups were formed in several cities. Those that have continued are in Aurora, Brantford, Burlington and Ottawa. Interest in other cities will be pursued as qualified ministers are available to accept pastorship.

March 1978, the TORONTO SPIRITUALIST TEMPLE INC. was established as an independent charitable corporation of Ontario, Canada. Branch churches are registered accordingly.

In July 1991, the daycare was established, under the registered name “COLLEGE STREET TOTS”, and is fully licensed and subsidized, provincially and municipally. Located at 706 College Street.

The INSTITUTE FOR SPIRITUAL STUDIES, the education division of the organization, was established in November 2000 in order to develop and coordinate study programs, to evaluate achievement and to certify candidates for the ministry.

In November 2002, the new corporate name was decided upon: CHRISTIAN SPIRITUAL MINISTRIES INCORPORATED (Inc.), of which there is the following interpretation:

* Christian reveals our link to the Infinite through the Christ Consciousness
* Spiritual denotes the eternal and is limitless
* Ministries portrays our commitment to service
* Incorporated indicates that we are a collective of individuals, functioning in unity, under a common mission

This, coupled with the dictionary definitions of Christian, spiritual, ministry and incorporated, most correctly epitomizes Christian Spiritual Ministries Inc.

On May 1st, 2003, this website, I AM Spirit.org, was launched, as we also commenced the celebration of 40 years of service - 40 years since we opened our first set of doors on October 6th, 1963.

The International Spiritualist Alliance's website's description of its theology makes the wider organization look like one of the Spiritualist Churches of the 20th century, distant descendants of the Swedenborgian Spiritualism that was so popular towards the end of the 19th century.

[LINK] "What was Barack Obama like in 1990?"

The Toronto Star has an article from 1990 describing an successful young African-American by the name of Barack Obama who was "the first black to be elected president in the 102-year history of the prestigious student-run law journal," the Harvard Law Review.

Barack Obama in 1990
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Barack Obama stares silently at a wall of fading black-and-white photographs in the muggy second-floor offices of the Harvard Law Review. He lingers over one row of solemn faces, his predecessors of 40 years ago.

All are men. All are dressed in dark-coloured suits and ties. All are white.

It is a sobering moment for Obama, 28, who in February became the first black to be elected president in the 102-year history of the prestigious student-run law journal.

The post, considered the highest honour a student can attain at Harvard Law School, almost always leads to a coveted clerkship with the U.S. Supreme Court after graduation and a lucrative offer from the law firm of one's choice.

Yet Obama, who has gone deep into debt to meet the $25,000-a-year cost of a Harvard Law School education, has left many in disbelief by asserting that he wants neither.

"One of the luxuries of going to Harvard Law School is it means you can take risks in your life," Obama said recently. "You can try to do things to improve society and still land on your feet. That's what a Harvard education should buy – enough confidence and security to pursue your dreams and give something back."

After graduation next year, Obama says, he probably will spend two years at a corporate law firm, then look for community work. Down the road, he plans to run for public office.

The New York Times also covered the story of the young lawyer in 1990.

[LINK] "The 1st black graduate of Queen's saved his alma mater. Will his story be told?"

This article by Elizabeth Church in The Globe and Mail caught my attention, what with its connection to my alma mater.

In a hillside plot at Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery a faded pink headstone marks the grave of Robert Sutherland, who in 1852 became the first black man to graduate from a university in what was then British North America.

"May his devotion towards his alma mater not pass into oblivion," says the Latin inscription on the tall column placed there by Queen's University, the sole beneficiary of Mr. Sutherland's sizable estate when he died in 1878.

More than a century later, a small group of Queen's students are waging a quiet campaign to fulfill that request by having a major building named for him on the Kingston campus. Their efforts hit a roadblock in December after members of the university's board failed to endorse their proposal at a closed-door meeting.

The decision came after one trustee pointed out that a former Queen's principal, David Smith, also does not have a building on campus to honour him, say several individuals who attended the meeting. Others warned that a prime fundraising opportunity might be lost by calling one of the few unnamed buildings on campus after the long-dead benefactor. The issue was referred to Queen's principal Tom Williams for further study.

"It's a no-brainer that this man needs an adequate recognition of his contribution to the university," said Leora Jackson, an undergraduate who also represents students in her position as the school's rector. Last March, Ms. Jackson and three other student leaders decided they would take on the Sutherland project to raise the profile of the remarkable Queen's graduate.

[. . .]

[G]iven Mr. Sutherland's achievements, little is known about him. Born in Jamaica in the 1830s, he had a Scottish father and a Jamaican mother, but it is not clear how he ended up in a prep school in Kingston, Ont., in the 1840s and later at Queen's. Mr. Welsh, a PhD student in history, said he is working with contacts in Jamaica to try to uncover why Mr. Sutherland chose the city and how he paid for his education. What is clear, he said, is that the young man was an exceptional scholar. Mr. Sutherland received several awards in mathematics and Latin while at the university and after graduation became the first black man to study law in British North America, at Osgoode Hall in Toronto.

Details of his working life also are sketchy. It is known that as a lawyer he worked in Berlin, Ont., now Kitchener, a popular settlement for American slaves escaping to Canada through the Underground Railway. One of his specialties was land titles, Mr. Welsh said, and it is believed he worked with former slaves to secure their ownership of unsettled land in the area. He later practised law in Walkerton, Ont.

Mr. Sutherland had no family and when he became ill, Queen's principal George Monro Grant is believed to have paid a visit to him at his sick bed in Toronto. Mr. Grant requested that he help his former school, which was struggling after losing money in a bank collapse. Upon his death, the successful lawyer left all he had to the school: about $13,000, roughly equal to the university's annual budget.

All of that money was used to save the school from a possible union with the University of Toronto, Mr. Welsh said, except for the funds used to cover legal fees and to pay for Mr. Sutherland's grave marker.

For whatever it's worth, I found contemporary Kingston to be much more diverse, ethnically and racially and otherwise, than Charlottetown. Granted that isn't saying much, I do think that Kingston's about as diverse a community as you're going to get in Ontario outside of greater Toronto and Ottawa. I think. Thoughts?

[LINK] "Undesirables?"

Torontoist's Hamutal Dotan, in "Undesirables?", reports that Bill Ayers, the one-time student radical and current expert in urban education famous for his links to Barack Obama, has been prevented from entering Canada.

Bill Ayers, an expert in urban education based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was turned away at the border last night, barred from entering Canada to give a lecture this evening. Ayers was invited by the Centre for Urban Schooling (CUS) at OISE to speak on teacher activism and was slated to deliver his talk at the Isabel Bader Theatre in front of an audience of about five hundred. He is also one of the founders of the Weather Underground, a radical-left group established in 1969 that was best known for conducting riots and bombings to protest various American military actions. Charges related to these activities were dropped in 1973, and Ayers has long been a respected member of the academic community in Chicago: named Chicago Citizen of the Year in 1997, Ayers worked closely with Mayor Richard Daley in attempting to reform the city's school system in the 1990s, and now he is active on the lecture circuit.

Our calls to Canadian Border Services were not returned, nor has CBS issued an official statement on the matter. The Centre for Urban Schooling has been struggling to explain the decision--according to their press release, it was "based apparently on a 1969 conviction during an anti-war demonstration." Ayers did, however, have all his travel documents in order, and the CUS had no indication that his entry into Canada would be challenged. The Centre views the refusal to deny Ayers entry as a "political decision" and fully intends to follow up with the relevant government officials.