Arts
Lorraine Williams' two vocations
MARKHAM, Ont. - If Marshall McLuhan says you ought to be on the left bank of the Seine writing, perhaps you should book a trip to Paris and buy a leather-bound notebook. But that’s not what Lorraine Williams did after her famous English professor told her he thought she might have a career as a writer.
Not that she didn’t appreciate McLuhan’s encouragement of her very young self as she sipped wine at a reception following graduation from Toronto’s University of St. Michael’s College in 1953.
Adding puzzling mystery to Jesus' story

Well-known authors have tried to retell the Jesus story in fictional form over the last few decades. Some, like C.S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, used a highly imaginative and metaphorical setting. Nikos Kazantzakis with his very earthy Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ and Anne Rice with her recent and much more prosaic rendering in the Christ The Lord series both chose a literal retelling of the Gospel.
Finding grace in the meal

In her book Keeping the Feast: One Couple’s Story of Love, Food and Healing in Italy, published this year by Riverhead Books, Butturini bounces the reader between a series of brutal, gut-wrenching events and peaceful, heartwarming stories that centre around food and fellowship — a gripping story of perseverance and hope.
Cambridge artist's monstrance a gift to Benedict XVI

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 Richard family’s love of music, each other, shines on CD

The Richards recently produced a CD of their own religious music — composed, arranged, performed and sung by the entire family.
Documentary shows Canadian connection in Peruvian mining conflict

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.
Music a big part of Fr. Robbie McDougall's ministry

Thirteen years later he would be ordained to the priesthood and for the past 21 years has been leading scores of people across Canada in retreats, parish missions, workshops and Christian concerts.
Fr. Robbie McDougall is a priest based in the Manitoba archdiocese of St. Boniface. He founded a ministry more than 20 years ago to combine his love for sacred music and evangelization.
Convent stay helps shape angel novel

This Catholic tradition is the unlikely inspiration for acclaimed author Danielle Trussoni’s new action-packed thriller and novel-turned-Hollywood movie Angelology.
Plain and simple, killing is wrong
David Dow may not believe in God, but he does believe in justice, love and compassion — and he certainly has a conscience. A death penalty lawyer, he works in Texas for a non-profit organization that attempts to save inmates from capital punishment.
Dow does not try to save the prisoners because he feels for them personally. In fact, he dislikes most of his clients. But, as he makes very clear, they do not deserve to die, and certainly not through a biased, racist and classist criminal justice system.
A poor man's biblical view of economics
{mosimage}Jesus and Money: A guide for Times of Financial Crisis by Ben Witherington III (Brazos Press, soft cover, 192 pages, $21.99)
Ben Witherington knows Scripture and he might know money, but when he brings the two together he falls short of talking sense.
Witherington brings biblical teaching on money to bear on the current economic crisis in Jesus and Money. Witherington is a well-published Evangelical biblical scholar whose works cover a wide range of scholarly debates, presenting them in accessible ways for lay Christian audiences. In this book, however, Witherington presents an incomplete view of biblical texts on wealth and oversteps the bounds of his expertise as he applies these texts to today’s economy.
This incompleteness is ironic, as Witherington explicitly stakes out his position as a “canonical” approach to the Scriptures. That is, he insists Christians may not pick and choose parts of Scripture that appeal to them while ignoring others. This is precisely the problem with his primary target throughout the book: advocates of the “health and wealth” or “prosperity” Gospel who focus on texts which seem to suggest that material wealth is a sign of God’s blessing.
Salt+Light opens a Rome bureau
TORONTO - The Canadian Catholic television network opened a bureau based in Vatican City on March 19. It is a joint effort of Catholic News Service, the Knights of Columbus, H2O News and Salt + Light.
“Topics of interest to the church and to the world’s faithful pose problems for journalists who are often on deadline, face limits on space and worry about tackling topics deemed taboo,” said Fr. Thomas Rosica, CEO of Salt + Light. “We hope our efforts in Rome will help people read beyond the headlines.”
A seraphic look at the single life
A selection of those blog posts from her last year of studies at Boston College are now featured in Seraphic Singles: How I Learned to stop Worrying and Love the Single Life, released by Novalis in March.
Regis College's new homes welcomes its first art show
In front of another stretch of wall Jesuit scholastic Trevor Scott was inspecting sculptor Farhad Nargol-O'Neill's 14 compressed and complex stations of the cross, and was very pleased.