Preaching to the Connected

Brother Innocent Smith was recently interviewed by The Kernel about how Catholics are creating a flourishing new media scene. Below is an excerpt from that article. [Brother Innocent Smith] re-founded the student friars’ magazine “Dominicana”, which had died off sometime after the changes of the Vatican II generation. A new piece is now published by the student friars on Dominicana from Monday to Friday, addressing topics from apologetics to theology to spirituality. Brother Innocent notes that the employment of technology by the Church today extends beyond websites and social media. “One of the most remarkable developments of the last several years has been the growing availability of theological and catechetical texts on devices such as the Kindle and the iPhone,” he points out. “To mention just one example, the US Council of Catholic Bishops recently released the complete Catechism of the Catholic Church in Kindle format, which allows one to easily consult the text, including the footnotes, on a variety of devices.” It is not just in Catholic teaching and apologetics that new media is providing opportunities for the Church, but also in the re-assessment or re-discovery of Catholic culture. “One of the most impressive uses of new media in the service of Catholic culture I have seen,” notes Brother Innocent, “is the Corpus Christi Watershed website which, amongst other things, has collated the Gregorian chant propers for both the Ordinary and the Extraordinary Forms of the Roman Rite in a format where you can look at the music and hear recordings for each chant in a way that anticipates the current or upcoming liturgical day. This is a good example of utilising the distinctive ability of the internet to combine text, image, and sound that is dynamically presented to the user.”