Friends, Catholics and accidents of geography: Here we are at 55.7433° N latitude and, yes, it’s been a long and sometimes strange but always interesting trip

Photos courtesy of Ken Bodnar, My OCHS, Dave Beirness and Jeanette Kimball

Many people, myself included, subscribe to the notion that even if you haven’t seen a childhood or teenage friend for decades, you can both pick up pretty much where you left off 10, 20, 30, or even 40 years ago. That’s how comprehensive the comfort zone is between you.

I have a handful of friends, mainly from my days growing up in Oshawa in the 1960s and 1970s that fall into that category. It’s quite a small list. In most cases I went to school with them at some point, although many of my classmates I did lose touch with after high school. In fact, it wasn’t until I got an e-mail from Ken Bodnar June 30 that I learned Kathleen Taylor, a classmate all through school from St. Christopher Separate Elementary School on Annapolis Avenue to Oshawa Catholic High School on Stevenson Road North, had just been appointed a member of the Order of Canada.

Taylor, 58, is the chair of the board of RBC and the former president and chief executive officer of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts in Toronto. Thank goodness for Ken or I’d have no idea probably about Kathleen’s recent honour. Congratulations, Katie!

Ken Bodnar’s blog called My OCHS at http://myochs.blogspot.ca/ is the first and last word on our high school days and years. Ken has it all: history, both official and unofficial, trivia, the arcane, milestones, biographical sketches and old photos from his own archive of old negatives, yearbooks and other sources. Ken is the unofficial archivist for all things relating to St. Joseph’s High School, Oshawa Catholic High School, or Monsignor Paul Dwyer Catholic High School, as students now call its hallowed halls.

In a new study published in April in the journal Royal Society Open Science in London, the authors set out to explore “the way life history influences human sociality and the way social networks are structured.

“Our results indicate that these aspects of human behaviour are strongly related to age and gender such that younger individuals have more contacts and, among them, males more than females.

“However, the rate of decrease in the number of contacts with age differs between males and females, such that there is a reversal in the number of contacts around the late 30s. We suggest that this pattern can be attributed to the difference in reproductive investments that are made by the two sexes. We analyse the inequality in social investment patterns and suggest that the age – and gender-related differences we find reflect the constraints imposed by reproduction in a context where time (a form of social capital) is limited.”

“The number of friends a person has can be difficult to quantify, especially when social media has served to widen the definition of ‘friend,’” observed freelance reporter Elsa Vulliamy in a May 23 piece on the study in the London-based Independent, “but these scientists stuck to the basics – they measured how many people subjects contacted via telephone.

“The study shows that both men and women continue to make more and more friends until the age of 25, when the numbers begin falling rapidly and continue to fall throughout the rest of a person’s life,” wrote Vulliamy.

“Researchers found that the average 25-year-old man contacts around 19 different people per month, where 25-year-old women contacted an average of around 17.5 people.

“By the age of 39, however, men and woman are calling an average of only 12 and 15 people per month respectively.

“The rapid decline in the number of people being contacted by both men and women comes to a stop around the age of 80, where the numbers plateau at around eight for women and six for men.”

What I have observed personally is that after my mid-20s, most of my new friends over the years have tended to be professionally or work connected, directly or indirectly. Or at least travel in the same social circles. Sure there are some exceptions to that observation, but not many.

On the other hand, I would venture to say most of my friends up to my mid-20s, when I began working as a daily newspaper reporter, were of greater variety – eventually – in terms of occupational backgrounds. That may well be because none of them really had an occupation, unless playing road hockey or house league baseball counts. Mind you, we did get a few chances to rub shoulders, however, briefly through road hockey and baseball with greatness, even if their greatness was just starting to shine through when we were kids.

I didn’t get to skate with Bobby Orr, hockey’s greatest defenceman. But I did get to play a bit of road hockey with him. My occasional contact with Orr between 1964 and 1966 was limited to some road hockey shinny in our Oshawa neighbourhood.

Orr, from Parry Sound, Ontario, was playing OHA Major Junior A Hockey then for the Oshawa Generals, a farm team of the NHL Boston Bruins. He was between 16 and 18 then. Bobby boarded with a family on Walmer Road, as did Wayne Cashman, the hardworking right-winger, who would go onto captain the Boston Bruins.

Sometimes they’d let us younger kids, who were seven to nine, join in. Bobby and Wayne were like that.

Hockey was our lives. Every Saturday meant a dinner of steak and fried onions at 4 p.m. After dinner it was off to mass at St. Gregory’s for 5 p.m., and back home again only to be knocking on Mike Byrne’s door at 6 p.m. to “take shots” with him on net. Mike shot left. I used a right-handed Hespeler. I am quite convinced that childhood friendships like I had with Mike Byrne are largely accidents of geography, as it were. There is a common saying that while you can’t choose your family, you can choose your friends. Maybe. Sort of. At least after you’re old enough mid-high school to get a driver’s licence or later when you’re off at college or university. But the pool or circle you are going to choose friends from when you are say between six and 15 is going to be based largely on geographic proximity to where your family lives, likely within walking distance. Accidents of geography. Sure you can make choices within that pool or circle; not everyone within it is going to be your friend, but what friends you do have as a kid are going to, for the most part, come from within it.

In 1972, Mike Byrne and I were both 15 and coached a Nipigon Park house league baseball team, which included future Winnipeg Jets’ hockey legend Dale Hawerchuk, then nine-years-old. Unlike road hockey, where we had been the youngsters hanging out with Orr and Cashman, in baseball the reverse age factor was in effect for baseball. We were the old guys. The coaches.

Last Thursday, I saw my old friend Dave Beirness, from Oshawa. He was in Winnipeg for a few days and rented a car and made the 750-kilometre drive up Highway 6 to Thompson for an overnight visit. I’ve known Dave since about 1974.

In the spring of 1976 we both drove white company-owned Plymouth Dusters delivering pizzas for Mother’s Pizza Simcoe North in Oshawa for $2.65 per hour plus tips. Those beasts could just fly! What pizza company delivers in that cool a car today? Or for that matter, what pizza company has a fleet of staff delivery vehicles of any kind? “I’ve always said it was the best pizza restaurant with good food!” Dave said in an e-mail back in 2013. “I even loved working for them, even if I had to drive a Plymouth Duster!!!”

You can imagine how pleased we both were then to read a few years ago, around the same we re-connected in 2013 actually, that the iconic Canadian pizza parlour chain from the 1970s – with its swinging parlor-style doors, Tiffany lamps, antique-style chairs, red-and-white checked gingham tablecloths, black-and-white short silent movies shown on a screen for patrons waiting for their meal to enjoy, root beer floats and pizzas served on silver-coloured metal pedestal stands, was to be reopened by two local entrepreneurs, Brian Alger and Geeve Sandhu, in April on Queenston Road in Hamilton, Ontario. By all accounts they are doing well with the venture.

Mother’s Pizza was founded in 1970 by three partners, Grey Sisson, Ken Fowler and Pasquale Marra, and got its start in the Westdale Village area of Steeltown. The chain eventually grew to about 120 locations in Canada, the United States and England.

Sisson, Fowler and Marra sold their stake in Mother’s Pizza in the mid-1980s, after taking the company public. In 1986 there was a leveraged buyout and Jerry White became chief executive officer. He sold franchises to a group of Toronto Blue Jays players but revenue began to plummet.

Little Caesars bought some assets of the Mother’s Pizza chain when it was in receivership in 1989, while existing franchisees also had the option to purchase their restaurant outright.

Locations began to close a few years later, including the landmark first one in Westdale in 1992, although one Mother’s Pizza franchise from the old days has apparently hung on all these years at 10 Country Hills Landing NW in the Beddington Mall in Calgary, making it something of a cult favourite for Mother’s Pizza aficionados.

Dave and I went to different high schools (R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate for Dave, while I was across the street at what was then Oshawa Catholic High School) but in the fall of 1976, months after our pizza delivery experiences, we both wound up heading off to Trent University.

The last time I saw Dave before July 7 was 24 years ago in July 1992 at a Sunday barbecue at his place in Oshawa before I headed down to North Carolina for a week. Dave went on from university to be an elementary school teacher in the Durham Region for many years before retiring in 2011.

While Dave is not on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook (except for trolling his wife’s Facebook page occasionally when curiosity gets the best of him) he does Google searches and uses email. He tracked me down in Thompson almost 3½ years ago now when I was editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News.

It started with an e-mail I received at work on Feb. 5, 2013: “Dave Beirness here! I have finally (I think) found out where you are. Ron G. and I were both thinking about you and your whereabouts during our high school reunion this past fall.

“We have a lot of catching up to do so keep in touch and please give me a home email address so I don’t have to correspond through your work address.

“P. S. I knew it was you when I saw your picture. Your head still has the same tilt.” Dave calls it my “thinking” pose. Friends like Dave can get away with implying work email really wouldn’t be appropriate to use from here on out because of the possible nature of the ensuing correspondence, and also remark on the tilt of your head in your newspaper photo they spotted in your online column without sounding offensive, but rather simply candidly familiar.

It’s rather refreshing because who actually tells you how it really is after you reach a certain age and stage of life? Your spouse or partner? OK, sure. And your former university roommates, that’s who.

Dave and I have shared more than four decades of friendship from high school days in Oshawa and delivering pizzas for Mother’s Pizza through being roommates off-campus from September 1977 to April 1978 at a townhouse at 1100 Hilliard Street in Peterborough, along with Ron Graham, another friend from Oshawa, while we were at Trent University in Peterborough.

While not all former roommates considered themselves friends (I had several excellent roommates who were just that and not really friends per se) they were the people who lived with you under the same roof when you were 19, 20, or 21-years-old, or whatever. In many cases, they were the first non-family, non-related people we lived with as young adults after leaving home.

A photo from that academic year, taken no doubt after a night of hard studying, shows me with Dave in my room and what appears to be a mickey of Canadian Club rye in one hand and a libation in the other. The colourful shirt is my dad’s, which was his favourite cottage shirt at Lake Simcoe, and which I somehow must have convinced him to donate to his son for university.

