In his new memoir, Michael Coren recounts his life, from Jewish cabbie's son to Anglican priest
Description
Michael Coren has lived many lives. Born to a Jewish cab driver in England, Coren converted to Catholocism in the 1980s, then Evangelicalism in the '90s; he grew into a bombastic right-wing Christian talk radio and TV personality with shows on the Sun News Network and the Crossroads Television System; then he came back to embrace the Catholic Church, before finally leaving again to become not just an Anglican—but an Anglican priest.
Coren's spiritual malleability—including open repentance for insulting comments he made about queer people decades ago, and the journey he's taken to fundamentally change various political opinions—is at the heart of his new memoir, Heaping Coals: From Media Firebrand to Anglican Priest, published in October 2024. In it, he recounts how he never considered how hard it was for his parents when he left his home country for Canada, and how his perspective on Christian values has changed, while the role of Christiandom has shifted in the broader Western world.
Coren sits down with fellow former broadcaster Ralph Benmergui for a frank talk about his numerous mea culpas, handling backlash on social media and the profound difficulty in forgiveness.
Credits
Host: Ralph Benmergui
Producer: Michael Fraiman
Music: Yevhen Onoychenko
Support The CJN
Subscribe to The CJN newsletter
Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
Subscribe to Not That Kind of Rabbi (Not sure how? Click here)
Growing up, Allan Novak assumed his family was fairly ordinary: modest, witty, hardworking Jewish immigrants who found a new live in Canada after the war. That his mother was one of four sibling survivors was noteworthy, but the outside world did not take notice.
That is, until the siblings all...
Published 11/20/24
Both of Eva Almos's parents were Holocaust survivors. Her mother, from Lithuania, was a kind and gentle soul who went out of her way to uplift strangers and support her daughter. But her father was the opposite: a traditional Greek man with chauvinist ideas who was hardened by the horrors of the...
Published 10/22/24