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Actor and director Emilio Estevez reluctantly went to Spain to tell a story about how faith, hope and walking are all part of the American way of overcoming hard times.

Estevez told The Catholic Register his new film is about American spirituality. The story follows four characters walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela through Spain.

The pilgrimage is to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galacia, where tradition has it the remains of the apostle St. James are buried.

TORONTO - Aisha Aberdeen wasn’t born on third base, and she doesn’t imagine she hit a triple. But as the school year starts, the former foster child is ready to trot home.

Aberdeen has done what almost no kid who has been through foster care ever does. She������Ƶapp graduated from the University of Toronto with a double major in forest conservation and Caribbean studies. Now she������Ƶapp planning graduate studies in the forests of Kenya this year.

Fewer than 44 per cent of children who wind up in foster care complete high school before they’re 21. Only 20 per cent of those (8.8 per cent of the total) go on to any form of post-secondary education.  

Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan is about to unleash a new dimension in a spiritual crisis that already grips nearly 80,000 problem gamblers in Ontario, addiction counsellors say.

Duncan announced in August that the will be “extending its brand” into the Internet. By 2012 the province will deal poker, sell lottery tickets and run bingo games online. The province worries its citizens already spend $400 million a year on unregulated, off-shore gambling sites. It expects the provincial take from OLG-run web sites will be in the neighbourhood of $100 million. Charities may be given the opportunity to fundraise directly by running online bingo games.

But the toll in addiction will be high, particularly for young males most at risk for Internet gambling addictions, said Christiana Ashabo, Southdown Institute������Ƶapp addiction and relapse prevention therapist.

It������Ƶapp been 13 years since Mother Teresa died of a heart attack at age 87 on Sept. 5, 1997 in Calcutta. Aug. 26 marks her 100th birthday.

How well I remember those days . . . my own father died on Aug. 27 that year. One week later, Mother Teresa was called home to God. I provided commentary of her funeral for several networks in Canada. The pomp, precision and sombre majesty of Princess Diana������Ƶapp London farewell one week earlier were hardly visible in the turbulent scenes of Mother Teresa������Ƶapp simple wooden casket riding on a gun carriage through the streets of Calcutta for her state funeral.

Mother Teresa������Ƶapp life was not a sound byte, but rather a metaphor for selfless devotion and holiness. Her most famous work began in 1950 with the opening of the first Nirmal Hriday (Tender Heart) home for the dying and destitute in Calcutta. Her words remain inscribed on the walls of that home: “Nowadays the most horrible disease is not leprosy or tuberculosis. It is the feeling to be undesirable, rejected, abandoned by all.”