This week I have completed nine years of blogging and so I can say that I have some perspective on the growth of the so-called Catholic “New Media.”  Nine years ago I could pretty much read every post in the Catholic blogosphere during a short lunch.  Catholic audio on the internet was extremely limited and podcasting was still a couple more years into the future.  The growth of new media for Catholics has been quite an interesting thing to watch.

Bearing that in mind I was quite happy to review the new book by blogger Brandon Vogt The Church and New Media: Blogging Converts, Online Activists, and Bishops Who Tweet. This book is mostly a collection of essays on topics related to Catholic media by well known names within Catholic media. Each writer provides their expertise and perspective. Within these essays are other factoids providing related sources and other information. Brandon Vogt provides both the introduction and conclusion. The book has been positively endorsed by a who’s who of Catholics in America like Archbishop Dolan, Cardinal O’Malley, Cardinal Wuerl, Archbishop Chaput, Mike Aqulina, Amy Welborn, and on and on. Well let me add my own name to that list of positive endorsements.

I found this to be a very good read that included things to chew on and other thoughts that agreed with my own experiences. The book starts out with Fr. Barron who like many accidentally entered into new media first by making his excellent homilies available on his site and then later podcasting them. Later he started to release short commentary addressing the issues of the day on YouTube and interacting with the YouTube commenters – not exactly a tame world. As you would expect Fr. Barron provides intelligent comments on his experience. Jennifer Fulwiler writes her conversion story from atheism from the perspective of interacting with Christians on her site. Like myself Jennifer Fulwiler was always an atheist from childhood on who had assumed that Christianity was simply a myth. Actually dialoging with Christians and have her assumptions overturned helped her to see the truth. While many complain about the atmosphere of commenting on blogs, her experience was largely positive.

I can’t really do an essay by essay review since it would be longer than the book. But I need to at least list some of the other people who contributed. Marcel LeJeune, Mark Shea, Taylor Marshall, Fr. Longenecker, Scot Landry, Jeff Geerling, Matt Warner, Lisa M. Hendey, Thomas Peters & Shawn Carney. Almost all our people I have read and interacted with over the years and in some cases have met. I found Thomas Peters thoughts the closest to my own and extremely well said. I especially liked his focus on the foundation laid by prayer. But there was so much said by all of them I found spot on. For anybody looking into Catholic media this book is much more than just an introduction.

When it comes down to it the new media is like all media in that it is a form of communication. For Catholics this communication is simply to spread the Gospel and while living the Gospel ourselves to help others to do the same. Catholic media and Catholic new media is effective when it spreads the good news and helps others to fully live their faith. I have certainly seen many examples of this over the years concerning conversion and how Catholic media helped to open a person up to the fulness of the faith. The Vatican has lagged behind when it came to new media, but the Vatican doesn’t need to do everything and us everyday Catholics can step in to take up the slack as our abilities direct.

The only real complaint I had about this book is that it was a little too much blogger-centric. Yes a funny complaint coming from a blogger, but I am also a great promoter of Catholic podcasts. While Fr. Barron podcasts, he is not really a podcaster since only his homilies are podcasted and he doesn’t engage his audience directly via podcasting. Lisa Henley though does have experience podcasting, but it isn’t her main role. To be fair the book certainly does address podcasting throughout the book, but I would have liked to have seen a chapter from someone who was a weekly podcaster. This book would have been perfect with a chapter from somebody like Fr. Roderick of SQPN, Greg & Jennifer Willits, the crew of the Catholic Underground, or really the perspective from any of the many very good Catholic podcasts.

One final thought is that I bet Brandon Vogt wishes that the Pope had used an iPad to make his first tweet and launch the new Vatican news site before this book was published. That episode would have fit right into his theme.

Here is a book that is an interesting juxtaposition. A Rock Star who has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame writes a new biography. In it there are pictures of this star along with pictures of him with people such as Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, and Scott Hahn. Yes Scott Hahn. I figure this is the first Rock and Roll autobiography co-authored by a patristic scholar – that is Mike Aqulina.

