Navigating coverage of Benedict’s trip
Buckets of ink — both real ink and cyberink on blogsites — are being spilled these days on what the media coverage of Pope Benedict’s U.S. trip will be like. One of the better commentaries that I’ve seen on how to navigate that coverage appears in an unsigned editorial in the national Catholic newspaper Our Sunday Visitor, which says that “efforts to turn him into a kind of Catholic Jerry Falwell or Jesse Jackson are doomed to fail.” Read on for the full editorial.
More nightmares about covering papal events
Tim Drake, who runs the National Catholic Register’s Pope2008.com blog, has a few nightmares of his own to tell about covering papal events. It’s a follow-up to our post last week.
A little name change
Sharp-eyed viewers of these pages may have noticed a slight name change: Rather than calling this the CNS News Hub, we’re now simply calling it the CNS Blog.
The reason for the name change is equally simple. When this all started in 2006, the News Hub was a way chiefly to link to interesting stories from CNS clients. Over time, though, it morphed into more of a traditional blog, with links to client stories plus news nuggets and other interesting tidbits about CNS that didn’t fit into a traditional news story format.
And with the papal trip to the United States just two weeks away, look for even more robust posting here. We’ve got big plans for the trip and for our blog, so stay tuned.
Also worth noting …
From here and there around the Catholic press:
 – Spreading the message of mercy. A story in the Arlington Catholic Herald in Virginia about a local nun who feels a close connection to St. Faustina Kowalska, the Polish nun who promoted the divine mercy devotions on the Sunday after Easter.
– St. Vincent’s ‘Flat Stanley’ visits Congress, travels afar. A feature from the Intermountain Catholic in Salt Lake City on how second-graders at a local Catholic school learn geography and language arts by following the travels of their own Flat Stanley.
– Diocese begins stem-cell-education program. A campaign in the Diocese of Rochester, N.Y., to counter a state plan to fund stem-cell research is described by the Catholic Courier.
Easter leftovers …
… but still tasty just the same:
– Dave Hrbacek, the outdoors-blogging photographer and writer at The Catholic Spirit in St. Paul, Minn., whom we’ve written about here before, has a great little entry on the power of confession, further cementing him as one of my favorite unknown Catholic bloggers.
– For those of you who love stories of individuals’ journeys to Catholicism, here’s another one, courtesy of the Arkansas Catholic in Little Rock.
– Not really Easter related but still a story of faith-formation is this piece from the Catholic Sentinel in Portland, Ore., telling about a “public trial” that led to a conviction of a Portland 15-year-old girl on charges of being a Christian.
‘Meditation made easy’
Also for Easter reflection, St. Anthony Messenger magazine has a primer on meditation. The article explains that, though we think meditation is only for monks and nuns, we already meditate each day of our life and we probably also already engage in contemplation, a practice some Catholics believe is only attempted by deeply spiritual people.Â
Story, video on new Stations of the Cross
For your Good Friday contemplation, our friends at FaithLife, the biweekly news bulletin of the Diocese of Erie, Pa., sent in a story as well as a video on an artist and an art professor working on new hand-made mosaic Stations of the Cross for a local parish. The story can be accessed here (it’s in .pdf format but can be read by magnifying the page), but perhaps more interesting is the accompanying video showing how the mosaics were created.
‘Pay It Forward’ contest reaps bountiful harvest
For the past few weeks here we’ve been following the progress of the “Pay It Forward for Lent†contest of The Catholic Spirit in St. Paul, Minn. Read here about its remarkable success.