The Richness Offered by our Users

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 26, 2009

I mentioned in my Insights message today that the noted Dominican scholar Benedict Ashley apparently keeps up with CatholicCulture.org and kindly sent us some information about the poetry of the Sacred Heart written by Mechtilde of Magdeburg in the thirteenth century. You can find information about this in the 13th century section of the history of the Dominicans on Fr. Ashley’s web site.

An important fact illustrated by this contribution is that we never have a shortage of good things from our readers. A perfect example is the note I received in response to a recent Insights message listing some of our resources devoted to embryonic stem cell research. Chuck Weber, Executive Director of SaintMax Worldwide, called my attention to the excellent video SaintMax produced for the USCCB highlighting the issue. You’ll find it on the home page of the SaintMax Worldwide web site.

There’s much more, of course. From down under, Peter Byrne wrote recently to say he uses quite a bit of my stuff on his radio program, “Catholic Print”, in Melbourne, Australia. That’s the kind of information that needs to be shared quickly, not because he uses some of my material but because he has a great radio program in Melbourne that some people there may not yet know about.

Speaking of the radio, Stephen Pease joins me in listening to sports radio when he needs a break, and he thoroughly understands the joke of defending it as “significant”. Then there’s Ellis Spear, who insists that he pictures me with a pipe, and wants me to live up to the image. Pipe, sports, or any other diversion notwithstanding, these are brothers in arms!

Limited funds make it difficult to share everything with everybody, and the strength of our site will always be critical news, commentary and what we might call pointed education. But clearly this requires additional thought. We need to work on ways to focus the site around the effort to highlight key concerns while drawing users together so that we can enrich each other and lend our strength to each other—without wasting space and time with vain comments, diatribes or unnecessary repetition.

There’s a sort of intellectual comaraderie waiting to happen here. This is an important part of how culture gets done.