Category: Web/Tech

The 2007 Catholic Blog Awards are now voting, and it seems I’ve been nominated in a number of categories.

Thanks for all who nominated me and who have already voted for JA.O.

May the best blogs win.

CLICK HERE TO VOTE.

Just a note to let folks know that I’m currently having to devote a significant amount of time to a writing project (the Mormonism booklet for the publisher outside the U.S.), and blogging may be light this week.

I’ll do my best to at least throw up some interesting links, though.

A reader writes:

Hey, Jimmy – you’re a Googlewhack!

I don’t know if you’re aware of the Googlewhacking phenomenon, but your blog is the only page on the Internet to feature both words ‘ediacaran gerrymandered’.  You’re a one in three billion chance!

I can’t claim credit for finding this out myself; some friends
and I on h2g2 were trying to find some and yours was the first to be
found.

Congratulations, and have a great day!

Thanks much! I had no idea!

MORE ON GOOGLEWHACKING.

Howdy, folks!

I thought I’d harness the power of the Internet by asking y’all if you could help me brainstorm something.

Currently my square dance club is starting a new class for beginners. We dance on Friday nights in Lakeside, California, and the thing about square dance classes is that you need to get all your new students right at the beginning. Unless someone is already an experienced dancer, it’s not really possible for people to join in mid class.

Given this, we’re trying to find as many new students as we can, and I’m trying to find as many new promising techniques for getting students as possible.

We’re already asking friends and co-workers if they’d like to learn and leaving flyers at local businesses. Those are standard methods of finding potential students.

I thought of doing PSAs on local country music stations, posting ads on CraigsList, and calling local churches (church folks are always looking for good, clean fun–and that’s exactly what we’ve got). Another club member thought of e-mailing our flyer to the local freebie papers.

But I’m in the market for ideas, and I thought I’d ask y’all if you had any!

The two key criteria are:

1) It has to be free (or at least very cheap) and

2) It has to be something that can be done quickly. We only have the next couple of Fridays to get new students in.

Can the ultra-intelligent readership of JA.O come through with good suggestions?

Lemme know in the combox!

BTW, I know I’ve got readers in the San Diego area. If y’all’re looking for something FUN to do on Friday nights, come by! It’s tons of fun–for singles, couples, or whole families! I’ll be there, and we’d love to have you give square dancing a try! (MORE INFO & DIRECTIONS.)

I know that today’s posts were brief and didn’t have the analysis or commentary that I usually provide, and I thought I’d offer an explanation.

There are some days when, for a variety of reasons, I’m not able to do a usual day’s blogging. Last night it was because I had to preside over a 3-hour board meeting of my square dance club (you’d be amazed how much business a club’s board needs to discuss!), and it took up my usual blog time.

I thought about putting up a Blog Day Off post, but I don’t like leaving regular visitors with nothing new to read or discuss if I can avoid it, so I decided to do an "Instapundit Day." I figured, Instapundit can get away with running one of the biggest blogs there is (FAR bigger than mine) by providing brief entries, so–even though it’s not what JA.O readers are used to–perhaps I can avoid some Blog Days Off (at least some of them) by doing brief entries like those I used today.

I hope the experiment was successful (or at least preferable to the alternative) and provided some interesting food for thought and discussion.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)

The above video illustrates the way in which technology is changing evangelization.

Mike is a very thoughtful, sincere young man who is investigating the Catholic faith, and he has used YouTube to request help.

I tried logging in to leave a comment for his video, but for some reason YouTube wouldn’t let me. If some who has a YouTube account could leave a comment for him pointing him to this post, I would be most appreciative.

Mike asks several questions in his video, including why converts became Catholic, why Catholics believe their faith (as opposed to the teachings of other groups of Christians), and what resources he could look to.

Here are my answers:

1) My own conversion story is online HERE.

2) HERE is a treatment of how I’d support Catholicism for someone coming from a Protestant background.

3) I would strongly recommend the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church as a resource offering a brief treatment of Catholic teaching in convenient Q & A format.

I’d also point out that the Catechism itself is online (Mike mentions that he’s planning on buying it).

I’d also recommend going to Catholic.Com for further info, including both its online library and its forums. I’d also note that I answer many questions about the faith here on JimmyAkin.Org.

 

I particularly agree with Mike’s statement that, in investigating the Catholic faith, there is only so much you can teach yourself, and you ultimately need to reach out to others. I’ve been at that point. When I was becoming Catholic, I hit the point at which I had done all I could with books and I needed input from an actual human being who was informed about the faith and who could respond to my questions. At that point there was no Internet, no Catholic radio, and it was hard going. Eventually, I found Catholic Answers, and that was an enormous help. I want to do all I can to help others who have reached the same point in their journey.

Thanks much, and God bless Mike for using the new tools of communication to help him as he pursues God’s will for his life!

20

Need a blog day off today.

Readers of JA.O may recall a few months ago when Bill Moyers sicced his lawyers on me that I was represented by Steve Dillard, a lawyer and fellow-blogger who ran the popular Catholic blog Southern Appeal. I really appreciate Steve’s help, on this occasion and others, as well as the lively blogging he and his compatriots have provided.

I was sorry to learn, just before the holidays, that Southern Appeal is closing its doors. Its proprietor, Steve Dillard, has decided for personal and professional reasons to discontinue the blog.

I know I’ll miss it, and many others will, too. Southern Appeal was one of the earliest and most popular Catholic blogs, bringing faith-based commentary on a wide range of issues, particularly social and political ones.