The purple and gold headboard were also my dad’s handiwork. As a teenager in Oshawa, I had some fondness for both the UCLA Bruins basketball team and the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings, both of which were sporting purple and gold uniforms in those days, so I convinced my father to paint my bedroom at 537 Nipigon Street in Oshawa, along with some of the furnishings … purple and gold, of course. I remember the realtor and my father discussing just how many coats of paint it might take to cover over my inspired idea (especially the purple) when my parents retired and put the house up for sale in June 1976. It seems some of the furnishings went off to university with me and escaped any repainting.

Sitting out in my backyard late in the afternoon last Thursday with Dave, and then later at Santa Maria Pizza & Spaghetti House on Station Road (where else would ex-Mother’s Pizza drivers go for dinner but to a pizza joint?) and Pub 55 (as in Thompson at 55.7433° N latitude) did yield several surprises though, as we put back a couple of Shock Top Belgian Whites and other libations.

While some of the conversation inevitably trended to things like “whatever happened to who?” questions back and forth, I learned a couple of things about Paul Sobanski, who is a mutual friend, but one Dave has kept in touch with over the years, while I sort of lost track of Paul. Truth is I’ve known Paul probably 10 years longer than Dave. I met Paul when we were six and seven-years-old and he lived in the next block down from me on Nipigon Street in Oshawa. I met Mike Byrne the same year. He lived on the same street between Paul and me.

Paul went off to Queen’s University a year before I finished high school, if I recall correctly (again, like Dave, Paul was at R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate, while I was across the street at Oshawa Catholic High School) to study engineering.  From our conversations before he went off to university, it seemed Paul wanted to pursue engineering at Queen’s and then maybe do some specialized work at General Motors Institute (GMI) in Flint, Michigan before launching his career with General Motors Canada at the plants in Oshawa. In fact, during my summers working at GM in Oshawa as a university student from 1976-1979, I heard that Paul was also working elsewhere in the plants for the company at least some of those summers.

So not seeing Paul, I simply assumed his trajectory put him on a 30-year or so career with General Motors that only would have ended a few years ago with retirement.  Journalists learn early on never to assume anything. Perhaps that rule should be extended to friendship also; Dave, when he stopped laughing, told me Paul had only worked for General Motors for the first three or four years of his career perhaps in the 1980s, before heading off to work as an engineer outside the automotive industry. Now Paul has indeed retired. To Peterborough. A place I lived for years and to which Paul had no known connection prior to retirement. At least that I know of. But I won’t assume anything.

Before he ventured north last week, Dave’s wife remarked to him I was a rather prolific poster of Catholic articles on Facebook. Which is quite true. Dave was nonplussed. “John’s always been a Catholic. He went to Oshawa Catholic High School,” Dave said his reply was. Dave himself is Protestant or perhaps what might more likely be described today as among that growing cohort pollsters describe as ”nones” (as opposed to nuns). While my Protestant friends went mainly to R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate, part of the public school system, a good number of my Catholic friends in what was then known as the “separate school” system wound up transferring to R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate after completing Grade 8 at St. Christopher Separate Elementary School or even more so after Grade 10 at Oshawa Catholic High School, spending their last three high school years at R.S. McLaughlin Collegiate for Grades 11, 12 and 13, as Catholic schools in the 1970s in Ontario were only taxpayer-supported as far as the end of Grade 10.

After that they were considered private schools and parents were required to pay tuition, which in the early 1970s, was running at about $300 per year, I believe. It sounds like a modest sum, and while it wasn’t prohibitively expensive for most, it was at the same time not an inconsiderable expense for Catholic parents who were middle-class blue collar wage earners making under $4 per hour on average in 1973, along with the added costs of mandatory school uniforms – grey flannel pants and navy blue blazer and tie for the boys and white blouse and blue kilt for the girls.

According to Statistics Canada historical data, the average manufacturing wage earner in Ontario in 1973 made $8,042 in annual salary, which works out to $154.56 per week or about $3.87 per hour for a 40-hour work week. So $300 in private annual tuition for a Catholic high school for senior grades represented almost two week’s annual salary. It was a sacrifice for many Catholic families. Other Catholic students, however, transferred from the Catholic to public system in the early 1970s for philosophical reasons flowing from the great social changes sweeping the Catholic world in those early years after the end of the Second Vatican Council, while others transferred simply for reasons of being with their peers and friends, if the majority were in the public system. The reverse occurred, too, as a small number of Protestant families sent their children to the private Catholic high school system, attracted not by Catholicism per se, but rather a sense, justified or not, that Catholic schools had a somewhat higher quality of education and more rigorous discipline.

I’m not sure how reassured Dave’s wife must have been when he went onto to tell her that Paul Sobanski had told him as kids I used to excitedly want to talk to him about the Second Vatican Council, which ended on Dec.8, 1965, when I was eight, and had opened on Oct. 11, 1962, when I was five. Mind you, as a kid, my idea of fun late on a Saturday afternoon at the cottage at Lake Simcoe, near Beaverton, Ontario and down the road a small piece from Orillia and Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock’s somewhat fictional, somewhat true Mariposa setting for his 1912 classic Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, was walking the beach road past the Talbot River and down to the blue Toronto Star “honour” coin box and buying the unbelievably fat Saturday Star. My main interest was the “Insight” section and the rotogravure colour-printed Star Weekly magazine.

More than four decades of friendship with Dave. It’s been a long and sometimes strange but always interesting trip.

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Is coming home a geographical place or place of the heart? Perhaps it is some of both

 

 

What does “coming home” mean?

A friend of mine from Minnesota, long a union mover-and-shaker in Washington, D.C., recently wrote that “You Can’t Go Home Again, written by Thomas Wolfe, made it clear what this tension is that I feel. After 21 years gone from Minnesota I feel an existential angst when ‘coming home.’

“It took me many years to accept that it wasn’t home anymore – Maryland is. I tend to be overly sensitive to things. Moving away was the hardest thing I have ever done (not involving losing people to death and a couple … of other ways.) It has become almost a tortuous trip full of ‘dead memories,’ things that were real, or did I see them in a movie – and why was I in that movie too?

“I’ve come to understand places as having their own weight or wavelength. When I found out a few years back that gravity actually fluctuates around the globe, it made sense to me. I’m rambling I know – but have others felt this way too? Do you have a hard time returning to a place? In the end I know moves can be very important and you can grow from them. I also think Americans move too much and also lose a lot in the process. In the end I can’t square it exactly, but I too have learned you can never really go home again.”

Thought provoking questions, all, to be sure. Where and what indeed is “home”?

I grew up in Southern Ontario in Oshawa, just east of Toronto. Within five months of my going off to university in 1976, my dad had retired from General Motors and my parents retired away from there. Suddenly a place I had taken for granted as home wasn’t so much anymore, and never has been since. I unexpectedly but quickly lost most of my sense of connection to Oshawa. Some 40 years on I’ve seldom been back. Since leaving Oshawa, I’ve lived and worked across much of Canada – from Nova Scotia to the Northwest Territories – as well as spending time living in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and North Carolina. For the last nine years, I’ve lived in Thompson in Northern Manitoba. Yet on some level – time and tribe perhaps – Oshawa and Ontario will always be home. I can close my eyes but for just a minute and it is 1974 again, and I know exactly where I am and who I am with, and they know me in ways others never will, as the music on the AM radio band provides the soundtrack for our lives. As do train whistles.

I’ve always found them to have a haunting, slightly distant sound that engages the soul instantly. All through my childhood, growing up in Oshawa, an east wind invariably meant two things: You could hear the train whistle from the CN tracks well south at Bloor Street, and rain, long steady rain, was an hour or two, not much more, away. You could not hear the train whistle at any other time from the house I lived in from the age of six to 19, and while it rained at other times, especially with summer thunderstorms, with winds from other directions that was more unpredictable. An east wind started the clock running for the countdown to rain. For me, east winds and train whistles are so internalized they’re still part of my chronobiology at some deep level.

Years removed from Oshawa, I would still notice the haunting but not at all unwelcome sound of the train whistle when I would visit my mother, who lived near Amherst, Nova Scotia, on Fort Lawrence Road, east of Exit 1, as the Via Rail Ocean passenger train, en route from Montréal to Halifax, or Halifax to Montréal, crossed the saltwater Tantramar marshes between Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, a stone’s throw from the Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America.

The saltwater Tantramar marshes, sometimes referred to singularly as the Tantramar Marsh, is a very special place indeed, and was even long before the first train crossed it in the 19th century. Memory surrounds you everywhere in Nova Scotia. This is the soil my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured on. Like being a teenager in Oshawa in the 1970s, again, all I have to do is close my eyes for but a moment listening to Lorena McKennitt’s The Mystic’s Dream and I clearly hear the words, “All along the English shore,” and in my mind’s eye I see the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians.

This is Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar marshes on the Isthmus of Chignecto, just west of the Missiguash River. This is the demarcation line between Fort Lawrence and Fort Beauséjour, New France and British North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

Nowhere, of course, in the song are the words, “All along the English shore” actually heard, not even as a mondegreen where you mishear the lyrics to a song, which is a sort of aural malapropism, where instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. No, this, as it was for Marcel Proust, is remembrance of things past.

While my hometown of Oshawa is a lot bigger (and for that matter older) than Thompson, it was in many ways, at least as I recall it from growing up there, a lot like Thompson in being a working-class blue-collar town.

The men in my Nipigon Street neighbourhood – guys like Earl Kirkpatrick, Snow Willson and my dad – were often working six days a weeks, with overtime on Saturdays when they were on day shift. If they were on nights, they’d be busy flooding the Nipigon Park outdoor rink at 2:30 a.m. – after their eight-hour night shift ended and they went to bed – so us kids could skate the next day. That’s how I remember my dad.

