In addition to being a physical trainer, Father Stephen Gadberry is also a Catholic priest. He hopes that his participation in the upcoming season of American Ninja Warrior will make the clergy appear more human and available. Continue reading

In the past four years he has converted to Catholicism, met and married singer/songwriter Rachel, and had two "sparkling" children — Roman, 17 months, and Felix, five months — whose existence lights him up from the inside like a sky lantern.

For those readers who might confuse fiction for biography, let it be known: Wilson, 50, is not at all like Tom Milde, the drunken protagonist of his just-published novel The Straight Banana, "a middle-aged loser, ex-failed poet, ex-print journalist, a nocturnal habitue who falls into TV in New York City".

But he kind of used to be.

For seven years, Wilson, known to many as "the quirky one" on Seven Sharp, was the American correspondent for TVNZ, establishing a New York "bureau" in his apartment. A Metro magazine staffer, he moved to New York with the aim of writing for the New Yorker, but like Milde found himself working in television almost accidentally, certainly with no ambition other than paying his rent.

He covered Hurricane Katrina, the Global Financial Crisis, the Virginia Tech massacre and many other big stories, contextualising them for Kiwi viewers, as well as celebrating red, white and blue oddballs.

"People think I was flown over there in a golden jumbo jet and installed in palatial splendour in Spanish Harlem, but I was a freelancer and I only got paid when I worked," he says. "My first job for TVNZ, I FTD'd [failed to deliver]. I was at the top of the news doing the second inauguration of George Bush. I did not know what I was doing. I hired friends to help me out, and it was a colossal mess.

"But I had support from Bill Ralston, who was the head of news and current affairs at the time. He was indulgent of me, and I was the only person they knew who had a New Zealand accent who was around. So it's an economy of scarcity." Continue reading

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• Stuff article by Eleanor Black

The Bible is extremely weird in places: monsters with horns on their horns, men wrestling with angels, devils entering pigs, floods covering the whole Earth, people rising from the dead. For some, this weirdness is its very weakness.

Such stuff obviously couldn't have really happened. It's just fiction, they scoff angrily, dismissing the whole thing as rubbish. But I often find the weird bits the best.

Why can't the imagination be used to tell the truth - maybe not empirical truth, but something else. A truth about the human condition perhaps.

Saturday is the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. And tonight's birthday show, The Day of the Doctor, continues the story of a man/god (a deus homo, in Anselm's words), aided by various companions, all seeking to save humanity from various dark catastrophes - often from those sinister religious fundamentalists, the Daleks, and their cult of Skaro. Continue reading.

Giles Fraser is priest-in-charge at St Mary's Newington in south London and the former canon chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral.

Source: Loose Canon, The Guardian

Image: The Guardian

That's understandable.

The series at its dark heart is a study of good and evil, and more specifically about how good people can do bad things, how they become bad, or whether we all have a seed of evil within us that can germinate and run amok under the right conditions.

It is further proof that the series' drama is a profoundly religious one is the fact that theologically minded people are still fiercely disputing exactly what the ending meant, and what the series — and its anti-hero, Walter White — stood for in moral and metaphysical terms.

Is the chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-cooker an irredeemable monster? Or maybe he is just one of us — a struggling, middle-class worker bee who gets a diagnosis of lung cancer and, hearing how profitable the drug trade can be, uses his talents to concoct premium-grade drugs to make a quick score that will support his wife and children long after he's dead.

Certainly the ending was inevitable and unsurprising: White dies, as he had to.

The show's creator, Vince Gilligan, made it clear - yes, some held out hope over the course of five seasons — that "this story was finite all along.

It's a story that starts at A and ends at Z." But how Walt died, who he would take down with him — or spare — and whether he ended in a state of grace were burning questions for devotees of the series, as they are for all believers.

Eschatology, the study of our ultimate fate, is what all religious exploring points to. So do TV dramas.

"I want to believe there is some sort of cosmic balancing of the scales at the end of it all," Gilligan said last year.

"I'd just like to believe there's some point to it all. I'd like to believe that there is. Everything is just too random and chaotic absent that."

Not surprisingly, many who watched the finale saw a light at the end of the series for Walt.

One genius of the show (there were so many) is that it co-opted viewers into rooting for Mr. White-as Walt's co-conspirator Jesse Pinkman always called his onetime high school teacher-no matter how low he sank.

So despite the trail of carnage and ruined lives that Walt left behind, the hope that he would find grace at the end, that his death would somehow sanctify, was overpowering.

Critics as varied as Emily Bazelon in Slate and Allen St. John in Forbes declared that "Breaking Bad" was ultimately a "love story" because White managed to do what he set out to do in the first season: He found a way to provide for his family, and at the end he finally confessed his original sin in becoming the drug kingpin dubbed Heisenberg.

