Catholic Culture in Online Media

The other day I examined a YouTube widget where you can choose channels of "YouTube Partners" that you're willing to have posted in the sidebar of your blog in exchange for ad revenue. While attempting to add channels that I like, it soon became obvious that the "Partners" are a more exclusive group than I thought. There is a difference between Partners and just any random person who posts a video (even if it's good).

According to the site, "YouTube Partners" are those video makers who are paid by YouTube to keep making videos because they bring lots of traffic to YouTube. When adding this widget, there are categories to help you find videos that you think would fit with your site (e.g. Entertainment, Comedy, Sports) but no category for Religion.

I'm not sure whether this means that religious videos aren't as valued or that religious videos don't bring in as many eyeballs to the site. Perhaps Catholics just don't patronize the companies who pay YouTube for those eyeballs. Who knows. You can go with whatever YouTube "thinks" goes with your site, but you don't know what you're getting. Perhaps something that would reflect poorly on you.

There are (at least) dozens of very good Catholic videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, the keyword "Catholic" pulled up politically liberal channels (TheYoungTurks), atheist/anti-theist channels (TheAmazingAtheist), and the like because they were the only Partners to choose from who used the term Catholic as a tag, probably to ridicule them in a video. Who knows why, but at the moment when it comes to Partners' channels, you're more likely to get something anti-Catholic or just un-Catholic.

So who cares. When my fellow conservatives analyze this last political election, they point to a need to change the culture and trust that people's hearts will follow. (I agree of course, but during and after that I think we need to push for a mechanism like Ranked Choice Voting or else the Republican Party is going to corner us conservatives every two to four years into a desperate, lesser-of-two-evils vote for their various "anybody but a Democrat!" candidates and then proceed to do very little or nothing to improve the situation of the innocent unborn.)

So if we're going to spread Catholic culture, we need to first partake of Catholic culture. Now where to start? I'd say we should consume something Catholic and share it if we liked it. Ask for a recommendation from a priest or other spiritual advisor. Curtis Martin, the founder of FOCUS (the Fellowship of Catholic University Students) recommends never recommending a book that you haven't read. I suspect that his advice is spot on. Of these two choices, what makes a better gift when you're buying something for someone's Confirmation, conversion to the Catholic faith, etc.?

A) a book that I "saw at the store and thought it might be good"
B) a book that I "also own myself and got a lot out of reading"

By process of elimination, I think it's 'B'. I've gifted a good number of Catholic books that I hadn't read yet and nobody has ever mentioned the gift to me again, so 'A' is out.

When it comes to online media, there's something there for people who don't have the time or fortitude to tackle extracurricular books. I would like to see real, orthodox Catholic channels like AscensionPress08(Christopher West) or wordonfirevideo (Fr. Barron) thrive and reach Partner status. There are probably a lot of young Catholics who use YouTube. Sign up for an account there and subscribe to channels like Christopher West's, and Fr. Barron's. Then share it. Thanks.

Credit to Marcel at Mary's Aggies" for mentioning Fr. Barron's channel today.

PS, if you can't be a "bookworm", be a "tapeworm". You can get a great 10-CD set of Christopher West Theology of the Body CD's at The Gift Foundation for only US$4.90, down from the previous $10, which was also very cheap.

Update: the "Naked Without Shame" series is now available for free online download!

Preferential Voting Could Save Pro-Life Voters in the Next Election

I want to make a suggestion for a project for voting Catholics to work on for the next four years:

Preferential (aka Ranked) Voting

It's called "Ranked Voting" or "Preferential Voting". According to Mark Monmonier's Bushmanders and Bullwinkles: How Politicians Manipulate Electronic Maps and Census Data to Win Elections this practice is used in other parts of the world that don't suffer through a strict two-party system. Some of us who consider ourselves conservative pro-life Catholics and Christians of other stripes find ourselves grumbling about the current state of things, especially after this most recent electoral disappointment where we await the most liberal and pro-abortion President in American History.

Some of us wonder if a third party could serve us better. I think it's premature for conservative Christians to push for the creation of a strong third party right now. A third party would be in big trouble in a hurry if it somehow materialized tomorrow.

Ranked or Preferential Voting would ensure that in the future there WILL be room for more parties. Basically, it ENSURES that you never "throw your vote away", as some people claim third party voting does to one's vote. It does this by giving the voter that a single transferable vote that transfers to second and third choices as the voter's choices are knocked out, allowing us to vote for big party candidates as a contingency, but to show our support for a hypothetical third party of our choice first. And hopefully, we'd one day see a third party of more authentically pro-life representatives and senators in our States and in Washington D.C. I strongly believe that this won't come until preferential voting, or some other way of voting, comes first.

Let's take an example that doesn't involve me suggesting the Constitution Party. Say you take a guy who, for God knows what reason, is voting in a Presidential election and he leans toward the Green Party, likes the Libertarian party a little less, but always ends up voting Democratic. In this previous election, his vote would be applied to Obama because in the first two rounds of processing, the Green and Libertarian candidates would be knocked out. Read the article cited for a better explanation. Again, I maintain that this would allow us to put a future, admittedly pie-in-the-sky-idealistic, third party candidate on the ballot. I just want to see that option!

Many Pro-life Catholics tend to vote Republican either enthusiastically or with a grain of salt, and the GOP's policies could definitely be improved upon for our purposes. Even conservative pro-lifers working against abortion should also be working against the death penalty and unethical torture practices, and believers of Catholic just war doctrine have problems with pre-emptive war, all of which are baggage that the Republican party carries.

According to one Steve Skojek (quoted here),

"We've heard a lot of talk this election cycle (and the one before it . . . and the one before that . . .) about stopping a great evil by voting for a lesser one. And yet, the only certain outcome of constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is the perpetuation of evil."

I agree, although I'm hesitant to call either party evil in and of itself. My own family fights over this: we're all pro-life and we hate having to choose parties right now; we're a house divided in this way.

I would love to hear what people think about Preferential voting. I think it could lead to a lot of good and is the one thing that could finally shake the complacent bipartisan system and force the Republican party to compete for Pro-life votes by producing more results! Even better it could inaugurate another party, espousing better Catholic ideals that even Evangelicals and other people of faith could get behind. We need to use our current frustration and unleash it on some new goal to fix our country before it goes through a "parting of the ways", as Father Benedict Groeschel has speculated.

Image Credit:

* Sample ballot image created in MSPaint by Tom Ruen (For public domain)

edits: bear with me, I'm improving my writing little by little