Arts News

TORONTO - Liezl Mejia believes everything happens for a reason. She feels it’s important to have faith and always believe God is there for you. And this is the message Mejia, who plays the main character Mary in St. Joseph Secondary School’s musical Waiting for God, hopes audiences will walk away with.

“I’m blessed to have this opportunity because it made me feel that I was a living testimony to God’s existence,” says Mejia, whose character is literally waiting for God to show up at a bus stop after her fiancé dies of cancer. During her wait, she encounters a variety of characters.

Dennis Gruending’s latest book proves the religious left is still treating the religious right more like bogeymen than the people in the next pew, and that’s a shame.

Gruending sees a pattern in these facts: REAL Women of Canada, a conservative pressure group, urged the Harper Government to terminate Status of Women Canada, a government organization answerable to the Minister for Status of Women. The Christian Family Action Coalition (CFAC) lobbied against funding for KAIROS, an ecumenical social justice organization. The government seriously wounded the Status of Women, and entirely cut KAIROS’ funding.

I first met Berlanty Azzam just outside the Old City of Jerusalem. Pulling up in a taxi, the business administration student had arrived directly from the Gaza Strip. Our cameraman was determined to capture her exact moment of arrival.

It was the first time she had been in Jerusalem in years and, more importantly, the first time that the Israeli government permitted her to leave Gaza since she had been deported there from the West Bank one month earlier. She was now preparing to meet with her lawyers before she contested the deportation at Israel’s Supreme Court.

The following is excerpted from Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity © 2012 by Michael Coren, an award-winning columnist of The Catholic Register. Published by Signal, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

The idea that Christianity is somehow opposed to science, and that individual Christians cannot reconcile their faith to scientific discoveries, is a relatively modern canard, but successfully and damagingly promulgated, usually by people who know very little about science and its history, or about Christianity and Christians. It’s a part of the larger, “Christians are stupid” approach, usually offered by people who are inspired by talk shows rather than texts, and assume that because a television mini-series or popular novel has depicted Christians as being superstitious, foolish, reactionary and frightened of change, such must be the case. The science aspect of all this is particularly nauseating, not only because it is fundamentally untrue, but that it is thrown at Christianity at a time when society is arguably experiencing one of its most credulous and naïve stages and is only too willing to embrace any and every kind of non-scientific or anti-scientific nonsense, from alien invasion stories to ghost myths, and from conspiracy theories to supernatural animals. To paraphrase the great Christian writer G.K. Chesterton, when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in something else, they believe in anything else.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from a program called Notorious Women of the Bible. Actually I was a little put off by the obviously provocative title. It seemed like a ploy to attract some of that large and lucrative audience normally drawn to programs like Desperate Housewives.

Not to disparage Desperate Housewives, but Hollywood depicts notorious women a dozen times a night on television. I was hoping for something a little different.

TORONTO - While residential school survivors told their life stories of trying to piece together family life after childhoods spent in an institution, Hilton Henhawk held a brush above canvass.

As an artist trained at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and an elder in his own right, Henhawk was seeking a picture of native culture and identity that transcends the residential school experience without forgetting the harm his people have suffered.

"It's got to be representative of the native as a whole," Henhawk told The Catholic Register as he began to paint an ideal chief — a leader who could embody the spirit of his people.

TORONTO - Toronto-born jazz artist Matt Dusk originally got into the music business because of a cow.

“I don’t know if you remember, but there was this television commercial with a singing cow for HP,” said Dusk, and as though to jog the memory he croons out a snippet of a jingle in his signature silky tone, complete with “moo” at the end. Although, a more dulcet cow sound is scarce to be found.

Diane Bish must be the busiest woman in the world. Besides being the pre-eminent organ performer of our time, she also composes, has designed her own instrument, runs a television program that’s in its 30th year with over 500 programs in the bank, and is gearing up to perform in Toronto.

None of this seems to tire her out, though. As she readies for her June 6 closing performance at Toronto’s Organix festival, Bish is recovering from a bout of laryngitis and has recently returned from a filming her TV program The Joy of Music, where she took a riverboat from Amsterdam to Switzerland, playing at various ports along the way.

TORONTO - Three years of lay formation training was celebrated on Pentecost Sunday at a quasi-graduation ceremony for 66 people at Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Parish.

During the afternoon event, adults from 30 Archdiocese of Toronto parishes were recognized for their leadership accomplishments, dedication to the community’s faith and personal sacrifice of time.

“We (zeroed) in on basically the foundational foundations of the faith to try and help people understand what it is the Church actually teaches,” said Bill Targett, director of the office of formation who launched the project in 2009.

ORANGE, Calif. - Father Rafael Luevano's life was never been the same, he says, since he spotted that small story in the newspaper almost 20 years ago.

"At the breakfast table one morning back in 1993, I read the briefest of newspaper accounts reporting on the discovery of what would be merely the first of the hundreds of women's bodies that would be found in the desert on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez in northern Mexico.

"In that instant my life changed."