Instead of going to Inco or Vale and down into a mine or working at the surface in a refinery or smelter, the men (and they were invariably men back then) I knew in the 1960s carried their metal lunch pails into the factory at General Motors to build cars and trucks. When they were leaving at the end of their shift, they punched the same clock they had coming in. Every time I hear Men of the Deeps sing Rise Again or Working Man, my union resolve deepens just a little bit more.

I spent the first of five summers as a university student, beginning in 1976, working in that very same West Plant in the high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department my dad had retired from the year before. Some of his buddies were still there; some I had heard about for years and met for the first time.

My first job was hammering large wooden crates together. It was just an amazing cavernous building that old West Plant with great big windows and wooden floors. I remember once going across the tunnel (or bridge, I’m not sure now how it was referred to) connecting the West Plant and the North Plant over Division Street. Later that summer, I hung rads in the rad room of the old North Plant across the street.

You Can’t Go Home Again tells the story of George Webber, a novice author, who writes a book that makes frequent references to his home town of Libya Hill, a fictional small town set in the South, to find it is no longer the peaceful place of his youth. The town is caught up in frenzied real estate speculation that precedes the stock market crash of 1929. The book is a national success but the residents of the town, unhappy with what they view as Webber’s distorted depiction of them, send the author menacing letters and death threats.

Wolfe took the title, You Can’t Go Home,  from a conversation with Australian-born journalist Ella Winter, who had remarked to him: “Don’t you know you can’t go home again?” Wolfe then asked Winter for permission to use the phrase as the title of his book.

The title acts as counterpoint to nostalgia, which is so often weighted with both inaccurately positive bias and an inability to appreciate the changes wrought by time on places and people we remember as static and permanent. In general terms, it means that attempts to relive youthful memories are never as fulfilling as during their initial creation. Webber realizes: “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

Up here in Thompson, we tell people home is where the heart is. Raymonde, the head cashier at Giant Tiger here, has built a new home with her husband to retire to in a couple of years back in Campbellton, New Brunswick, on the south bank of the Restigouche River opposite Pointe-à-la-Croix, Quebec.  Another friend and colleague from University College of the North here, who arrived in Thompson in July 2007, the same month and year I arrived, is soon decamping to return home to the Membertou First Nation, just outside Sydney, Nova Scotia on Cape Breton Island.

Others, perhaps surprisingly stay on here long after retirement. A friend from Grand Falls-Windsor, a town located in the centre of Newfoundland and Labrador, has told me many times he and his wife go back for visits every few years but have no interest in moving back to the Rock with their children and grandchildren in this area, where they were born and raised. Maybe Brandon, he says, thinking about moving some day maybe, because the winter is milder, if not less stormy in Southern Manitoba.  It’s a not unfamiliar story. Another friend saw her parents move this past winter, after five years of retirement back home in St. John’s, to Sanford in the Rural Municipality of Macdonald, just a few kilometres southwest of Winnipeg in south central Manitoba. Grandchildren and children – family – trumping other considerations over the longer run.

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Sixth annual Real to Reel Film Festival about to kick off in Winnipeg

Paul Boge gets it. He runs the Winnipeg Real to Reel Film Festival like, well, a film festival. Just because the films are shown in a church and are mainly new offerings on the market from what might be loosely called the Christian movie genre – a hot genre even in secular Hollywood these days – Boge doesn’t give them a free pass, as it were. If your film has copyrighted music or other material subject to copyright protection and you’re a filmmaker, you better have arranged all the necessary copyright clearances, or it won’t be screening this week at North Kildonan Mennonite Brethren Church on Gateway Road in Winnipeg. Boge, a consulting mining engineer and capital project manager with the family firm Boge & Boge Consulting Engineers in Winnipeg, wears many hats, and is a member of the church.

This year’s festival runs on four screens from today through Feb. 21, opening at 7 p.m. with three flicks, including A Matter of Faith, from Rich Christiano’s Five & Two Pictures, where a college classroom clash between a biblical creation-believing freshman and a professor teaching evolution (a popular theme in the last few years, also canvassed in God’s Not Dead and God’s Not Dead 2, being released in April) is showing in Theatre 1. You can watch a YouTube trailer for A Matter of Faith here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiRGdJ2uPwk Christiano, a former Catholic from Waterloo, New York, became a born-again Christian in 1980. One of his early influences after his conversion experience was John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church.

Two of the other feature films showing at this year’s festival are Henline Productions of Loveland, Ohio’s  Polycarp: Destroyer of Gods, based on a novel authored by Pastor Rick Lambert, a co-pastor of Grace Bible Church in Cincinnati, and War Room, from Alex and Stephen Kendrick.

St. Polycarp, one of the three chief Apostolic Fathers, was a second century bishop of Smyrna, one of the new centres for the Christian world after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and located in modern-day Turkey on the Aegean Sea, was martyred at the age of 86 in 155 AD on the orders of Statius Quadratus, proconsul of Asia.

Born in 69 AD, the real-life Polycarp was an important historical link to that Sub-Apostolic Age, during which it was possible to learn by word of mouth what the Apostles taught from those who had heard them for themselves.

But sorting out fact from fiction when it comes to the life of Polycarp of Smyrna, like so many ancient saints from the Sub-Apostolic Age, is no simple task. Much is simply shrouded in the mists of time and certainties are in short supply. Even the historical fact that Statius Quadratus was the proconsul of Asia at the time who ordered Polycarp’s martyrdom is not beyond dispute, nor is the exact year of Polycarp’s death. Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus wrote it was St. John the Apostle himself who made Polycarp a bishop.

The main sources of credible historical information concerning St. Polycarp are the Epistles of St. Ignatius; Polycarp’s own Epistle to the Philippians; sundry passages in St. Irenaaus; and the Letter of the Smyrnwans recounting the martyrdom of St. Polycarp. The Epistle of St. Polycarp was a reply to one from the Philippians, in which they had asked him to address them some words of exhortation.

Four out of the seven genuine epistles of St. Ignatius were written from Smyrna. In two of these – Magnesians and Ephesians – he speaks of Polycarp. The seventh Epistle was addressed to Polycarp.

Just before his martyrdom in 155 AD, Polycarp was urged by Quadratus, or whoever the proconsul was, to curse Christ, leading to Polycarp’s celebrated reply: “Fourscore and six years have I served Him, and He has done me no harm. How then can I curse my King that saved me?”  Polycarp was then burned and stabbed to death.

Henline Productions, formerly J&J Productions, is the brother and sister Protestant evangelical homeschooled filmmaking team of Joe Henline, 20, and Jerica Henline, 22.

In 2010, they entered the five-minute short video No Time in the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival and finished as semi-finalists in the competition.

Their next film, The Forgotten Martyr: Lady Jane Grey, shot in 2011 was entered into the 2012 San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival and won them the Best Young Filmmaker award, and was runner-up in the Short Film category. Awards from other independent Christian film festivals included, Best Young Filmmaker at the GloryReelz Christian Film Festival, Golden Crown Award (Best Student Production) at the International Christian Visual Media Festival and Best Young Filmmaker at The Attic Film Festival.

In their script for Polycarp, a 12-year-old slave girl, Anna, is rescued and adopted by Christians in 2nd century Smyrna and befriended by the aged Polycarp. You can watch a brief 1:52 YouTube trailer for it here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IjPlffZVy8

In real life, of course, Polycarp was supposedly born into slavery, purchased as a young boy, and raised by a godly woman in Ephesus.

As Anna is taught by Polycarp and her new family, she struggles to reconcile her beliefs with those of the Christians. When the Roman proconsul demands that all citizens worship Caesar to show their allegiance to Rome, Polycarp and the Christians stand for their faith against the growing threat of persecution, and Anna is forced to choose whom she is willing to live – and die – for.

Polycarp was awarded Best Feature Film, Audience Choice Award and Best Original Music Score at the second Christian Worldview Film Festival last March at Castle Hills First Baptist Church, also in San Antonio.

Tulsa native Garry Nation received the award for Best Lead Actor in a Feature Film for his performance as Polycarp.

A family-friendly drama, War Room is about learning to fight the right kinds of battles. Filled with humor, wit and heart, it follows Tony and Elizabeth Jordan, a middle-class couple, and their daughter, Danielle, as they struggle through personal, marital and spiritual issues. Their lives are forever changed after Elizabeth meets an elderly widow who helps her develop a secret prayer room in her home. You can watch a YouTube trailer for it here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIl-XY9t_Lw

The Kendricks, who are both associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, got their start in 2003 with their first movie Flywheel. They conceived the idea for Flywheel in the spring of 2002 after they saw the results from Barna Research Group demonstrating empirically popular culture movies and television shows are more influential in American society than the Christian church.

Flywheel, which tells the story of a dishonest used car salesman who comes to grips with his need for God, relied on untrained actors from the Sherwood Baptist Church congregation to play all the roles, debuting as an independent film on a single Carmike Theatre screen in Albany, Georgia in April 2003 and ran for six weeks initially, often outdrawing Hollywood films on adjoining screens.

Then came Facing the Giants in 2006 and in 2008 Fireproof, made on a $500,000 budget, but generating more than $33.4 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing independent film of the year. Their most recent film until the release last summer of War Room, Courageous, was released in September 2011. It was produced with a budget of $2 million and has grossed more than $34.5 million to date. Facing the Giants, which grossed more than $10 million; Fireproof, which grossed more than $33 million; and Courageous have a combined gross of nearly $80 million at the box office, with a combined budget of less than $4 million.

The Kendicks wrapped up principal photography on their fifth movie, War Room, in July 2014 in and around Charlotte, North Carolina. It is their first project independent of Sherwood Pictures, the movie ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church. It being produced  by Kendrick Brothers Productions with Provident Films and AFFIRM Films in distribution partnership. Provident Films, a division of Provident Music Group, develops, produces and markets faith-based films. Nashville-based Provident Music Group is a division of Sony Music Entertainment. AFFIRM Films is a division of Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions (SPWA), a Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) company, which is a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment Inc., which in turn is a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation.

