Book Review: Connected Toward Communion
Connected Toward Communion: The Church and Social Communication in the Digital Age by Daniella Zsupan-Jerome is not a book first and foremost about social media or new media and definitely not a how-to manual for best practices in Catholic media. It is a survey of the Church’s teachings on social communications since Vatican II’s Inter […]
Book Review: The Glory of the Crusades
From the time I was a child, I had a passing interest in the Crusades as part of that exciting time of knights and chivalry known as the Middle Ages. They showed up, sometimes tangentially, in many of the books I read, including Robin Hood and Ivanhoe and others. Later, I read about them in […]
Looking Back on 2014
Last January 1, I composed a post looking back on the previous year and its highlights and noted at the end my hope to make this an annual tradition. In that spirit, here’s a look back at 2014, its highs and lows, in no particular order. 1. Isabella’s First Communion Certainly the highlight of the […]
What churches can learn from restaurants about social media
What if churches contracted with social media specialists who not only published tweets and Facebook posts for them, but engaged in dialogue with people online and analyzed the effectiveness of their social media efforts? The Boston Globe today profiles a small consultant business that provides that service to the restaurant industry and, in the meantime, […]
Your parish already has a mission statement. And so do you.
Does your parish have a mission statement? Of course, it does. No, not that paragraph on your web site or in your bulletin that a committee of the parish pastoral council developed with your pastor on a retreat. Oh sure, it’s an expression of your parish’s particular vision of its mission, but it’s not the […]
Your Parish isn’t a Welcoming Place
Our family has recently become homeless, from a Catholic parish standpoint[1], and so we’ve spent recent Sundays going to a variety of parishes in surrounding towns, trying to find a new home. We tried the neighboring parish that is paired with ours at 9am, but there wasn’t even an attempt to welcome the refugees from […]
This “crying game” just leads to more voter apathy
If you want to an illustration of why people are increasingly turned off by politics and elections and why there is so much voter apathy, the race for Massachusetts governor provides a timely example. The two candidates, Republican Charlie Baker and Democrat Martha Coakley, had their last debate last week and one of the question […]
Mario Batali’s 8 tips to bring dinnertime serenity to harried home cooks
Celebrity chef Mario Batali was interviewed by Chris Kimball[1], host of America’s Test Kitchen Radio, a couple of weeks ago and Kimball asked Batali a question that I think will hit home for every cook, every parent who’s looked at the clock, seen it was time to start making dinner and was wrung out of […]
If you can’t say something nice, don’t be a boor
A Facebook friend[1] the other day posted a link to a story about an actress who had died. It wasn’t someone you’d know by name, but you’d recognize their face and perhaps express some surprise and a normal amount of regret, as in “Oh, that’s sad. I liked their work.” Or you’d do that if […]
Carpooling kids to the end of society
Like most of the lifestyle pieces written by Beth Teitell in the Boston Globe, this article about “Rules of the carpool road” makes me want to flee to the woods and reject the morass that modern American society has become. There’s the resigned acknowledgment from emasculated parents that their and their neighbors’ children are the […]