The tale of a priest, the devil, a mine and the mine’s private army has hit the Toronto Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival just as Canada is debating whether it should give taxpayer money and government services to mining companies with poor human rights and environmental records outside Canada.

The Devil Operation, produced and directed by Canadian filmmaker and journalist Stephanie Boyd, adds to a list of recent documentaries that feature a Canadian connection, mining, human rights violations and environmental disaster, including Return to El Salvador, the story of how a protester against a Canadian mine turned up dead, and Under the Rich Earth which explores the use of private paramilitary squads by Canadian mining companies in Ecuador.

As always, five English-language books were shortlisted for this year's Governor General's prize for fiction. The majority deal with war. As Canadians struggle with the tragedy of Afghanistan and our military's foggy role in it, this is not likely a coincidence.

TORONTO - The media today, whether it be newspapers, radio, TV, the movies or the web, is a pervasive, and, some might add, invasive fact of life in the 21st century. Is the incredible influence that the secular media have on our lives all the more evidence that we are turning our backs on God?

TORONTO - Salt + Light Television’s Opus Dei: Decoding God’s Work took the best TV documentary award at the Religion Today Festival in Trento, Italy, Oct. 14.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Artist Elizabeth Adams has been making art for churches for 30 years. Her latest commission, titled Unbind Them, is on view at St. Philip the Apostle Anglican Church in Toronto. Despite her years spent studying in Italy, and her love of Romanesque architecture on display in the front hall of her home and studio, almost none of Adams’ work has seen the inside of a Catholic church.

TORONTO - When Ireland Park opens at the foot of Bathurst Street June 21, the 25-metre-long wall commemorating those who died on Toronto’s waterfront in 1847 will display 663 names. Blank spaces have been left for the 461 whose names have disappeared from the historical record.

When he was designing a monstrance around the idea of the Holy Trinity a decade go, sculptor Achim Klaas never thought he would be presenting it to the Pope.

But that’s exactly what happened April 21 when Klaas, 59, met Pope Benedict XVI and gave him the monstrance as a gift just days after the official celebration of the Pope’s five-year pontificate.

The most important information in the bookends of the Bible, Genesis and Apocalypse, is the stuff that tells us who we are. Identity is one of the most deeply religious questions we can ask.

Chimera is an engaging play about a topic which is rarely dealt with in theatre. For that reason alone it is well worth seeing, but it is also well acted and well staged, thought provoking and topical.

TORONTO - One gets the sense from reading selections from Dr. Vincent Lam's Scotiabank-Giller Prize-winning new collection, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, that the author would have made an excellent reporter had his time not already been taken up with medicine and fiction writing.