The Vatican on YouTube

In order to do what Pope Benedict has described earlier this year as "evangelizing the 'digital continent'", the Vatican has created their own YouTube channel.

Daniel made use of one of their videos in an earlier post after our trip to Castel Gandolfo to see the Holy Father. We had some technical difficulties and could only include a link before, but if you missed it, I now present it here in its full webpage-embedded glory (the NAC seminarians show up at about 8:00, and sing at 10:50) :

Although the Holy Father generally gives the Angelus messages in Italian, there are a considerable number of shorter messages with audio voiceover in English.

(P.S. This post is largely to see if I can actually get the video to embed properly... hopefully this will become one more option for us to share our experiences with you.)

God Bless, and enjoy your Sunday!

Until We Can Photograph Everything Here ... Visit Rome Virtually

When I was reading one of my favorite blogs this morning, I saw an interesting article that explains how to use Google Maps to do a "virtual walking tour" of famous cites.

From the New Liturgical Movement:

Those of you who have never visited Rome, or who simply wish to revisit it, may be interested to know that Google Maps has a rather interesting feature that will allow you to do it "virtually" in a rather unique way that is actually somewhat proximate to being there, walking those streets.
...
If you go to Google Maps and double click on the maps, zooming in, eventually you will be taken to views such as these:

Typing in the name of the landmark is enough to get you there if it's anything remotely famous.  (I'd suggest to start, try it with St. Peter's Basilica or the Pantheon, which Dan and I pass every day on the way to classes).

This "Street View" also works for most cities and large roads in the States; before we came over, I found it particularly useful for recognizing landmarks when I was driving someplace new.

Happy travels!

(Hat tip to Shawn at NLM for the original post, which can be found here.)

To Become a Master of Fifteen Minutes

First, an apology:

As all of you have noticed... I haven't been here much lately, and for that, I sincerely apologize.  In the wide mix of things that I need to do here, blogging has been getting bumped toward the bottom of the list.

Everyone at home deserves better than that - and so I'm going to try to post more frequently.  Dan has really been doing great in picking up the slack in my absence.

---

Second, something of some substance.  As I said, things are a bit hectic here - we get pulled in a lot of different directions: prayer, classes, study, ministry work, other formation activities, and a little bit of leisure and fellowship.

This requires a lot of time management skills - something that I'll be the first to admit that I don't have.  Fortunately, I've already heard some good advice from some of the other seminarians and faculty that I'd like to share:

1) "You need to become the master of fifteen minutes" - This is one of the hardest things for me to do.  In my past experience, I've found it difficult to do anything productive with much less than an hour.  So I need to learn how to fill the gaps between events here.  Actually, most of this post was written in the little gaps between classes - so that's a start.

2) "You need to be 'rigidly flexible'" - This is a tip from our Dean of Academic Formation, and something that, if I can ever learn to master time in fifteen minute increments, this one will be rather useful.  It simply means that I need to fit some activities, like study, in around everything else, but I need to be consistent in doing it.