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Letter: The peril of judging words without context

Words do matter. But context matters too.

The controversy surrounding Father Norman MacPhee’s remarks at the Cape Breton University convocation illustrates a growing danger in modern public discourse: the tendency to isolate words from their context and then assign to them the harshest possible interpretation.

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(Editor’s note: According to a statement from Cape Breton University: “Father Norman MacPhee made reference to Fatima House in Honduras, referring to it as a “residential school,” and noting that “residential schools don’t get good........

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