"I did it for me," as he tells his devastated wife, Skyler. "I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really ... alive."

Writer Sonny Bunch even saw Gilligan slyly turning White into Jesus Christ-the wounds in Walt's hand and side, his reference to the view of the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountains, his "sacrificing himself to save the people he loved," his cruciform death pose.

White also "made peace with those who had wronged him and those he had wronged (one way or another) so as to prepare himself for the afterlife."

Well, "making peace" may be pushing it.

White actually used his intellectual gifts one last time to build a Rube Goldberg killing machine and orchestrate a bloody-if improbable, without divine aid-denouement that destroyed all his enemies.

"His moment of clarity at the end doesn't make up for all the hubris of Heisenberg," Bazelon wrote. "But it did mean I could wholeheartedly root for his scheme of revenge."

And that's the theological problem. Continue reading

The region and other parts of the North Island will be among the last in the country to move from analogue television to the new system in December.

That means households without a UHF aerial face a bill of at least $200 to $300 to receive the new service along with the cost of a receiver for older TVs.

Mangere Budgeting Service chief executive Darryl Evans says it's unfair many families that rent will have to bear the cost of installation.

"The problem is to get an aerial. They probably don't have the money.

Age Concern Counties-Manukau chief executive Wendy Bremner says government organisation Going Digital has done a great job advertising the change over the last few years.

But the move is likely to affect some elderly people aged between 65 and 74. They don't qualify for government funding aimed at helping over-75s switch to digital.

"They don't have any discretionary spend. I think that will have the biggest impact." Continue reading

"This is a great opportunity for people here in New Zealand to experience family and faith programming that over 55 million other people enjoy every single day," he said. Cope, who also manages the One Christian Radio 87.6FM station, said Sky Angel had previously only been available in the United States, but 30 channels were now available around the world for the monthly subscription through the internet.

He hoped to secure an internet provider to offer the service for free from October 1. The provider would benefit from the publicity, he said. Cope, who is also Sky Angel's Australia representative, said the service was not only for church-goers.

"The feedback we've had is that it is great to be able to have family friendly programming in New Zealand . . . in the church, and outside the church. There are channels [with Sky Angel] that don't necessarily have Christian content," he said. "We're also negotiating with TV and radio services in New Zealand to offer New Zealand content in the very near future."

A 48-hour free trial of Sky Angel is available at 392.tryskyangel.com.

Source

• Taranaki Daily News
• Image: Techvibes

TVNZ's Breakfast host Petra Bagust has once again shown her support for Media Prayer Day by being one of the faces fronting the campaign in the lead up to August 5.

Media Prayer Day is an initiative of Christian Broadcasting Association (CBA) which Bagust has been involved with for a number of years.

"CBA is very good at coming up with new ways of keeping people involved, and prayer is so simple, yet so powerful," she says.

Around 1700 churches have been invited to join in Media Prayer Day, which has been set up with the aim of encouraging churches to intercede for the spread of the Gospel through New Zealand's mass media.

Continue reading

She explained that she had been invited there by a friend who had paid for the trip. She noted, "I had a sort of an allergy for priests and the Church," but the trip so changed her life that, "for the following two years I was no longer able to live serenely, because I realised that I had never been really happy in my entire life. What I was living was an illusion, not true happiness. I became depressed. I had a privileged life that I no longer liked. Instead, I wanted simple, normal things. One morning I woke up, called a friend and asked him to find me a place to stay in Medjugorje - or I would have jumped out of the window."

Though Golędzinowska had been due to start a PR job at the billionaire Flavio Briatore's club in Porto Cervo, Sardinia, the day she was due to start clashed with the 30th anniversary of the apparitions of Medjugorje. "After five days here I terminated the contract and have decided to remain. I am in a Marian community and I live with priests and nuns."

Her routine couldn't be further from the life that she could have been leading. "I wake up at five in the morning. We climb the mountain Podbrdo to recite a rosary, then we go down, we have prayers, then Holy Mass. Until noon we work. I clean the rooms and bathrooms, then I do the ironing, or peel potatoes. We also have a vegetable garden and chickens. After that we recite another rosary. In the afternoon we rest, then at six there are other prayers"

No longer the wearer of latest fashion, Golędzinowska contents herself with dressing in "clothes of Providence", which pilgrims leaved behind.

"I could not come here wearing Chanel shoes…", she said.

Read the full interview: Catholic Herald

Jeremy Irons is suitably ghoulish as Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI and head of a vicious brood.

The Borgias, it goes without saying - this is historical drama with as much rumpy pumpy as pomp; the latter it does magnificently - will have plenty of silliness. And it has to because it is mostly populated by calculating old men in red frocks, so it requires rather a lot of sexing up to make it sexy viewing.