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1 week ago | 
angelusnews.com | Robert Brennan |Heather King |Scott Hahn |Ad rem
I will wager that most people reading this have no idea who St. Fiacre was and what he has in common with the Beatles. The whimsical Beatles song, “When I’m 64,” is a projection into a beautiful future with the singer joyfully looking forward to growing old with his true love, where even the simplest pleasures, such as “doing the garden, digging the weeds,” are things devoutly to be wished for.
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1 week ago | 
angelusnews.com | Robert Brennan |Ad rem
The spate of religious/biblical films and television series in the post-“Passion of the Christ” world have been a mixed bag of successes, failures, and everything in between. Popular culture that “borrows” from sacred Scripture usually churns out things so pious they are unwatchable, or takes such liberties and “reinterprets” what God has inspired, the writers of such faire could be charged with assault.
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3 weeks ago | 
angelusnews.com | Robert Brennan |Msgr. Richard Antall |Ad rem
We’re in the middle of Lent. We edge ever closer toward the most profound week on the liturgical calendar, capped by the holiest day of the year. There is a lot to think about and a lot to pray over in the remaining Lenten season. So, it is only natural that I’m thinking about a movie series with a computer-animated bear in a winter coat and red hat. I am not going to shoehorn the premise of the “Paddington” movies into a treatise on Christian imagery as it pertains to the passion of Our Lord.
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1 month ago | 
angelusnews.com | Robert Brennan |Stefano Rebeggiani |Cindy Wooden |Ad rem
It’s difficult for people today to understand what a monumental cultural impact the film “Gone With the Wind” had on the American imagination. So the scandal the film created when Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler tells Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn,” is also lost in the fog of popular culture’s tenuous memory. A lot of words were not said in films then that are now routine on “family” television shows.
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1 month ago | 
angelusnews.com | Robert Brennan |Ronald Rolheiser |Madalaine Elhabbal |Ad rem
As someone who works in a homeless shelter, I found the newly released film “No Address” to be an earnest, praiseworthy attempt to put a human face on the social catastrophe known as homelessness. I see the human face of homelessness on a daily basis. Sometimes, that face is not so pleasant. It makes it hard to raise money to keep the lights on. That explains why there is a sameness to the messaging that all homeless services organizations use, and that “No Address” drives home.
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1 month ago | 
angelusnews.com | Robert Brennan |Caroline de Sury |Ad rem
If you saw a picture of John Lennox or heard his Irish accent on one of his many YouTube videos, you would be reminded of an old-time movie character actor who always seemed to play bartenders rather than the world-renowned mathematician that he is. You would also learn that Lennox is one of the best Christian apologists on the planet. When I first came upon his videos, I did some math of my own.
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1 month ago | 
angelusnews.com | Robert Brennan |Ad rem
There are no explicit prohibitions against gambling in sacred Scripture, but there certainly are plenty of reminders that some of the basic properties of gambling are not conducive to a solid spiritual life. In the Old Testament we get: “Wealth won quickly dwindles away, but gathered little by little it grows” (Proverbs 13:11).
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1 month ago | 
angelusnews.com | Robert Brennan |Cindy Wooden |Carol Glatz |Ad rem
There are countless ways in which the word of God manifests itself in our daily lives. I have no doubt God tries to get our attention on a regular basis if we only stop and listen. It is easy at every Mass to look at an elevated host and hear the Lord say, “This is my body.” But it is in the ordinary when the extraordinary falls on our heads like an anvil in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. One such “anvil” dropped on my head came from the back seat of a 1997 Toyota Camry. A little backstory may be helpful.
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2 months ago | 
angelusnews.com | Robert Brennan |Kate Scanlon |Ad rem
In 2014, more than 40 million people watched the Academy Awards show on television. Since then, viewership has seen a steady decline, with occasional upticks, but the result is that the under 20 million who watched last year’s broadcast is considered a plus. There was a time that I never missed the Oscars, and a time where I had seen most, if not all, of the best picture nominees.
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2 months ago | 
angelusnews.com | Robert Brennan |Natalie Romano |Joseph Joyce |Ad rem
During the around-the-clock news coverage of the historic fire disaster that befell us, I saw actor Mel Gibson interviewed after learning his multi-million-dollar house was now a pile of ash. He shrugged it off like one of his tough guy movie characters, suggesting the house and everything in it were only “things.” Instead of being gripped with sorrow, he embraced gratitude.
