I have mostly ignored the hype around facebook and myspace, but those sites, as well as sites like digg.com, reddit.com, and del.icio.us (which are called “social bookmarking” sites, I have gathered), have reached incredible popularity.

I have joined del.icio.us and digg.com and have been trying them out to see whether they are useful to me.

One note about the sites: I was disappointed when I went to digg.com and reddit.com because many of the links that become the most popular due to people’s votes are links to vulgar or very derogatory material.

In case you don’t know how they work, what happens is people might read an interesting story on a webpage, or a cool blog post, and they will then vote for that link, which sends their vote to the social bookmarking site and lets others go read about it. If they like it, they will also vote for it, and if a site gets enough votes, it will show up on the main page (of digg.com or the others), so that all people will see it.

Unfortunately, this naturally leads to people with twisted hearts voting for evil sites, and so those often rise to the top–kind of the worst of human nature coming out. But the idea is pretty cool, I think, and not all of the links voted for are bad, most are morally neutral I would say.

So, my question is: Do you use any of the sites I referenced?

If so, what do you like best about them, or how are they useful to you?

I just listened to a talk given by Father Phillip Chavez, S.O.L.T. on the need for true masculine spirituality in the Church and world today.

S.O.L.T. stands for Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity, and the most famous priest from that community is Father Corapi.

Fr. Chavez is tough, and he doesn’t pull his punches. Many of the things he said made me think, “Am I living this masculine faith?”, which means for me that it is a good talk because it is challenging me.

His main premise is that the men in the Church and generally in Western culture have largely forgotten or never learned what it means to be a man. What we need is to reclaim our masculinity, so that we can lead our families, friends, and the world to Christ, as He created us to do.

In particular, not only do husbands and fathers need to live masculinely, but especially priests do to become the role models that men and women need in order to see how they ought to live.

Men need weekly fellowship with other men, to strengthen one another in faith and in living heroically for Christ. This point was heavily stressed by Fr. Chavez. One cool thing about that is that Regnum Christi, the movement I recently joined, includes a weekly meeting, called an Encounter, where the Regnum Christi men in Austin get together to encounter Christ through prayer, gospel reading and reflection, and discussion.

Men also need to get involved, to get into the fight. A man who isn’t in the fight is open to temptations, and he pointed out David sitting out the fight and then falling to lustful temptation with Bathsheba as the main example.

Men need to get into the fight by taking action in their homes, parishes, work places, and in society. Most church ministries are run by females, Fr. Chavez noted. I think he said something like 85% are, which is a huge majority but probably accurate.

He also talked about the fact that the words “purity”, “chastity”, and even “virtue” have taken on a feminine connotation, so much so that now, when he speaks to men about these virtues, he uses “physical integrity” instead.

He brought up the point that girls and boys both need instruction on the virtue of purity, but that they need to be separated from each other and be given two different talks because for females, purity is about preservation, but for males, it is more about self-mastery (my words).

Sexuality is a good thing, men must be taught, but if a man isn’t the master of himself, then his sexuality can lead him into temptations of lust, looking and using women as objects instead of loving them and protecting them as beautiful persons.

It was a good talk, and masculine spirituality needs more proponents like Fr. Chavez. I know I have found it difficult to know the right balance between being strong but not overbearing, authoritative but not authoritarian, and gentle but not a doormat.

I’ve been working on the graphics a bit with Crescendo, but before you get your hopes up that the graphics are looking better than just plain colored rectangles, let me disillusion you with this screenshot from the game:

What are those white looking things all bunched up together, you might ask? Well, of course, I would answer, those are the squirrels who are gathering the (currently invisible) acorns and planting them in the green earth, which they have (invisibly) transformed from the brown ground terrain so that the ground would be fertile.

Why doesn’t the squirrel look like a squirrel, you cleverly point out. Well, that’s because I downloaded some freeware images from a website, and though the website’s artist had created images of cows, deer, rats, bats, wolves, and other creatures, he didn’t create any squirrels. So I have used one of his chicken images to show the squirrels.

The squirrel/chicken heading in the northeast direction by itself is an attack squirrel who has spotted the enemy, whose terrain are represented by the grey and (slightly darker) grey tiles.

I think that this game is going to be great for children because they get to use lots of imagination for just about every aspect of it.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, seems to me to be a man of contradictions:

On the one hand, he wants to lay a wreath at the memorial site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But on the other hand, he had declared that the attacks were an inside job carried out by the U.S. government, and he was “amazed” that families of the victims were sickened by his request.

