The Catholic imagination the imagination that allowed Shakespeare to sprinkle his plays with references to Catholic religious beliefs and practices in meaningful ways also helped to create the fictive worlds of Denmark, Rome, Verona, Venice, and Illyria. The imagination that made him Catholic also helped make him the greatest writer in the English-speaking world.

The question as to why he died so young is always superseded by: How could he have existed at all? How could you ask more of a miracle?

July 9, 2002 marked another milestone in the much wished-for moral transformation of Hollywood. That is the date of the home video release of the popular family-friendly film, A Walk to Remember, based on the novel of the same name by Catholic author, Nicholas Sparks.

No wonder Anakin Skywalker seems so confused. Every time the Jedi apprentice turns around, a spiritual master tells him to trust his feelings, search his feelings or follow his feelings. Trouble is, the young super-warrior in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones is a tornado of feelings. He feels love. He feels hate, ambition, desire, frustration, fear and fury.

The Oxford Movement began in 1833 under the leadership of John Keble, E.B.Pusey and John Henry Newman. Another movement which began in Oxford a century later and which has given us shelves of great books is that of The Inklings.

In the midst of the scandals that have broken in the United States, Spiderman has a timely message; with authority and power come responsibility. From those to whom much has been given, it is written, much will be expected and not just by anguished laity, outraged media and determined attorneys general.

Summertime generally means more time to spend hanging out with family and friends. Heres a list of recent films now available on video or DVD that parents and kids can enjoy together and perhaps find what Joseph Conrad called that measure of truth for which they had forgotten to ask.

Charlemagne, King of the Franks, regarded the restoration of the West as both a spiritual and a political duty. He set about to revive the traditions of ancient Rome in light of the universal call to recognize Christ as the center of the new emerging culture. This, the beginning of the first great Renaissance in Christendom, found expression in architecture.

In an age of skepticism, cynicism, and false freedoms, Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) was a passionate and occasionally scathing voice of reason. Like her friends C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and Charles Williams, Sayers was a brilliant Christian thinker, an Anglo-Catholic who took doctrine seriously and bristled at the growth of fads, schisms, heresies, and anti-Christ within the Church of England.

Christians continue to make headway as cultural influencers in Hollywood and consequently the world. That's true because more Hollywood executives are recognizing that morally true and uplifting television shows and motion pictures consistently rise to the top of the revenue pile.