Many though will have picked up by now that this is a new book by Dion DiMucci who is just most simply known as Dion. The book is “Dion: The Wanderer Talks Truth.”

I was already aware that Dion was a revert as I had seen him on EWTN before and have heard parts of his conversion story on EWTN Radio. This book though much more in depth in regards to his life and his conversion to the Church.

His story begins with his life as a youth that besides performing music at a young age included being a gang member in the Bronx. There are some very interesting stories told here of this part of his life – especially his interactions with a Father Percione a man who was very much a shepherd of his parish. While Dion did not follow much of the advice of this priest, his talks with him on subjects such as virtue remained with him throughout his life and provided markers for him on his later path to conversion. I really enjoyed his descriptions of this priest and how active he was in his neighborhood.

He describes his entrance professionally into the music business and his meteoric rise where he soon became a teenage millionaire. His path parallels so many stories which include sudden fame and the path of increasing drug intake. We think of the Sixties as the start of the Drug, Sex, and Rock n’ Roll era – but the Fifties has it’s share of the same problems. In this book he does not dwell on those aspects of his life other than how they affected him on a personal level and especially his lack of a spiritual life. There are though plenty of stories about this time that he recounts especially the famous episode of the coin flip and the subsequent crash that killed Buddy Holly, The Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson. He sets the record straight on some aspects of this story along with his disagreement concerning the famous line America Pie about the day the music died.

This biography is interesting on several levels. First you have a good story about a musical career and the musical changes he has gone through in that career. Most importantly you have a spiritual biography that takes you from the days of a non-religious family and his later movement towards faith and the spiritual landmarks along the way. The acts of grace that allowed him to leave behind drugs and alcohol and to move first to Protestantism and then later to the Catholic Church. I really enjoyed the style of the book in that it was often quite humorous and his being able to laugh at himself contributed to that. The book is not pretentious in any way. Another important thread in the book is first his pursuit of a girl in the Bronx who later became his wife and has stayed his wife.

I found it to be quite a good read.

This review was written as part of the Catholic book reviewer program from The Catholic Company. Visit The Catholic Company to find more information on Dion — The Wanderer Talks Truth. They are also a great source for a Catechism of the Catholic Church or a Catholic Bible.

When you get a book to review there is always a bit of a hesitancy. What goes through your mind is “What if it is really bad.” A new book An Imperfect Miracle and found it quite enjoyable.

The story takes on the subject of all those sightings of images of the Virgin Mary. There have certainly been a rash of them that apparently are quite ridiculous and so the media has paid them some attention mostly as a subject of ridicule. Miraculous images are nothing new in the Church and of course there are some very good examples of very plausible ones such as Our Lady of Guadalupe. This interest provides the subtext of the plot.

The story centers around a young boy Nathan Gray from a broken family who lives with his mother. A rather intelligent child with a large imagination that on the surface seems to be an escape from the past of an abusive father. His dog Chewy might be man’s best friend, but he is an imaginative man’s best friend on the order of Harvey. One day this young man sees something that defies explanation and is on the order of the miraculous and then he soon discovers an image of Mary on a cement wall that seems more than just a random water stain.

The story is told through his eyes as he discovers more about Mary and the people involved in promoting what was becoming a new shrine. He has intellectual curiosity and even though he and his mother belong to a local Protestant Church he does not see anything incongruent with what he is learning. He also develops a friendship with one of the people in the local Catholic church in his small town along with the Catholic priest and also one of the pastors of the church he attends.

The novel involves the tensions of this boy with an active imagination reporting this miraculous image and then the coming crowds to see this image and the towns involvement in seeing this as an opportunity to bring more money into the coffers as the image is on public land. Further plot elements introduce some danger and further mysteries on a more material level.

I really enjoyed the telling of the story and the boy’s reactions to the multiple events that developed. There were a couple of plot points that seemed to be of a more implausible nature, but they didn’t ruin the story for me. This book is also not written as Catholic apologetics disguised as novel and can easily be recommended to a wide audience as a good novel that takes faith seriously on both the Catholic and Protestant divides.