On the one hand, he says that the American people are eager for different opinions about the world, and he is looking forward to providing them with “correct and clear information”.

But on the other hand, he calls the Holocaust a “myth”, says that the nation of Israel should be “wiped off the map”, and, just yesterday before he boarded a plane for the U.S., stood before a military rally where a banner declared “Death to America”.
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Well our backyard barnyard is continuing to take shape.

Katie and I have been wanting to plant our Fall garden, but the newest residents at Pointe 1-7 Acres, named Gertrude, Lobelia, and Eunice, have taken a particular shining toward our garden plot, so much so that we feared planting any seeds would result in their swift consumption.

So yesterday I make a very simple fence around the garden, and now the chickens are foiled from one of their favorite spots. Don’t worry, though, they still have their beloved compost pile.

Now we can plant: okra and chile peppers, that Nathan gave us, winter and butternut squash, beets, cilantro, dill, snow peas, carrots, and garlic.

Egg Report: The chickens all laid an egg per day, every day this past week, for the maximum weekly total we can possibly get from our chickens of 21 eggs! Average cost per egg, down to $3.63.

You can watch the news video here on Youtube covering the fraud that Planned Parenthood committed to bring an abortion mega-clinic to Aurora.

They received $305 million in your tax dollars last year, and made $60 million in profit–this is for an organization that is supposedly not run as a for-profit corporation.

They cover up statutory rape, something long known about in pro-life circles, but for the first time that I have seen, covered on this national news broadcast.

Planned Parenthood hurts women and hurts society. Women deserve better.

I don’t think so.

Neither does J. Budziszewski:

[Student:] “Well, at first I thought you were only saying that there’s a difference in typical male and female qualities. Then I thought you were saying that there’s a difference in what men and women typically do. Then I thought you were saying that there’s a difference in what they’re designed to do. But now you seem to be saying that there’s a difference in what they are.”

[Professor:] “Right. And we’re not finished.”

“You mean there’s another layer to the onion?”

“Of course. There’s the center.”

Read this very interesting exchange between a professor and his students about male and female complementarity here.

Katie and I recently felt called to leave our parish and join a new parish.  It was a tough decision because I had made many friends at my old parish, and both Katie and I were involved significantly with ministry, in particular Perpetual Adoration.

The good news is, we still go to our old parish frequently for daily Mass and adoration, and so we keep in contact with our old friends.

The great news is, Katie and I felt called in our new parish to start a program called Splendor of Love.  It is a study of the Theology of the Body where married couples get together in a small group, read the book that Father Walter Schu wrote for it, and go through a workbook, discussing the Theology of the Body and related, relevant topics like same-sex “marriage”, feminism, and contraception.

Oddly, most priests that I have met don’t seem to know about the Theology of the Body, and some priests, sadly, have heard information about Regnum Christi or the Legion of Christ that is simply false, and so when we went to present this idea to the marriage coordinators at our new parish, we weren’t sure of the reception we would get.

We prayed and left it up to God.  Well, when we went in to talk to the two marriage coordinators, they were ecstatic about the program!  They want it to be an official marriage enrichment program at the parish (which is very large, probably 4,000 families) as it will complement their two Theology of the Body introductory sessions that couples preparing for marriage are required to take.

Katie and I are so grateful to our Lord for the warm reception that we and this program received.

I hope that one day all priests will know and embrace the Theology of the Body, Eucharistic Adoration, and ministries that promote the virtue of purity for both men and women.  All young priests from our generation that I know do embrace these gifts of Christ to the world, so there is great reason for hope.

May Christ’s Kingdom come!

“And love,
is not the easy thing,
the only baggage,
that you can bring,
love,
is not the easy thing,
the only baggage,
that you can bring is all that you can’t leave behind…”
-U2, “Walk On”

I just have to make a short blog post to say, it’s hard to love some people, but these are the people that Jesus most wants us to love.

When I hear Jesus say “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”, I usually think, “that’s not that hard”, and then a person comes along who really acts like an enemy to me, and I realize that love is harder than I think it is.

Only with God’s grace can we as human being love our enemies.

My brilliant and gorgeous husband is quoted in the front page article of this week’s National Catholic Register! 

Of the many men who have found their wives through Catholic Internet singles’ sites, Devin was interviewed for the article on Catholic online dating.  I’m so proud of you, Devin, and think that you sound really smart, which is hard to do when you’re interviewed over the telephone.  I’m glad that you diligently searched for me (no Internet pun intended) and waited for 6 years.