Here are today’s dispatches from the crossroads of faith, media and culture.

1. March for Life weekend in D.C. The march itself (protesting the 1973 Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision) will take place on Monday but there will be various events leading up to it over the weekend. They include a speech by former presidential candidate and current Fox News Channel host Mike Huckabee at a mini-rally by the White House at 3:00 PM on Sunday. 

On Saturday, bestselling authors Fr. Robert J. Spitzer and Teresa Tomeo will appear at 2 p.m. on Saturday at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The event is free and open to the public. Spitzer and Tomeo will make presentations and field questions from the audience. At 3 p.m., they will sign copies of their new books from Ignatius Press – Fr. Spitzer’s Ten Universal Principles and Tomeo’s Extreme Makeover.

The weekend will also feature a couple of screenings of the pro-life film October Baby set for release in theaters in March.

You can view the entire March for Life schedule of event here.

2. Brian Bird and SWC Films team on Dream It For Another. The veteran producer-writer (whose lengthy list of credits include the 2011 Hallmark Channel movie The Shunning and five seasons of Touched by an Angel) has come aboard the Stan Williams project about infertility and the dramatic impact of an IVF mishap on two couples. When one of the would-be mothers is accidentally implanted with the wrong fertilized egg, she and her husband must make some profound moral choices. SWC Films is seeking  to raise pre-production capital for the pro-life/pro-adoption film via faithfunder.com, an online service aimed at connecting donors (as opposed to investors) to faith-friendly entrepreneurial ventures.

Williams  is the author of The Moral Premise: Harnessing Virtue and Vice for Box Office Success and a sought-after script consultant who, since 2008, has worked with Will Smith on various projects, including the 2010 remake of The Karate Kid.

Under his SWC Films shingle, he plans to develop positive screenplays from various  sources and then either produce them in-house (as with Dream It For Another) or sell them. One film he has chosen for the latter path is Parabellum, a World War II era drama from Nikita Mungarwadi, a 13-year-old girl he considers to be something of a writing prodigy. The story concerns a rebellious German teenager who battles her mother’s fiancé, a ruthless S.S. colonel, to rescue her Jewish friends from a ghetto before its inhabitants are liquidated.

3.  Mark Wahlberg apologizes for 9/11 comment. From The LA Times: The star of the new movie “Contraband” found himself starring in a 9/11 controversy this week when he revealed that he had been scheduled to fly on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center — and suggested that he could have single-handedly prevented the tragedy…Now, Wahlberg is trying to leave those 9/11 magazine comments on the cutting room floor, telling TMZ, “I deeply apologize to the families of the victims that my answer came off as insensitive, it was certainly not my intention.”

No blog tomorrow. See you Monday.

Encourage one another and build each other up – 1 Thessalonians 5:11