My first love was literature, novels and poetry. As a child, I loved story books, mysteries and adventures. In grade school, I was made to memorize poetry and loved the exercise. High School introduced me to more serious literature: Shakespeare, Kipling, Keats, Wordsworth, Browning. On the side, I still read story books, cowboy tales from the old West taken from my dad’s bookshelf.

The heart has its reasons, says philosopher Blaise Pascal, and sometimes those reasons have a long history.

With a permanent president in place for the first time in six years, Regis College is poised to become an international magnet for Jesuits and others seeking to study theology in English, according to incoming president Jesuit Fr. Thomas Worcester.

OTTAWA – Canada’s premier centre for university-level studies of Ukrainian Catholic theology, tradition and liturgy is moving from Ottawa to Toronto’s University of St. Michael’s College.

VATICAN CITY - Although he lives a relatively hidden life in a villa in the Vatican Gardens, retired Pope Benedict XVI continues to study modern theological questions and, occasionally, to comment on them publicly.

For the first time in cinematic history, a film is exploring the life of the child Jesus. The Young Messiah, in theatres March 11, follows the seven-year-old Jesus growing up in Egypt after the Holy Family fled Bethlehem to escape King Herod’s wrath. With news of Herod’s death, Joseph decides it is time to return. The journey, however, is not without its obstacles as Herod’s son assumes the search for the child Saviour.

Journalists, taxi drivers, musicians and motels have all had their economic apple carts upset by the Internet. Theology professors are discovering they too are not immune from the game-changing, democratizing effect of the world wide web.

The richness of a gentle August day was all round. A drive in the countryside featured lush fields ready or almost ready for harvest, with merry little breezes riffling through. Such a day will always make me think of Margaret O’Gara, for I heard the news of her Aug. 16 death during that country drive in 2012.

TORONTO - James Ginther wants the truth. He finds it by getting help from people all around the world.

IQUITOS, Peru - As floodwaters rose with heavy rains in this Amazonian city, Graciela Tejada and her neighbours found greasy slaughterhouse offal, human feces and used hypodermic needles floating practically to their doorsteps.

Now is the time Catholics need to prepare for a new urgency and a new way of thinking about our tradition and the natural world. We have to claim a new or renewed intimacy with creation.

For years the outdated library in the basement of the Bathurst diocesan offices saw more mice and rats than readers, said Bishop Daniel Jodoin. But when pipes burst during the spring thaw, new doors were opened to our nation’s past.

VATICAN CITY - The presidents of the bishops' conferences of Germany, France and Switzerland decided their preparation for the Synod of Bishops on the family could benefit from listening to theologians, biblical scholars and canon lawyers from all three countries, said the spokesman for the German bishops.

The Canadian military’s first Roman Catholic Chaplain General in a decade says his top priority is to recruit more chaplains.

TORONTO - The biggest theological conference in Toronto since 1967 brought more than 200 scholars to the University of St. Michael’s College to look at the same subject theologians were wondering about then — the Second Vatican Council.