It is also the first Kendrick brothers project shot outside their hometown of Albany, Georgia. It drew more than 1,000 volunteers from 85 churches in the Charlotte area who stepped up and reached across denominational lines to support the production. The Kendricks remain associate pastors at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia.

Each Kendrick brothers film explores a subject important to Christians and the Christian life: personal integrity in Flywheel; resilient faith in Facing the Giants; loving marriages in Fireproof and heroic parenting in Courageous. War Room’s focus on prayer strategically highlights a subject of interest to a majority of Americans. According to a National Opinion Research Center survey on frequency of prayer, nearly 90 per cent of Americans claim to pray regularly. Some 60 per cent say they pray at least once a day – for Christians, that number grows to 84 per cent, according to a U.S. News and Beliefnet online poll. Almost 80 per cent of American Christians say they pray most often at home.

One of the most frequently asked questions that filmmakers ask about the festival, according to the online FAQ on Winnipeg Real to Reel Film Festival’s website is: “Does my movie have to be a Christian movie?”

The answer is, “No. While there are varying definitions of ‘Christian’ movies, WR2R is interested in both Christian movies and also movies that are not expressly Christian but feature challenging, encouraging themes that highlight interesting stories.”

The festival is a mix of larger budget films from some of the bigger American players in the Christian movie-making genre – such as Pure Flix Entertainment, Sherwood Pictures, Kendrick Brothers Productions and Provident Films – and local made-in-Manitoba efforts, including Winnipeg teenager Joshua Hood’s six-episode Shaw Cable TV-produced television project called Millworth, which takes a look at life inside Winnipeg’s worst fictional high school, and is entered in the Short Films 2 category screening Saturday at 6 p.m. and again Sunday at 1:30 p.m. with the filmmakers present.

Boge’s FireGate Films made the 2006 feature-length movie Among Thieves, with Boge writing, directing and producing the film, which explores the possibility the end is in sight for the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency, as Gulf Arab countries including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar have contemplated ending dollar dealings for oil and moving to a basket of currencies including the euro and Chinese yuan or renminbi. The last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than U.S. dollars was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990.

Perhaps at least partially as a result of making Among Thieves, Boge has an interest in young filmmakers, who may be long on promise but short on cash. The festival FAQ notes: “My film is low budget. Do I stand a chance?”

The reply: “YES!!! Story trumps budget. If you have a great story but not a lot of cash you will be considered for the festival.”

Among the documentaries airing is Mully, directed by Austin, Texas-born director, playwright and actor Scott Haze. Mully premiered at the Austin Film Festival last November.

Charles Mulli was a poor abandoned six-year-old Kenyan boy who grew up to become successful, powerful and very rich, but decided to sell all he had to rescue street children whose condition reflected his own childhood. Saving one child has turned into rescuing thousands for Mulli.

The story has remained near and dear to Boge’s own heart.  He has travelled to Kenya and done volunteer teaching with Mulli’s organization and written two books about his African experiences: Father to the Fatherless: The Charles Mulli Story; Hope for the Hopeless: The Charles Mulli Mission; and most recently, The Biggest Family in the World, chronicling the life of Charles Mulli in an illustrated children’s book and published in December 2014. Faye Hall, administrative assistant for Winnipeg Juno-winning singer-songwriter Steve Bell’s Signpost Music and IncarNATION Ministries, spent two years creating 32 paintings that capture Mulli’s life for Boge’s The Biggest Family in the World.

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Who’d a thunk it? Readers says it’s a toss-up when it comes to whether robo-journalists write better than human journalists

OK … we’ve all heard the phrase “fishwrap” applied derogatorily by critics assessing the quality of newspapers wherever they live from time to time.  Methinks some weeks that does a disservice to how my favourite pickerel from Paint Lake should be treated, but it isn’t just local newspapers that are problematically bad at times. Take the venerable Associated Press, affectionately known by working journos simply as the AP. They managed to move this alert last Wednesday: “BC-APNewsAlert/17. New York Yankees Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Bear has died. He was 90.” Actually, Yogi Bear, the beloved Hanna-Barbera cartoon character is only 57. He was created in 1958, making his début as a supporting character in The Huckleberry Hound Show, and was the first breakout character created by Hanna-Barbera and was eventually more popular than Huckleberry Hound.

Yogi Berra, the beloved baseball player, on the other hand, was created in 1924 and born in 1925. A native of St. Louis, Berra signed with the New York Yankees in 1943 before serving in the U.S. Navy in the Second World War. He made his major league début in 1946 and was a stalwart in the Yankees’ lineup during the team’s championship years in the 1940s and 1950s.

Berra was a power hitter and strong defensive catcher. He caught Yankees’ pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game on Oct. 8, 1956, in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, the only perfect game in Major League Baseball (MLB) post-season history. After playing 18 seasons with the Yankees, Berra retired following the 1963 season. Berra was also famous for his string of truisms, tautologies and malapropisms, including “Nobody goes there any more; it’s too crowded,” along with, “It ain’t over til it’s over” or, “Anyone who is popular is bound to be disliked,” as well as, “Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true” and, “If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.” My personal favourite, which I managed to inject into several columns, editorials or news stories over the years, was the well-known, “This is like déjà vu all over again,” which I had used again as recently as Aug. 24, less than a month before Yogi Berra died.

It was while I was pondering how a boo boo like the Yogi Bear/Yogi Berra obituary mix-up happens in journalism (I suspect the eagle-eyed Ranger John Francis Smith from Jellystone Park would have known the difference) that I came across the latest information on robo-journalism (not to be mixed up with Tory robo-calls during the 2011 federal election campaign, I should point out to my friends still remaining in Canadian journalism.) Turns out that unlike most human journalists, who are for the most part seriously mathematically challenged, robot journalists that already work for such illustrious newspapers as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, as well as Forbes, the storied business magazine, have shown a natural aptitude for data, making them ideal for the sports and business desks, and as such are now about ready to branch out into breaking news and investigative journalism.

Neil Sharman (believed to be a human writer) and former head of research and insight at Telegraph Media Group on Buckingham Palace Road in London, writing Sept. 22 in TheMediaBriefing, also based in London, noted that robots, “Like junior reporters … can learn from and draw on a back catalogue of great writing – but with more powerful memories and analytical techniques.” You can read Sharman’s full piece here:  http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/robo-journalism-the-future-is-arriving-quickly

“Machines are adept at investigating data sets,” Sharman says. “Publishers have set them to tax records, homicide data, meteorological reports and more –looking for patterns and describing them. They’re thorough, not prone to error and they’re fast.

“The LA Times uses robo-journalism to break news about earthquakes because machines can analyse geological survey data faster than a human. It takes under five minutes to spot a story and get it online.”

Tim Adams, a staff writer for the “The Observer: The New Review” at London’s The Guardian newspaper, wrote a piece June 28 on Kris Hammond, a professor of journalism and computer science at Northwestern University and co-founder and chief scientist at Chicago-based Narrative Science, which developed a writing program for robots known as “Quill.” Hammond also founded the University of Chicago’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He told Adams, “we are humanizing the machine and giving it the ability not only to look at data but, based on general ideas of what is important and a close understanding of who the audience is, we are giving it the tools to know how to tell us stories.”

Adams observes, “It’s not deathless prose – at least not yet; the machines are still ‘learning’ day by day how to write effectively – but it’s already good enough to replace the jobs once done by wire reporters. Narrative Science’s computers provide daily market reports for Forbes as well sports reports for the Big Ten sports network. Hammond predicts that 90 per cent of journalism will be written by computer by 2030. Automated Insights, one of Narrative Sciences competitors, based in Durham, North Carolina, does all the data-based stock reports for AP.

Adams also notes that “last year, a Swedish media professor, Christer Clerwall, conducted the first proper blind study into how sports reports written by computers and by humans compared. Readers taking part in the study suggested, on the whole, that the reports written by human sports journalists were slightly more accessible and enjoyable, but that those written by computer seemed a little more informative and trustworthy.”

Clerwall, an assistant professor in media and communication studies at Karlstad University in Karlstad, Sweden concluded that “perhaps the most interesting result in the study is that there are [almost] no… significant differences in how the two texts are perceived.”

In terms of narrative arcs, Hammond says, “Like any decent hack, the machine is coming to learn that there are only five or six compelling tales available: back from the brink, outrageous fortune, sudden catastrophe and so on.”

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Happy Canada Day from the True North: Land of Back Bacon, Pickerel, the Maple Leaf, Beaver, Moose and Loon, eh

Here’s some food for thought from Ipsos Reid’s annual Canada Day survey conducted between June 12 and June 15 on behalf of Historica Canada, formerly known as the Historica-Dominion Institute, as you get ready to hoist the cold libation of your choice tomorrow to perhaps toast Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, and mark Canada’s 148th birthday.

Historica Canada is a national charitable organization that was launched in September 2009 as the Historica-Dominion Institute, through the amalgamation of two existing organizations: The Historica Foundation of Canada and the Dominion Institute. The Historica Foundation of Canada was launched in October 1999, while the Dominion Institute was formed in 1997 by a group of young professionals, concerned about the erosion of a common memory and civic identity in Canada.

While Ipsos Reid assures us their sample of 1,005 Canadians from Ipsos’ panel interviewed online was weighted to balance demographics “to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe,” I wonder? Does it really matter that much? It’s the all-too-short summer barbecue season in Canada, time to have some fun, without worrying too much about how the sample was constructed. It’s a Canada Day poll after all, not say a … provincial election seats results prediction poll!

Don’t get me wrong. I have worked in public opinion research on-and-off, sometimes between journalism gigs, since 1980, including working as a supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I supervised telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Carter-Reagan presidential election campaign. Earlier the same year, I worked as a field interviewer in Peterborough, Ontario for Opinion Place/Marketing Insights, a Winnipeg company, doing a 1980 Quebec Referendum survey for the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. So when Ipsos Reid says the precision of their Canada Day poll is accurate to a confidence or credibility interval of plus or minus 3.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadian adults been polled with the margin of expected sampling, coverage, measurement and perhaps other errors, as well as a confidence or credibility interval that is wider among subsets of the population, I’m suitably impressed.

