Arts
Still life in old bones
After more than six decades of marriage, love looks like Craig Morrison caring for his ailing wife Irene in Michael McGowan’s Still Mine. But this isn’t your typical sob story about aging.
Vision series explores religious persecution
TORONTO - Religious persecution, whether by mob violence, popular prejudice or state-imposed restrictions on religious practice, is significant in 163 countries, according to the Pew Research Centre’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, with Christianity being the number one target. The world’s 2.2 billion Christians face significant state or popular persecution in 130 countries, says the Pew Forum, while Aid to the Church in Need estimates 150,000 Christians are killed annually because of their faith.
Provocative art aims to show Jesus is bulletproof
TORONTO - When Toronto artist Viktor Mitic began his Bullet Proof collection, he started with the most iconic image of the past 2,000 years: Jesus Christ.
Bishop Ryan’s ‘rock show choir’ going for gold
Students from Hamilton, Ont.’s Bishop Ryan Catholic Secondary School are going for gold — again — at this year’s Heritage Music Festival May 1 to 5.
Student concert inspired by the Earth
TORONTO - The Earth matters to students and staff at Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts — it matters enough to inspire prayer, song and art.
42 inspires
To paraphrase the title of an earlier movie about the national pastime, hate strikes out in the historical drama 42 (Warner Bros.) Writer-director Brian Helgeland's uplifting — if sometimes heavy-handed — film recounts the 1947 reintegration of professional baseball after decades of segregated play.
Easter prepares St. Michael’s Choir School for Rome
TORONTO - Holy Week is always a busy time for students of St. Michael’s Choir School, but four-hour rehearsals this year are not just for their requisite masses at St. Michael’s Cathedral. On Easter Monday, 180 boys from the choir school will board a plane and head to Italy for a series of musical engagements, and the opportunity to sing for Pope Francis.
In the good and true is God, says fiddler MacMaster
As a theologian, Natalie MacMaster favours the toe-tapping, hand-clapping, step-dancing-around-the-kitchen-table school of theological inquiry. The Juno-Award-winning fiddler now has an honorary doctor of divinity degree to back up her theology.
Lionheart brings back 14th-century hymns of praise
TORONTO - The Renaissance has always been worth looking at — all those gorgeous paintings and striking sculptures — but it’s also worth a listen.
‘Theology of dirt’ can stem ecological devastation
Sacred Acts: How ChurchesAre Working to Protect Earth’sClimate, edited by Mallory McDuff(New Society Publishers, 288pages, softcover, $17.95).
Renaissance greats grace AGO
Matthew Teitelbaum, the director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario, calls Revealing the Early Renaissance: Stories and Secrets in Florentine Art “the greatest exhibition of Italian art ever to come to Canada.”
The environmental movement has much to learn from religion
TORONTO - Curbing the effects of climate change and curing the environment will take religiously minded imagination, said author and professor Stephen Scharper.
‘Jesus the Homeless’ home at last
TORONTO - Regis College has a new resident. “Jesus the Homeless,” a sculpture cast in bronze depicting Christ as a homeless man, was installed outside the Jesuit school of theology at the University of Toronto on Feb. 23.