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.

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.

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.

TORONTO - The Renaissance has always been worth looking at — all those gorgeous paintings and striking sculptures — but it’s also worth a listen.

Sacred Acts: How ChurchesAre Working to Protect Earth’sClimate, edited by Mallory McDuff(New Society Publishers, 288pages, softcover, $17.95).

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.”

TORONTO - Curbing the effects of climate change and curing the environment will take religiously minded imagination, said author and professor Stephen Scharper.

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.

There was severe hardship but no famine in West Africa last year. Crops failed, locusts and other insects consumed farmers’ fields and at least 18 million people suffered through a food shortage.

An ideal book for the Year of Faith