It was also a robust group blog, with many co-bloggers from a variety of perspectives (some of them Protestant) who worked together respectfully and well.

If you’ve read Southern Appeal before, be sure to

CHECK OUT STEVE’S FINAL POST.

In it he notes where you’ll be able to read the continuing blogging efforts of his co-bloggers, as well as keep up to date on his own speaking engagements.

If you’ve enjoyed Southern Appeal, you might also take a moment to leave Steve and his co-bloggers a note letting them know and expressing support for their future blogging efforts.

God go with you, Steve and all. I look forward to seeing you around the Internet.

There are certain subjects that I tend to handle by e-mail rather than posting them on the blog. I very much prefer (and ask) that when people e-mail me they let me post their question (in anonymized form) and its answer so that others can benefit from it, but sometimes, if the issue is especially sensitive, I’ll handle it by e-mail instead.

One case where I tend to do that is when people feel that they may have done something that God will not forgive them for–something unpardonable.

The reason that I tend to help people like that via e-mail is that I don’t want to stir up worries unnecessarily in other readers, who may be scrupulous. I mean, if you’re scrupulous and you’d never thought that Sin X is unpardonable then why should I make your life harder by publishing a blog post entertaining the question that it is. Even if I offer sound arguments for why God forgives Sin X, you’d probably rather not have even known about the issue–at least if you’re scrupulous.

I feel it’s important to help people who are afraid that they have done something that will permanently damn them. It’s a common worry that affects a lot of people at some point during their lives, and it’s an absolutely terrifying position to be in, so I want to help people who are at that point, and I want to do so without stirring up fears needlessly in others.

Thus far my solution has been handling queries like that largely by e-mail, but this limits the potential good that the answer may do. What I’d rather do is write the answers in some kind of web-based repository where they can benefit multiple people–but without needlessly stirring up fears.

This would also have the benefit of letting people go back to the repository when they need to in order to calm their fears. I had one person write me, and I sent him material that he found helpful, and he’d re-read my e-mails to comfort himself whenever he got fearful, but then his e-mail crashed and he lost them all. (Fortunately, I was able to pull them up out of my e-mail and re-send them.)

A key element in doing that would be to break the subject up in to little chunks so that the fearful could read those chunks that applied to them and not the ones that didn’t.

There are also certain chunks that I’d want to make sure that almost everyone reads (e.g., the fact that the story of the Prodigal Son was given to us precisely in order to stress the fact that you can begin as a son of the Father, then go off into horrible, horrible sin, and still come back and be forgiven, which serves as a reference point for God’s mercy that has to be kept in mind when reading other passages).

The question is how to present these little chunks to the reader in the best way, and that’s where I’d like advice from people.

Two plausible options occur to me. There may be others also, and if so I’d like to hear about them, but here are the two I’m thinking about at the moment:

1) The Minimally-Tagged Presentation

In this version I’d have a list at the top of the page of the things I think virtually everyone should read. I’d advise people to click on these things and read them.

Below this would be a list of answers to the particular things that worry people. The items on this list would be very brief and as non-descriptive as possible (i.e., minimally tagged) so as not to stir up needless fears. For example, many entries in the list might just be the citation of a scripture passage (Book X, Chapter Y) and nothing else. That way if you were having a fear that something in Book X, Chapter Y meant that you were irretrivable damned, you could click on that link and find out why this isn’t the case.

I could then tell people to read only the entries that are actually bothering them and, if they’re not sure what the reference is for the passage they have in mind, I could provide a link to a searchable Bible so that they could look up the reference and know what to click on.

The drawbacks of this approach are the facts that (a) some people may click on things that aren’t bugging them (in fact, some people may have anxiety over what’s under all the different links that they start clicking them just to find out) and (b) they may not be able to figure out what one that want to click on, even if I provide a link to a searchable Bible.

2) The Non-Tagged Version

This version would start out with links to the chunks that I think almost all of the fearful should read, as before, but it would not have the second list. Instead, it would have a search box, and you’d enter search terms relating to your fear and be given results you could click on to read the corresponding chunks. The idea here is that you wouldn’t even see things that weren’t already bugging you, and so they wouldn’t raise needless fears.

The drawbacks here are (a) people might not enter the right search terms (they misspell things, use different abbreviations for biblical books, use different translations that use different vocabulary) and might miss the material was there to help them, and (b) they might generate too many results and see things that end up stirring up new fears anyway (e.g., the word "unpardonable" or "unforgivable" might show up in almost every item in the repository, and if they wouldn’t the word "and" or "the" would).

The latter problem might be ameliorable if I were able to get someone to do me a custom search function that would only accept certain terms, but that could exacerbate problem (a) at the expense of curing problem (b).

So I’m not sure what to do.

I’d like to find a way to use technology to provide help for people on these points without the risk of placing greater burdens on them, but it seems like some degree of risk will be unavoidable, and it isn’t clear which of these approaches (if either) is the better. There may also be a third approach that I’m not even considering.

My question for you–particularly if you are someone who struggles with these kinds of issues–is what you think. Which approach do you think would be most beneficial–and, if you think you have a better solution than either of them–what it is.

Much obliged for the feedback, folks!

BTW, I *totally* understand if folks would prefer to comment anonymously on this one. Just make up a new, temporary handle for yourself. That’ll make the discussion easier than if we have a bunch of anonymous blanks.