And then I go back to the barbecue. Or perhaps my mother’s black cast-iron skillet if it is breakfast time.  Ipsos Reid  says 35 per cent of Canadians named back bacon as Canada’s national food, beating out poutine, named by only 30 per cent, for the top spot this year. Salmon, whether Atlantic or Pacific, trailed at a distant third (personally, I’d have opted for Paint Lake pickerel, a regional delicacy of Northern Manitoba), named by 17 per cent, followed by beavertails at eight per cent; tourtière at six per cent and doughnuts (which is how we’ll spell it for Canada Day) at four per cent.

Other fascinating tidbits include such illuminating facts as only 12 per cent of us have had the opportunity to go out dog-sledding.

When it comes to Canadian symbols, the beaver ranks up with the maple leaf, and 64 per cent of Canadians have seen a beaver in the wild, followed by moose at 60 per cent, edging out loons at 59 per cent and a bear in the wild at 55 per cent. Meanwhile 16 per cent of Canadians say they  have never seen any of these animals,  Ipsos Reid reports. If you live in Toronto or Vancouver, well, take your dog-sledding stats for guidance. Could happen, I suppose, but back bacon is a better bet. Trust me.

Respondents were asked which musician they are proudest to call Canadian. Nearly four in 10  (38 per cent) chose Celine Dion from a list which also included Kingston’s The Tragically Hip (picked by 14 per cent), Nickelback (11 per cent), Blue Rodeo (nine per cent), Drake (six per cent), Justin Bieber (two per cent), or some other musician or group (20 per cent). Given that Neil Young, The Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, April Wine, the Stampeders, A Foot in Coldwater and Loverboy, just to name half a dozen or so others, are apparently absent from the top of the list, I’ve concluded this must be the result of the confidence or credibility interval that I mentioned earlier. Or, perhaps more likely even, the fact my tastes in Canadian music apparently haven’t quite arrived in the 21st century yet. A possibility not to be discounted, to be sure.

Five years ago, the Historica-Dominion Institute, in partnership with the Munk School of Global Affairs and with the support of the Aurea Foundation, conducted an online survey, “Canada and the World in 2010,” which was also conducted for it by pollster Ipsos Reid and had more than 18,000 respondents in 24 countries.

The survey found, among many other things, Canadians sometimes overestimate their own influence in world affairs:

While two in three Canadians (67 per cent) agreed in 2010 that Canada had an influence on the world stage, only 55 per cent of global respondents agreed. Those polled in Brazil and India were most likely (both 74 per cent) to agree that Canada had influence in world affairs, while only one third of Japanese and Swedes agreed, making them least likely of the 24 countries polled to believe that Canada is influential on the world stage.

For Americans, Independence Day Saturday on July 4 marks the defeat of the British Redcoats in the War of Independence in 1783, although some Southerners still mourn it as the date in 1863 when Vicksburg, Mississippi fell to Union troops in the War Between the States or Civil War.

Canada being Canada and Canadians being Canadians, we quintessentially mark July 1 with what might appear to outsiders to be a rather odd mix of reticence, pride and ambivalence. Me? I like to recall that it was on Canada Day 2007 I arrived to live in Manitoba!

Sometimes we forget just how remarkable an achievement Canada was in 1867. In the spring of 1864, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were contemplating the possibility of Maritime Union. But nothing concrete happened until the Province of Canada, springing from the legislative union of Canada East and Canada West, heard of the proposed conference and members of the combined legislature requested permission to attend the meeting of the Maritime colonies, in order to raise the larger subject of British North American union.

Delegates from away arrived by steamer in Prince Edward Island and shared the spotlight with the first circus to visit the island in more than 20 years. No kidding. How absolutely Canadian can you get?

The historic Charlottetown Conference took place from Sept. 1 to 9, 1864. My ancestral Acadian roots are on the saltwater Tantramar marshes of Amherst, Nova Scotia, in Cumberland County on the Isthmus of Chignecto at the head of the Bay of Fundy and Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America. From Amherst came four of the 36 Fathers of Confederation, more than any other city or town in Canada:  Robert Barry Dickey, Edward Barron Chandler, Jonathan McCully, and Sir Charles Tupper, a Conservative who went onto serve as Canada’s sixth prime minister briefly in 1896.  While he was born in Amherst, Chandler was best known as a New Brunswick legislator.

Tupper was also a medical doctor and founded Pugsley’s Pharmacy, dispensing chemists, at 63 Victoria Street East in downtown Amherst in 1843, the same year he became a doctor. Tupper was president of the Medical Society of Nova Scotia in 1863, and was the first president of the Canadian Medical Association from 1867 to 1870. Pugsley’s operated at the same location in the same historic Tupper Block building, as the oldest business in town and one of the oldest pharmacies in Canada, for 169 years until May 2012.

While there are differing historical opinions as to who should be considered a Father of Confederation, traditionally they have been defined as the 36 men who attended one or more of the three conferences held at Charlottetown; Québec City from Oct. 10 to 27, 1864; and London, England from Dec. 4, 1866 to Feb. 11, 1867 to discuss the union of British North America, preceding Confederation on July 1, 1867. Negotiators settled on the name “Dominion of Canada,” proposed by the head of the New Brunswick delegation, Samuel Leonard Tilley.  The word dominion was taken from the King James Bible: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth” (Psalm 72:8). Tilley, who had a background in pharmacy, became the minister of customs in Sir John A. Macdonald’s first cabinet in 1867.

As a Canadian, it also remains an uncommon privilege for me to have to sat in the public gallery in the balcony of historic Province House in Charlottetown, designed and built by local architect Isaac Smith and completed in 1847, to accommodate the legislative assembly of Prince Edward Island. To this day, the assembly has only 27 seats for the members from the ridings of Souris-Elmira through to Tignish-Palmer Road.

The July 1 holiday was established by statute in 1879, under the name Dominion Day. There is no record of organized ceremonies after the first anniversary, except for the 50th anniversary of Confederation in 1917, at which time the new Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings, under construction, was dedicated as a memorial to the Fathers of Confederation and to the valour of Canadians fighting in the First World War in Europe.

The next celebration was held in 1927 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation.

Since 1958, the federal government has arranged for an annual observance of Canada’s national day on July 1.

Well done, Sir John A.

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Billy Graham, Jack Van Impe, G.K. Chesterton and Saint Paul the Apostle and the human enigma

It has taken me months, but yesterday I was able to finally finish watching the last 18 minutes of a slightly more than 26-minute TED conference talk titled “On technology and faith” that a then 79-year-old Billy Graham gave in California in February 1998. If you are interested, you can watch it here at: http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_and_suffering#t-399663

The talk, like many Graham has given over his long life, is remarkable for any number of reasons, and delivered with his usual homespun, folksy North Carolina wisdom. If it’s not too much of a stretch, I’ve long considered the Southern Baptist preacher with a worldwide appeal transcending Christian denominationalism, and even extending to non-Christian religions, as somewhat analogous to a living saint (Catholics don’t have living saints, much less Protestant ones, but grant me a moment of literary licence.)

Graham, of course, would never think of himself that way either because he well recognizes the sinful and depraved nature of man, something we Catholics also recognize, although not as total depravity in the Calvinist sense. Interestingly, Graham in that talk more than 17 years ago, was talking about end of life issues and getting ready to go home and meet his maker. Apparently God still isn’t quite ready for Billy since he’s now 96. While he’s not well enough these days to be giving a TED or any other public talk in all likelihood, methinks God leaves people like Billy Graham and Mother Angelica, a similar age to Billy, and founder of the worldwide Catholic Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) among us longer than we might expect as a reminder of what a shining witness is, even long after they can make public appearances. The very fact of their lives is their Christian witness.

Saint Paul the Apostle, describing the human enigma in his Letter to the Romans, wrote:  “My own actions bewilder me; what I do is not what I wish to do, but something which I hate. Why then, if what I do is something I have no wish to do, I thereby admit that the Law [of God] is worthy of all honor; meanwhile, my action does not come from me, but from the sinful principle that dwells in me.

“Of this I am certain, that no principle of good dwells in me, that is, in my natural self; praiseworthy intentions are always ready at hand, but I cannot find my way to perform them; it is not the good my will prefers, but the evil my will disapproves that I find myself doing.

“And if what I do is something I have not the will to do, it cannot be I that bring it about; it must be the sinful principle that dwells in me. This, then, is what I find about the Law [of God], that evil is close at my side, when my will is to do what is praiseworthy. Inwardly, I applaud God’s disposition, but I observe another disposition in my lower self, which raises war against the disposition of my [heart], and so I am handed over as a captive to that disposition towards sin which my lower self contains.”

G.K. Chesterton, one of the four greats, at least to my mind, of Edwardian letters (the others on my Dead White European Males – or DWEM – literary canon shortlist being Hilaire Belloc, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw) was asked in 1907 by The Times of London to write an article on the theme, “What’s Wrong with the World?” Chesterton’s pithy reply was: “Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton.”

Influenced by his wife Frances, he first became an  Anglican and later converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922. Chesterton lived from 1874 to 1936. This is the convert to Catholicism after all who wrote: “[W]e should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.” Privately, he joked, “One pint is enough, two pints is one too many, three pints isn’t half enough.” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/catholicism-is-a-big-tent-with-an-eclectic-communion-of-saints-will-there-be-room-for-g-k-chesterton-some-day/)

In September 2013, Bishop Peter Doyle, bishop of the Diocese of Northampton, appointed Canon John Udris, a priest of the diocese and currently spiritual director at St Mary’s College, Oscott, to undertake a fact-finding exercise on his behalf into whether a cause for Chesterton’s canonization should be opened. Udris in due course will submit a dossier to the bishop on whether to open the cause for Chesterton’s canonization.

As Udris told the Catholic Herald in an interview in March 2014, Chesterton, one of the most important Catholic writers and apologists for the faith of the 20th century, is “potentially a huge model” for the Church who “breaks the mould of conventional holiness.”

