How to hold a rockin' megachurch service

Amusing parody of modern mega-church services:

Praying With the Office Chaplain

A neat story about the rise of workplace chaplains. An excerpt:

Following the military-chaplain model, these roving spiritual advisers typically visit offices or factories weekly, greeting employees, hanging out in the break room, handing out business cards and meeting one-on-one with workers. But they're also on-call 24/7, so chaplains rush to hospitals, restaurants or homes on request, providing comfort and support free of charge to employees.

They perform weddings or funerals for people who have no one else to do so. And they pray with employees over problems from medical or marital crises to job loss, addiction and financial woes, holding the information in confidence. The Rev. Warren Wetherbee, a corporate chaplain in LaCrosse, Wis., says he sometimes helps employees make a budget if asked, or sits with them while they decide to cut up their credit cards.

Cover the canvas

The secret to getting past blocks in writing or any other kind of art.

A new magazine for Catholic singles

Not an ad, just something I thought looked cool.

John Wayne's grandson is a priest

Neat!

If there is a more fabulously nerdy video, I have not seen it

A Mother's Day song by a biologist:

When death isn't pretty

A gripping, honest post by Denise Spencer, wife of the late Internet Monk blogger, talking about how her husband's final moments weren't what she'd hoped they'd be like.

Access to media is changing from scarcity to surfeit

Some interesting points with lots of implications. Key quote:

A Xhosa tribesman in South Africa with a Vodacom HTC Magic mobile handset has instant access to more information than the President of the United States did at the time of the tribesman’s birth.

Read the rest here.

via Ted Weinstein

World Youth Day 2011 Promo video

via Catholic Seeking

Life and death, good and evil in the New World

A fascinating PDF article about the role the Dominican friars played in the 16th-century exploration of the Americas. It shows the complicated mix of forces at play in terms of how the indigenous people were viewed, what the motives of the various colonists were, etc.

Stephenie Meyer wrote Twilight in three months with three young children at home?

I've never read Twilight, but I thought this story behind its writing was interesting. (For the record, the series has sold 70 million copies and spent 143 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.)

Calvin Klein fragrance a hit with big cats

Amusing.

If Wikipedia were a book

A student tried making a book out of Wikipedia entries. He only printed out 0.01% of it and it was still a couple feet tall.

SaintWiki

A great resource.

Baby hears his mom for the first time after getting cochlear implants

An incredibly touching video.

How the Church Fathers approached youth ministry

A great article by Mike Aquilina. An excerpt:

Scouring the Patrologia Latina and Patrologia Graeca, I found nothing to suggest that Ambrose had ever led teens on ski trips to the nearby Alps. Digging through the Eastern Fathers, I came up even drier — no junior-high dances — not even a pizza party in either Antioch or Alexandria. In fact, in all the documentary evidence from all the ancient patriarchates of the East and the West, there's not a single bulletin announcement for a single parish youth group.

Yet the Fathers had enormous success in youth and young-adult ministry. Many of the early martyrs were teens, as were many of the Christians who took to the desert for the solitary life. There's ample evidence that a disproportionate number of conversions, too, came from the young and youngish age groups.

So how did the Fathers do it? Read the rest here.

Catholic music...in space!

Neat.

Top Catholic blogs

An impressively thorough list of Catholic blogs listed in order of Google Reader subscribers.

How e-books are revolutionizing the publishing industry

A fascinating look at how the book publishing industry is changing, especially as it relates to unpublished authors.

"Best of" epic movie trailer music

Beyond awesome:

Why Christianity is losing to LOST

Some good food for thought.

Can changes in writing reveal Alzheimer's?

Reader Cuppa Jo pointed me to this interesting article: "An English prof ran a computer program on many of Christie's novels and discovered a dramatic change in her word count and vocabulary as she got older, a possible indication that she was losing some of mental faculties. Really amazing concept!"

"Why I remain Catholic in the face of the scandals"

A transcript of a fantastic segment Elizabeth Scalia did on NPR on Good Friday.

Stories of martyr priests of the Mexican Revolution

A great collection.