Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday received in audience an Algerian Muslim philosopher known for his commitment to battling religious hatred.
"I was impressed by his welcome and attention, face to face," Mustapha Cherif, an expert on Islam at the University of Algiers.
As a young man growing up in Toronto in the 1980s, I considered Third World Books on Bathurst St. a shrine to which I made weekly pilgrimages.
In these formative years, I, like so many other young men and women who frequented the store, was exposed to writers and thinkers - Audre Lourde, Claude McKay, bell hooks, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Cheikh Anta Diop, C.L.R. James - and a range of ideas such as Pan- Africanism, socialism, Third Worldism, and anti- imperialism. Third World Books was the site of lively, and, at times, heated debate. We were imagining and crafting the world anew, and our tools were the books that graced the store's shelves.
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