Udris noted Chesterton, a married layman, was not conventionally devout and could show Catholics “you don’t have to say your rosary every five minutes to be holy.” The first stages of a canonization cause include collecting evidence of heroic virtue.

Instead, Udris suggested, “Chesterton’s holiness could be found in his humour, his charity and his humility.” His defence of the faith in particular, Udris said, “was a model for Catholics.”

Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, and a former Baptist who converted to Catholicism, said in 2013 the idea that someone like Chesterton could be a saint attracted him to the Catholic Church: “The fact that a 300-pound, cigar-smoking journalist might be a saint of the Catholic Church made me understand what the communion of saints is all about. They’re not just one particular type of person.”

Exactly so. Did Chesterton lead a perfect life? Hardly.  His excessive enjoyment of food and drink exhibited a distinct lack of temperance, the cardinal moral virtue “that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it. As well, some of his utterances, contemporaneous with his times, clearly sound anti-Semitic to the modern ear. There should be no whitewashing of Chesterton’s life.

Saints, we are reminded time and again, lead holy, but not always conventionally holy, and never perfect lives. They were human beings before they were saints.

Another who has lived a life of Christian witness, in my opinion, although many Catholics may not share it, is Jack Van Impe, who at 84 is a bit of a youngster compared to Billy Graham, where Van Impe got his start at the age of 17 playing the accordion before he started preaching.

Van Impe, an American televangelist best known for his long-running half-hour weekly television show Jack Van Impe Presents, an eschatological commentary on the news of the week, is a premillennial dispensationalist in his interpretation of Bible prophecy, positing a pretribulation secret Rapture – the belief that Christians will be taken up from earth in a sudden, silent removal of true believers by God prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming. For this Pre-Tribbers rely heavily on Saint Paul and 1 Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

That, to be clear, is not a Catholic reading of 1 Thessalonians or Catholic theology, as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. We do, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming. While some of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church, including Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactanitus – were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign – the pretribulational Rapture espoused by Van Impe, which is premised on the notion that Christ sought to establish a material and earthly kingdom, but the Jews rejected him, so the Church by necessity is a parenthetical insert into history, created as a result of Jews rejecting Christ, resulting in the existence of two people of God: the Jews, the “earthly” people, and the Christians, the “heavenly” people, is all alien to both Catholic theology and even the premillennialist views of some of the early Apostolic Fathers.

The premillennial dispensationalism that Van Impe adheres to is of much more recent vintage and is for the most part the creation of John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish curate with of the Anglican  Church of Ireland, who would eventually leave that church and in the early 1830s with a small group of men form what would come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren. It was Darby who postulated the secret Rapture and much of what premillennial dispensationalism today teaches about 190 years ago.

Van Impe, who co-hosts Jack Van Impe Presents with his wife, Rexella Van Impe, has been hospitalized since May and missed several recent broadcasts of his show. The couple have been married since 1954.

Van Impe is widely known as “The Walking Bible.” He says he has spent about 35,000 hours in memorizing 14,000 verses through two hours of daily memorization, including virtually the entire New Testament. Divine gift? Photographic memory? Neither, Van Impe says, chalking it up to simple hard work and study.

David Allen was his role model. His ability to quote the scriptures in his work as a successful pastor and teacher convinced Van Impe of the value of memorization in giving authority to one’s ministry.

The actual method using index cards, he picked up fortuitously from his father, Oscar, who on a return trip home to Belgium left his “Bible memory cards” behind inadvertently in Michigan, and Jack found them.

Van Impe graduated from Detroit Bible College, as it was then known (later William Tyndale College) in 1952 as an undergraduate, but he calls himself “Dr. Van Impe” in that annoying habit some have of  using honorary, or even worse, somewhat sketchy doctorates, to self-justify the honorific before their name. Call me elitist, but if it isn’t an earned PhD from a properly accredited graduate university program, you shouldn’t be using the title doctor before your name in an academic sense.

Van Impe was known in his early years of ministry as being anti-Catholic, but to his credit, that changed by the early 1980s, so much so that he’s taken much heat over the issue from some of his fellow Protestant evangelical brethren.  While he doesn’t like Pope Francis, perceiving him as too liberal, and rants about him on air from time to time, Van Impe has only good things to say about his two immediate conservative predecessors, Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI and Saint Pope John Paul II. He just doesn’t trust Pope Francis and occasionally alludes to the possibility Pope Francis may be the last pope by a somewhat specious use of the Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes from 1139, which is a sequence of 112 cryptic Latin oracles or mottoes ending with the 112th and final Pope, Petrus Romanus, who in Malachy’s vision, is said to be on the Throne of the Apostle as history’s 112th and last pope (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/)

Jack Van Impe Presents works as good television not because of Jack’s bombastic jeremiads, but because of the chemistry between him and his wife, Rexella, 82, who calls herself “Dr. Rexella Van Impe,” although she didn’t complete her undergraduate music and Bible history studies at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina before Jack swept her off her feet.

There’s something transcendent about how they look at each other several times each show and speak to each other. Rexella in some ways is still the blushing bride she must have been on their wedding day in 1954. And Jack clearly has eyes only for her. Here’s this crusty old televangelist, who actually is well named as Impe as he acts like an impish boy around her at times. He simply unabashedly melts in her presence after six decades of marriage. For that kind of authenticity, I can put up with some sketchy, in my view anyway, theology, and questionable academic credentials. Besides, at the end of the day, how can you not like a couple who do a VHS video and DVD called Animals in Heaven? and, along with Billy Graham, believe we will see our pets in heaven one day? Sadly for those of us of Catholic persuasion, early sensational media reports of Pope Francis reportedly saying animals go to heaven during his weekly Wednesday general audience at St. Peter’s Square last Nov. 26, which would have contradicted centuries of common Catholic theological opinion that the souls of animals do not survive death, turned out to be premature, the result mainly of some garbled translation of an interpretation of Pope Francis’ remarks by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Jack Van Impe Ministries in Troy, Michigan reported in the November-December 1998 issue of their Perhaps Today magazine that people from the largest denomination ordering their materials were Baptists, followed by Roman Catholics, then the so-called “unchurched” in third spot, and then Presbyterians, Lutherans and Methodists – in that order.

Most recently, Carl Baugh stood in as guest co-host of Jack Van Impe Presents with Rexella. Baugh is 78 and a young earth creationist. To be fair to Baugh, he had an impossible task. The show may ostensibly be about Bible prophecy, but in reality it works because of the chemistry between Jack and Rexella.

While I think he’s wrong or misguided about some things (who isn’t?), I can’t help admiring his steadfastness and thinking when Jack arrives at the Pearly Gates he’ll hear, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant … enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

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The Devil, Prince of this World, is not surprisingly about to get his pop culture due on Fox Television as Lucifer Morningstar, recently retired as Lord of Hell and running a piano bar in Los Angeles, the City of Angels

Some movie film buffs are attracted to 1940’s and 1950’s Hollywood film noir, the stylish but low-key black-and-white German expressionist influenced flicks that emphasize cynicism and sex as motivations for murder and other deadly sins (not necessarily in that order). Think Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep in 1946, with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, based on Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel of the same name. Or perhaps the 1950 classic, D.O.A., starring Edmond O’Brien and Pamela Britton.

Both are fine films, as are many others of the genre. But I wouldn’t say I am quite an aficionado of film noir. Rather, I appreciate it on its artistic merits.

The same is true for TV series science fiction or sci-fi. While I am a sucker for a good story with elements of time travel or parallel universes (“The City on the Edge of Forever,” the second to last episode of the first season of Star Trek, first broadcast on Thursday, April 6, 1967, which was awarded the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, remains in a league of its own in my mind), I’m not  quite a diehard Trekkie, although I think the original series, which ran on NBC Television for three seasons from 1966 to 1969 is superb, albeit cheesy. But cheesy is OK. Popular culture is made up of a rich cornucopia of cheesy television and movies that almost require a mandatory bowl of Cheetos® to consume such classics as the black-and-white a double-bill of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, also known as The Head That Wouldn’t Die, a 1959 science-fiction-horror film, directed by Joseph Green (made for $62,000 but not released until 1962), and Plan 9 from Outer Space, the 1959 American science-fiction thriller film, written and directed by Ed Wood on a $60,000 budget, and dubbed by some critics as the worst movie ever made.

While it took me a while to warm up to it, I also came to like Star Trek: The Next Generation, which aired from 1987 to 1994. I’ve also seen most, although probably not all, of the movies from the seemingly endless Star Trek-spawned movie franchise.

Three additional Star Trek spin-offs, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise; well, I could probably count on the fingers of one hand how many episodes of the combined series I’ve ever watched, although knowing Star Trek: Enterprise, which aired originally between 2001 and 2005 and was titled simply as Enterprise for its first two seasons, features Scott Bakula of Quantum Leap fame as Capt. Jonathan Archer, and there is a recurring plot device based on the Temporal Cold War, in which a mysterious entity from the 27th century uses the Cabal, a group of genetically upgraded Suliban, to manipulate the timeline and change past events, I probably will have to give in and start watching its 98 episodes at some point.

Then there is the Christian movie genre. We discover things where we discover them. While I had seen The Rapture, a rather odd but interesting movie starring Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny, later of The X-Files and Californication fame, on VHS videotape cassette in Durham, North Carolina shortly after it was released in 1991, for me, my first real introduction into what I would call the Christian movie genre took place a decade later in Yellowknife, of all places (when I lived in Yellowknife a standard observation was that there were more bars than churches, although that’s hardly unique to Yk).

I remember seeing A Walk to Remember, an American coming-of-age teen romantic drama, when it was released in 2002 downtown at the Capitol Theatre on 52 Street, starring Shane West and Mandy Moore as Landon Carter and Jamie Sullivan, based on the 1999 novel of the same name by the Catholic romance fiction writer Nicholas Sparks. That would be the Nicholas Sparks whose earlier 1996 book, The Notebook, was released as a movie of the same name in 2004, two years after A Walk to Remember came to film screens. I can’t recall exactly how I came to find myself in the Capitol Theatre to watch A Walk to Remember. I don’t recall any of my colleagues going with me, although more than one expressed incredulity the next day when they asked me and I said I enjoyed the movie. I saw it again a couple of years ago for the first time on DVD, and I still enjoyed it.

