Fr. Longenecker was kind enough to ask me to write a guest post on his blog “Standing on my Head” dealing with humor. You can read it here.
Brandon Vogt has a good post up on “7 Things Bishops Should Know About Catholic Bloggers”
One of them included this:
5. Digital imprimaturs are not a good idea.
One of the big questions in the Catholic blogosphere concerns authority. In an online world that is by nature egalitarian, how can bishops speak with any unique authority? Similarly, how can Catholics be sure that a website they visit faithfully and authoritatively presents Catholic teaching?
As you know, the answer is easy when it comes to print. Your censor gives it anihil obstat, you give it an imprimatur, and people can be confident it contains no theological errors.
But what about blogs and websites? Should we institute some form of digital imprimatur?
I don’t think so. I’m convinced it’s a bad idea for three main reasons:First, blogs and websites are constantly changing. If you grant an imprimatur to a specific website, there’s no guarantee its content would remain orthodox.
Second, validating tens of thousands of Catholic sites and millions of new articles each year would be a futile effort.
Third, as Matt Warner points out, blogs are not libraries of digitized books. They are virtual conversations. They’re more like pubs and living rooms than soapboxes or encyclicals. We would never put an imprimatur on a bar stool or living room couch, nor should we propose one for blogs.
When I was a guest on Catholic Answers Live this was one of the questions I got. The caller wanted a sure way to tell if a blog was faithful to the Church and wanted blog imprimaturs. As I recalled I told him first to study your faith — the Catechism, spiritual classics, and other documents. Those who are experts in detecting counterfeit money become experts by becoming thoroughly familiar with real money not studying counterfeits. As you learn more about the faith it becomes easier to detect when any writer or speaker is speaking accurately about the faith. As I was coming into the Church reading Church documents and the spiritual classics it helped my theological spidey sense to detect dodgy writers.
My second suggestion was when you find a blog that you like and is faithful to the Church you can look at their blogroll for suggestions regarding other faithful blogs. These blogrolls more often than not are a semi-impramatur and a good indicator. The opposite is true of more dissident blogs where almost always they link to other dissident blogs. When I found my first Catholic blog over a decade ago I immediately found other good Catholic blogs from the blogroll and then from the blogroll of these other blogs. It was a little easier then since there were not all that many Catholic blogs and really no dissident blogs at that time. In fact I remember Commonweal doing some coming whining about the lack of progressive blogs.
Jimmy Akin on his podcast previously answered this question regarding the Canon Law aspects regarding blogs, podcasts, and other public posting. Here is the transcript.
Jimmy Akin on Bad Church art.
Some years ago I went to a travelling exhibit of the Vatican art treasures.
One thing leapt out at my really clearly: In contrast to all the art treasures from previous centuries, the “art treasures” from the mid-2oth century onward were terrible.
Sometime I want to post a picture of the “Millennium vestments” they designed for John Paul II. They look like some kind of alien dignitary costume from Star Trek Voyager.
And bad Catholic art is by no means confined to the travelling art treasures exhibit.
But his post is not just a showcase of bad Catholic art, but also about Catholic art education and the good work the Chesterton Academy is doing.
Jimmy also links to an article published in the Nov-Dec 2012 issue of Catholic Answers Magazine titled Horus Manure: Debunking the Jesus/Horus Connection by Jon Sorensen. The author really deserves some kind of award for that pun.
For this Year of Faith, Pope Benedict has encouraged you to study and reflect on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Well, here’s an easy way to do it. Simply enter your email address and – starting October 11, 2012 – you’ll start getting a little bit of the Catechism emailed to you every morning. Read that little bit every day and you’ll read the whole catechism in a year. Cool, right?
Great idea for the year of faith.
SF Signal asks several SF authors for recommended stories for English Lit class. John C. Wright starts to answer by by saying:
The question is frankly a very difficult one. Let us analyze it.
The purpose of education is to teach the youth the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic, and, as they grow, to teach either a trade or to train them in the liberal arts (Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy). Additionally, education must instruct the youth in the Christian faith and classical virtues (fortitude, temperance, justice, prudence), as well as teaching enough Civics and history to allow them to be productive and honest citizens of this Republic, able to serve as jurors, voters, or soldiers, wisely and bravely, as the need demands.
Unfortunately, the Progressives of over a century ago usurped the educational industry, and created an establishment similar to the Established Church of England, in that the schools became the primary conduit not of education, but of indoctrination in progressive dogmas, and, later, various lunatic dogmas of the Politically Correct, communism, feminism, sexual liberation, environmentalism, and most of all the doctrine that all philosophy is meaningless and all ethics relative, and human life not sacred.
Given this, when I am asked what science fiction and fantasy I would recommend to educate and instruct the youth, I take the question as being akin to asking what superhero comic books or fairy princess Disney cartoons I would recommend to educate and instruct the youth. But the purpose of science fiction and fantasy is to entertain, not to instruct. When art becomes didactic and pedagogical, it often loses its savor
He then goes with several lists of recommended reading:
Imagine society’s collective shock if Hillary Clinton were to join the National Rifle Association, if members of the Westboro Baptist Church were discovered frolicking at a gay bar or if Quentin Tarantino were to announce plans to make a Justin Bieber documentary.
Josh Horn’s friends were hit with a shock wave of that magnitude when Horn, then an ardent atheist, announced his resignation as president of the Secular Free Thought Society, an ASU club known for its skepticism of religion. Horn had committed the ultimate taboo and sealed his self-imposed excommunication with one act: he decided to become a Catholic.
An interesting conversion story reported in a magazine for Arizona State University and is well worth reading. The opening paragraphs are a bit over the top, but the actual story of his life and conversion is more straight-forward. His description of what happened after he had read the Litany of the Sacred Heart is also something I can understand.
“I was actually kind of annoyed that it happened, and scared – not comforted in the least,” Horn says. “I didn’t want it, I didn’t think it was possible. It just happens, and you come out of it realizing that this obliges you to change your life and the entire course you thought it was taking immediately.”
Just read the whole thing via Tito Edwards.
CHICAGO, Ill.–September 15, 2012 – Imagine Sisters, a new online organization founded to be the nexus for media and information about discerning a vocation as a Catholic Religious Sister, will launch its first viral vocation initiative, The One Rose Project, on October 1, 2012.
The One Rose Project invites Catholics around the globe to reach out to young women they know, personally inviting them to consider that God may be calling them to be a Religious Sister.
The campaign promotes a personal encounter on October 1, 2012–the feast of St. Therese of Liseux. Participants will invite the young woman they know to consider a call to consecrated Religious Life by giving her a single rose in the spiritual legacy of St. Therese.
Imagine Sisters has received substantial testimony that a personal invitation is incredibly powerful for young women who are open to a religious vocation. Imagine Sisters asks for prayers that this invitation will be used by God to plant the seeds of religious vocations among young women, blessing the Church with many new religious sisters.
The One Rose Project can be easily shared through social media networks, personal blogs and speaking engagements. Imagine Sisters has created a short video explaining the project, and encourages supporters to share this video as the primary means of transmitting the message virally.
In the spirit of The New Evangelization, Imagine Sisters embraces social and visual media to passionately propose the possibility of becoming a religious sister in the world today. Through the grace of God, the Imagine Sister website and Facebook interact with over 100,000 individuals each week, effectively working through the new media to reach young women around the world.
Just read this talk that Julie of Happy Catholic gave at this years Catholic New Media Conference. Required reading for all Catholic bloggers – should be part of a terms of service for Catholic bloggers.