We have an election coming up. With that in mind, the Free Press asked some of their columnists to write about the challenges ahead and how the city can become better.

For Tom Brodbeck, the main challenge is finances — and how candidates will pay for their many promises for fixing roads, improving public safety and making transit better.

Rebecca Chambers said that the concerns of inner-city residents need to be taken seriously by those who aspire to work at city hall.

Niigaan Sinclair said the most pressing issue in Winnipeg isn’t construction projects, light-rail transit, public safety, taxes or social services. For him, it’s the city’s relationship with Indigenous people.

Jehovah’s Witnesses jailed in Russia. A shortage of clergy in the United Kingdom. A dispute between the Catholic Church and the Trump administration over a sacred site in New Mexico. Baptist churches in Ukraine providing warmth to people in that country in winter.

These are stories you likely don’t know about. But you could have known about them if you subscribed to the Religion Media Centre.

The Centre is an organization in the United Kingdom that reports on religion and belief in that country — and around the world — in an effort to promote cohesion and understanding in society.

Describing itself as impartial, the Centre doesn’t promote any one religion or belief; it has no editorial line other than “religion matters.”

“We are not numbers.”

That’s what Diaa Ostaz, a reporter in Gaza for ONE Magazine — the official publication of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association — and for ABC News, said earlier this month during a Zoom recording from the territory.

Ostaz, 26, was speaking about the many who have died in Gaza since October, 2023. According to the United Nations, that’s over 73,000 people killed and more than 173,000 injured since that time. At least 20,000 of the dead are children, with more than 44,000 injured.

The numbers of killed and injured in Gaza are staggering, but people there are not statistics, Ostaz said.

The war between the U.S. and Iran has put some of us in an uncomfortable position.

On the one hand, we can feel like cheering on the Iranians as we watch them stand up to the American bully. It’s like the enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the old saying goes.

On the other hand, Iran doesn’t feel like much of a friend because of its terrible human rights record — including its treatment of religious minorities in that country such as Christians, Jews and Baha’is.

Those abuses only seem to be increasing due to the war. The United Nations has condemned the Iranian government for how it is treating religious minorities during this time, saying it is using the war as “a smokescreen to deepen their machinery of repression and carry out crimes under international law with impunity.”

Three Canadian denominations have taken another step towards reconciliation with Indigenous people.

At a June 18 gifting ceremony here in Winnipeg, the United, Anglican and Presbyterian churches made a collective gift of $1.5 million towards the construction of a new permanent home for the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) at the University of Manitoba’s Fort Garry campus.

In so doing, they were following up on the four calls to action for Canadian churches from the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report.

One of them, call No. 59, asked churches that were involved in operating residential schools to support ways to help members of their congregations learn about their church’s role in colonization and residential schools.

In response to growing threats around the world, Canada is increasing its military spending. In March, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the country had met its NATO benchmark of spending two per cent of GDP on defence, with plans to spend five per cent by 2035.

Is this the right direction? Is the money being spent in the best way possible? And what about other forms of international engagement such as aid, diplomacy and peacemaking?

Those were some of the questions raised by 14 faith groups in the United Kingdom in July in response to that country’s decision to increase military spending by 20 billion euros (C$32.5 billion) per year over the next decade.

In a joint letter with other organizations, the groups expressed “grave concerns” about how spending on weapons was being given priority over other ways of promoting global security such as aid, diplomacy and peacebuilding — things that are “essential and underfunded tools in building a safer world,” they stated.