I won’t spoil the plot for you; the summary is on the Internet and easy enough to find and the ideas, to be honest, are not exactly original. Cheesy? You bet. Pass the Cheetos®. But I’m happy to say the movie was made for about $11 million and has taken in about $47.5 million at the box office. Not a particularly big budget film and far from record box office, but OK.

I wrote a piece here in soundingsjohnbarker (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/flying-largely-under-the-mainstream-cinematic-radar-christian-movie-genre-is-hot/) last Sept. 15 headlined, “Flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar: Christian movie genre is ‘hot’” where I mentioned just a few of last year’s Christian movie offerings, including The Giver, starring three-time Academy award winner Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges, which is set in a fictional post-war 2048 where the community has decided to get rid of colors and, as a consequence, different races and feelings. All citizens have had the memories from before erased from their minds.

I also talked a bit about Heaven Is for Real, directed by Randall Wallace and written by Christopher Parker, based on Pastor Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent’s 2010 book of the same name, and starring Greg Kinnear, Kelly Reilly, Jacob Vargas and Nancy Sorel, which tells the story of  three-year-old Imperial, Nebraska, native Colton Burpo, the son of Pastor Burpo, and what he says he experienced heaven during emergency surgery; and When the Game Stands Tall, starring Jim Caviezel, best known for portraying Jesus in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, now playing Catholic De La Salle High School Spartans’ football coach Bob Ladouceur (with Laura Dern as his wife, Bev Ladouceur), and telling the story of the record-setting 151-game 1992–2003 winning streak by De La Salle of Concord, California, just east of San Francisco. The movie is an adaptation of the 2003 book of the same name by Neil Hayes, then a columnist with the Contra Costa Times.  The movie was filmed in Louisiana.

As well, I mentioned Tim Chey’s movie, Final: The Rapture, released in 2013 in theatres, but on DVD just last November, starring Jah Shams, Mary Grace, Carman, Masashi Nagadoi and Dave Edwards. While there have been generally cheesy church-sponsored, Halloween “Hell Houses” videos in the past, Final: The Rapture is an unusual sub-genre of Christian horror movie or Christian disaster movie. The movie’s poster promise, “When the Rapture strikes … all of hell will break loose.”

Chey said his purpose is “to scare the living daylights out of nonbelievers … If it means I have to make a horror film to make it realistic to win people to Christ, then so be it.”

Online Maranatha News of Toronto calls Final: The Rapture “the scariest Christian movie ever.”

Final: The Rapture depicts the apocalyptic chaos that ensues for four nonbelievers – an African-American, an Asian, a Hispanic and a Caucasian man living in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and on a South Pacific island, after the Rapture occurs. “In Los Angeles, Colin Nelson desperately attempts to flee to Bora Bora. Keenly aware that he’s in the Tribulation period, his only hope is in a mysterious man. In Tokyo, a journalist, Masashi, tries to unravel the disappearance of millions of people as the government closes in on him. In Buenos Aires, Marie searches for her final relative as time runs out. And on a deserted island in the South Pacific, Tom Wiseman, an avowed atheist, attempts to be rescued after his plane goes down.”

The film was shot in six countries over five months for about $7 million, Final: The Rapture, raised the necessary production money across a spectrum of investors, ranging from faith-based to hedge funds.

Just in passing, I wrote about God’s Not Dead with Kevin Sorbo; Noah with Russell Crowe; Son of God, produced by evangelical Mark Burnett from Survivor, and his Catholic wife, Roma Downey (whose A.D.: The Bible Continues miniseries based on the early church, as described in the first 10 chapters of the Acts of the Apostles is airing on NBC currently); and the “new” Left Behind movie about the Rapture by Paul Lalonde and Stoney Lake Entertainment, with Nicolas Cage starring as Rayford Steele, and Civil Twilight’s song “Letters from the Sky” being used in the trailer, released in North American theatres last October.

The interesting thing is if I was to revisit the genre today nine months later for a comprehensive update, I’d be saying the Christian movie genre is not just hot, it is on fire, churning out television miniseries and movies at a pace that would be better suited to a book than a blog post.

Mind you, the devil, Prince of this World, is not surprisingly about to get his due as well. Such is the nature of the supernatural and spiritual warfare.

A new DC Comics-based Fox TV high-concept genre series Lucifer where Lucifer Morningstar “bored and unhappy as the Lord of Hell, resigns his throne and abandons his kingdom for the gorgeous, shimmering insanity of Los Angeles, where he opens an exclusive piano bar called Lux” is set to air on Fox next year.

It gives new meaning to the dangers of glamorizing evil, something we Catholics get a refresher course in every Easter through the renewal of our baptismal promises where the priest asks us, “Do you renounce Satan and all his works, and all his empty show; do you renounce the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin; do you renounce Satan, the author and prince of sin?”

The production of Lucifer is incredibly slick and well done. That said, watching a three-minute trailer on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4bF_quwNtw), I couldn’t help laughing near the end of the trailer when Lucifer, played by Tom Ellis, baffled, asks the female L.A.P.D. homicide detective, Chloe Dancer (played by Lauren German) who unlike almost all the other women who are charmed by him, while she isn’t, “Did my father send you?”

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St. Polycarp, a second century bishop of Smyrna, is subject of new movie just released on DVD

St. Polycarp, one of the three chief Apostolic Fathers, who was a second century bishop of Smyrna, one of the new centres for the Christian world after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and located in modern-day Turkey on the Aegean Sea, was martyred at the age of 86 in 155 AD on the orders of Statius Quadratus, proconsul of Asia. Martyred, but not forgotten, Polycarp is the subject of the Henline Productions of Loveland, Ohio movie Polycarp: Destroyer of Gods, which was released on DVD May 5, and is based on a novel authored by Pastor Rick Lambert, a co-pastor of Grace Bible Church in Cincinnati.

Born in 69 AD, the real-life Polycarp was an important historical link to that Sub-Apostolic Age, during which it was possible to learn by word of mouth what the Apostles taught from those who had heard them for themselves.

But sorting out fact from fiction when it comes to the life of Polycarp of Smyrna, like so many ancient saints from the Sub-Apostolic Age, is no simple task. Much is simply shrouded in the mists of time and certainties are in short supply. Even the historical fact that Statius Quadratus was the proconsul of Asia at the time who ordered Polycarp’s martyrdom is not beyond dispute, nor is the exact year of Polycarp’s death. Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus wrote it was St. John the Apostle himself who made Polycarp a bishop.

The main sources of credible historical information concerning St. Polycarp are the Epistles of St. Ignatius; Polycarp’s own Epistle to the Philippians; sundry passages in St. Irenaaus; and the Letter of the Smyrnwans recounting the martyrdom of St. Polycarp. The Epistle of St. Polycarp was a reply to one from the Philippians, in which they had asked him to address them some words of exhortation.

Four out of the seven genuine epistles of St. Ignatius were written from Smyrna. In two of these – Magnesians and Ephesians – he speaks of Polycarp. The seventh Epistle was addressed to Polycarp.

Just before his martyrdom in 155 AD, Polycarp was urged by Quadratus, or whoever the proconsul was, to curse Christ, leading to Polycarp’s celebrated reply: “Fourscore and six years have I served Him, and He has done me no harm. How then can I curse my King that saved me?”  Polycarp was then burned and stabbed to death.

Henline Productions, formerly J&J Productions, is the brother and sister Protestant evangelical homeschooled filmmaking team of Joe Henline, 20, and Jerica Henline, 22.

In 2010, they entered the five-minute short video No Time in the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival and finished as semi-finalists in the competition..

Their next film, The Forgotten Martyr: Lady Jane Grey, shot in 2011 was entered into the 2012 San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival and won them the Best Young Filmmaker award, and was runner-up in the Short Film category. Awards from other independent Christian film festivals included, Best Young Filmmaker at the GloryReelz Christian Film Festival, Golden Crown Award (Best Student Production) at the International Christian Visual Media Festival and Best Young Filmmaker at The Attic Film Festival.

In their script for Polycarp, a 12-year-old slave girl, Anna, is rescued and adopted by Christians in 2nd century Smyrna and befriended by the aged Polycarp. You can watch a brief 1:52 YouTube trailer for it here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IjPlffZVy8

In real life, of course, Polycarp was supposedly born into slavery, purchased as a young boy, and raised by a godly woman in Ephesus.

As Anna is taught by Polycarp and her new family, she struggles to reconcile her beliefs with those of the Christians. When the Roman proconsul demands that all citizens worship Caesar to show their allegiance to Rome, Polycarp and the Christians stand for their faith against the growing threat of persecution, and Anna is forced to choose whom she is willing to live – and die – for.

Polycarp was awarded Best Feature Film, Audience Choice Award and Best Original Music Score at the second Christian Worldview Film Festival in March at Castle Hills First Baptist Church, also in San Antonio.

Tulsa native Garry Nation received the award for Best Lead Actor in a Feature Film for his performance as Polycarp.

“This is a moving story of second-century persecution, reminiscent of the persecution many believers face today,” said Alex and Stephen Kendrick, producers of Courageous and Facing the Giants.

The Kendricks, who are both associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, got their start in 2003 with their first movie Flywheel. They conceived the idea for Flywheel in the spring of 2002 after they saw the results from Barna Research Group demonstrating empirically popular culture movies and television shows are more influential in American society than the Christian church.

Flywheel, which tells the story of a dishonest used car salesman who comes to grips with his need for God, relied on untrained actors from the Sherwood Baptist Church congregation to play all the roles, debuting as an independent film on a single Carmike Theatre screen in Albany, Georgia in April 2003 and ran for six weeks initially, often outdrawing Hollywood films on adjoining screens.

