Catholicism Pilgrimage Journal

I’m pleased to let you know about the Catholicism Pilgrimage Journal  - written to help teens and young adults connect more deeply with the content of Fr. Robert Barron’s Catholicism series.

 

It evolved last year as Fr. Stephen Grunow and I brainstormed on ways to integrate the program more deeply into various aspects of parish life.  You can find more details about the program here.

Here’s an interview I did with Word on Fire.

Today (5/7), I’ll be on Sheila Liaugminas’ radio show, talking about the Pilgrimage Journal and other projects.

(In other work with WOF, I wrote a study guide for Fr. Barron’s excellent series on Conversion - think about it for next Lent!)

 

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Prayer Corner

We are all about rocks here – well one of us is all about rocks here – so we spent some time this evening reading about – and more importantly – looking at photographs of – the astonishing Cave of Crystals in Mexico.  

I thought this one was good for this space.

Source.

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Got it!

Okay, so I was thinking about all the virtual ink that’s been spilled, tears that have been shed and skin that’s been worn off hands because of all that wringing over the LCWR/Sr. Farley business, and I figures at some point soon, the columnists and bloggers are going to run out of material, and they just might need another example of a Religious Sister, Kept Down By The Men.

(Not a fake issue, historically speaking, by the way! Not kidding!)

So, I thought of one!

Here you go: the American religious sister who’s had more conflicts with more bishops than any other over the past few decades. Who’s gone head-to-head with a bishop or two, whose work has been supported by lay people, but who’s had bishops has her primary opponents, both overtly and covertly, who, up until various shifts and changes of the past 5-7 years, has had probably 80% of the American bishops strongly in opposition to her ministry.

Nun v. Male Bishops! For your next column, blog post, Colbert bit or #hashtag campaign! Ready?

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Pinteresting!

Pinterest is, of course, one of the currently pervasive Internets Flavors-of-The-Month.  Like all the others, it came, it’s exploded, it’s here, and it will undoubtedly go.

(Which is why, while I’m all for churches using the Internet, I also think, aside from a basic, informative, well-designed web page, social media should probably be way down on a typical parish’s to-do list.  If you have someone who’s into it and knows what they’re doing, set them loose.  I think a diocese should definitely have a communications person who’s savvy with social media.  But otherwise….remember MySpace,  calm down and give the liturgy, catechesis and works of mercy more time..  Don’t need a full-time Twitter Apostolate or Pinterest Ministry team just yet.)

So, Pinterest.  Just a couple of thoughts.

I know some people experience it as a huge time suck – just one more addictive, inadequacy-inspiring corner of the whole addictive, inadequacy-

inspiring Internet we’ve all grown to love and hate over the past two decades, especially (it seems) women and especially (it seems) mothers.

Over at Word on Fire today, Kerry Trotter admits she sees a value in the site, but also the problems of getting sucked into it. 

A month ago, April Perry offered this brief reflection, not only on Pinterest, but on the inevitably-dashed high expectations that too much time amidst the cunningly organized spices and hand-made soaps of the Internet, not to speak of the clever Tweets and clever blog posts (and lure to produce the some of all of them) can bring.  Your children want YOU! she reminded her readers.

And then there’s one of many blog posts on the theme: “Pinterest and Feelings of Inadequacy,” from which I grabbed the image to the left. 

Mercifully, Pinterest doesn’t seem to have the power to pull me into its web.  Yah, I’m on Pinterest, and I “pin,” but I don’t spend a lot of time surveying other people’s boards.  Once in a while I cruise for recipes, and I’m finding some useful and interesting resources on Catholic homeschooling boards…but that’s about it.

(No,no,no…Pinterest recipe boards? Not a problem…please excuse me while I tumble down my daily rabbit hole of cooking blogs, though…)

The primary reason I use it and am on it is because I use it as a Bookmarking/Favorites site. For myself. (Although as long as I’m there, I have some stuff about my books up – might as well.)   If the site  had the function to go private, I would do it – I find it just so easy to pin recipes (mostly)  - and then just as easy to run through them later and actually be able to remember what it is that appealed to me about that recipe, since there’s an image attached.  Much more helpful to me than a list of text-only bookmarks.

So I was thinking I was going to write a Pinterest post anyway, but then today I was checking up one of my former (high school) students, a woman who’s carving out a very nice career as a fabric designer and crafter – Rashida Coleman-Hale.  I only taught Rashida for one year (her senior year, my first year teaching in that school), but she flew back on my radar via Facebook a while back, and I discovered her sharp, charming Japanese-and-retro-influenced style, which is just marvelous. 

And she has 844,428 Pinterest followers. 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, then!

How do you even do that without being on American Idol or being married to Demi Moore or something?

And how many of you can say such a thing of one of your former students?!

(P.S. – here’s an interesting article on “10 Brands Suprisingly Killing It On Pinterest.  But still..none of them has over 800K followers!)

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