Then came Facing the Giants in 2006 and in 2008 Fireproof, made on a $500,000 budget, but generating more than $33.4 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing independent film of the year. Their most recent film, Courageous, was released in September 2011. It was produced with a budget of $2 million and has grossed more than $34.5 million to date. Facing the Giants, which grossed more than $10 million; Fireproof, which grossed more than $33 million; and Courageous have a combined gross of nearly $80 million at the box office, with a combined budget of less than $4 million.

The Kendicks wrapped up principal photography on their fifth movie, War Room, last July in and around Charlotte, North Carolina. It is their first project independent of Sherwood Pictures, the movie ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church. It being produced  by Kendrick Brothers Productions with Provident Films and AFFIRM Films in distribution partnership. Provident Films, a division of Provident Music Group, develops, produces and markets faith-based films. Nashville-based Provident Music Group is a division of Sony Music Entertainment. AFFIRM Films is a division of Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions (SPWA), a Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) company, which is a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment Inc., which in turn is a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation.

It is also the first Kendrick brothers project shot outside their hometown of Albany, Georgia. It drew more than 1,000 volunteers from 85 churches in the Charlotte area who stepped up and reached across denominational lines to support the production. Pre-production began in 2013 and the movie is in post-production currently and scheduled to be released Aug. 28. The Kendricks remain associate pastors at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia.

Each Kendrick brothers film explores a subject important to Christians and the Christian life: personal integrity in Flywheel; resilient faith in Facing the Giants; loving marriages in Fireproof and heroic parenting in Courageous. War Room’s focus on prayer strategically highlights a subject of interest to a majority of Americans. According to a National Opinion Research Center survey on frequency of prayer, nearly 90 per cent of Americans claim to pray regularly. Some 60 per cent say they pray at least once a day – for Christians, that number grows to 84 per cent, according to a U.S. News and Beliefnet online poll. Almost 80 per cent of American Christians say they pray most often at home.

A family-friendly drama, War Room is about learning to fight the right kinds of battles. Filled with humor, wit and heart, it follows Tony and Elizabeth Jordan, a middle-class couple, and their daughter, Danielle, as they struggle through personal, marital and spiritual issues. Their lives are forever changed after Elizabeth meets an elderly widow who helps her develop a secret prayer room in her home.

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100 years ago today the British Naval Wing launched what was to be one of the largest bombing raids of the First World War, less than a dozen years after the first powered flight, by targeting railway operations in the German-occupied Flemish North Sea port coastal towns of Blankenberge, Ostend and Zeebrugge in West Flanders in Belgium

Less than a dozen years after Orville Wright had taken the first powered flight at Kill Devil Hills on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on Dec. 17, 1903, the British Naval Wing, still part of the British Army’s joint Royal Flying Corps, launched what was to be one of the largest bombing raids of the First World War on Feb. 12, 1915 – 100 years ago today – by targeting railway operations in the German-occupied Flemish North Sea port coastal towns of Blankenberge, Ostend and Zeebrugge in West Flanders in Belgium.

Under the command of Air Commodore Charles Rumney Samson, 34 planes from the British Naval Wing attacked Blankenberge, Ostend and Zeebrugge, targeting the railway stations in Ostend and Blankenberge, as well as railway lines across the coast that were being used by the German occupation forces. The Blankenberge railway station had opened on Aug. 16, 1863. Zeebrugge was being used by the Germans as a base of operations for their deadly submarine warfare, light shipping, and for a planned blockade of the Belgian coast.

Samson, 31 at the time of the bombing raids, was already a British naval aviation pioneer. He was one of the first four officers selected in 1911 for pilot training by the Royal Navy and in May 1912 was the first pilot to fly an aircraft from a moving ship, taking off from the battleship HMS Hibernia during the annual naval review in Weymouth Bay.

The unprecedented bombing raids of Feb. 12, 1915 at Blankenberge, Ostend and Zeebrugge were an extraordinary success, causing heavy damage to the occupying German military force. Despite coming under heavy ground fire from German anti-aircraft guns, not a single British Naval Wing plane was shot down and there were no British fatal casualties.

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The indefatigable Paul Boge, a Winnipeg engineer-author-filmmaker with a heart for Kenya, back in Thompson Feb. 27

Charles Mulli, left, Paul Boge, right
Paul Boge, the Winnipeg engineer-author-filmmaker with a heart for Kenya, will make a return visit to Thompson Feb. 27 to March 1 as guest speaker at this year’s annual Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship’s Family Enrichment weekend, says Pastor Ted Goossen.

“He will speak at the Friday night banquet sharing about his work and how he integrates his faith into his work environment,” Goossen said. “Saturday morning brunch Paul will share about his newly released children’s book  – The Biggest Family in the World  – an illustrated book on the Charles Mulli orphanage in Kenya.”

Mulli was a poor abandoned six-year-old Kenyan boy who grew up to become successful, powerful and very rich, but decided to sell all he had to rescue street children whose condition reflected his own childhood. Saving one child has turned into rescuing thousands for Mulli.

Faye Hall, administrative assistant for 54-year-old Winnipeg Juno-winning singer-songwriter Steve Bell’s Signpost Music and IncarNATION Ministries, who is herself an increasingly noticed artist, spent two years creating 32 paintings that capture Mulli’s life for Boge’s The Biggest Family in the World. “She has done an indescribable work,” Boge blogged last Sept. 8.  “I could not even dream of the paintings being this good.”

Boge, 41, is an award-winning author and has also written The Urban Saint: The Harry Lehotsky Story; Father to the Fatherless: The Charles Mulli Story; Hope for the Hopeless: The Charles Mulli Mission; and most recently, The Biggest Family in the World, chronicling the life of Charles Mulli in an illustrated children’s book published last December.

He has also written two novels in a potential trilogy, The Chicago Healer in 2004, and The Cities of Fortune in 2006.

Boge was last the keynote guest speaker at Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship’s annual family enrichment weekend five years ago in 2010, when he talked about his then recently published book, The Urban Saint: The Harry Lehotsky Story, which explored the life of old west end Winnipeg inner city pastor Harry Lehotsky, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2006 at age 49.

Boge won Word Guild’s best new Canadian author award in 2003 for his first book, The Chicago Healer, published the following year.

In addition to being an author, Boge, is a consulting mining engineer and capital project manager with the family firm Boge & Boge Consulting Engineers in Winnipeg, and no stranger to Thompson. He lived and worked here for nine months in 2003, five months in 2005 and for another 10 months in 2007, while working on three separate surface projects for Vale, and doing much of his writing in his apartment at night.

Boge is also behind FireGate Films, an independent Winnipeg company that made the 2006 feature-length movie Among Thieves, with Boge writing, directing and producing the film, which explores the possibility the end is in sight for the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency, as Gulf Arab countries including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar have contemplated ending dollar dealings for oil and moving to a basket of currencies including the euro and Chinese yuan or renminbi. The last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than U.S. dollars was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990.

Boge is also the co-ordinator for the fifth annual Winnipeg Real to Reel Film Festival at North Kildonan Mennonite Brethren Church, running this year from Feb. 17-22. He is a member of the church.

On March 1, the Sunday night wrap up for Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship’s  Family Enrichment weekend will include the traditional free chili dog supper.

Following the chili dog supper, there will be a free showing of the 2003 movie Flywheel.  Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who are both associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, conceived the idea for Flywheel in the spring of 2002 after they saw the results from Barna Research Group demonstrating empirically popular culture movies and television shows are more influential in American society than the Christian church.

Flywheel, which tells the story of a dishonest used car salesman who comes to grips with his need for God, relied on untrained actors from the Sherwood Baptist Church congregation to play all the roles, debuting as an independent film on a single Carmike Theatre screen in Albany, Georgia in April 2003 and ran for six weeks initially, often outdrawing Hollywood films on adjoining screens.

Then came Facing the Giants in 2006 and in 2008 Fireproof, made on a $500,000 budget, but generating more than $33.4 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing independent film of the year. Their most recent film, Courageous, was released in September 2011. It was produced with a budget of $2 million and has grossed more than $34.5 million to date. Facing the Giants, which grossed more than $10 million; Fireproof, which grossed more than $33 million; and Courageous have a combined gross of nearly $80 million at the box office, with a combined budget of less than $4 million.

The Kendicks wrapped up principal photography on their fifth movie, War Room, last July in and around Charlotte, North Carolina. It is their first project independent of Sherwood Pictures, the movie ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church. It being produced  by Kendrick Brothers Productions with Provident Films and AFFIRM Films in distribution partnership. Provident Films, a division of Provident Music Group, develops, produces and markets faith-based films. Nashville-based Provident Music Group is a division of Sony Music Entertainment. AFFIRM Films is a division of Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions (SPWA), a Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) company, which is a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment Inc., which in turn is a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation.

It is also the first Kendrick brothers project shot outside their hometown of Albany, Georgia. It drew more than 1,000 volunteers from 85 churches in the Charlotte area who stepped up and reached across denominational lines to support the production. Pre-production began in 2013 and the movie is in post-production currently and scheduled to be released Aug. 28. The Kendricks remain associate pastors at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia.

Each Kendrick brothers film explores a subject important to Christians and the Christian life: personal integrity in Flywheel; resilient faith in Facing the Giants; loving marriages in Fireproof and heroic parenting in Courageous. War Room’s focus on prayer strategically highlights a subject of interest to a majority of Americans. According to a National Opinion Research Center survey on frequency of prayer, nearly 90 per cent of Americans claim to pray regularly. Some 60 per cent say they pray at least once a day – for Christians, that number grows to 84 per cent, according to a U.S. News and Beliefnet online poll. Almost 80 per cent of American Christians say they pray most often at home.

A family-friendly drama, War Room is about learning to fight the right kinds of battles. Filled with humor, wit and heart, it follows Tony and Elizabeth Jordan, a middle-class couple, and their daughter, Danielle, as they struggle through personal, marital and spiritual issues. Their lives are forever changed after Elizabeth meets an elderly widow who helps her develop a secret prayer room in her home.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22