Site Seeing - David Palm

Truth, Love and Grain of Salt
Your road map for exploring Catholic Web sites on the information superhighway.

Catholic World News
http://www.cwnews.com
Tired of news that comes to you scrubbed clean of any moral or spiritual content and super-charged for maximum shock value? Sick of the spin doctors who portray people of faith and supporters of life as pathological kooks? Then log onto the Catholic World News site and get a dose of news coverage from a distinctively Catholic perspective.

CWN offers late-breaking news stories on a wide variety of topics of interest to Catholics, including the pope's travels, statements by prominent bishops worldwide, major events in other world religions, scientific discoveries and education. I found the coverage of pro-life events — which rarely get past secular media censors intact — particularly helpful and encouraging. This is a great place to get the straight and detailed scoop on major events which get lame, or even no, coverage elsewhere.

The site features a search engine that lets you pull up archived stories on any topic you care to research. And for a very modest annual fee, Catholic World News will automatically send you daily news updates via e-mail, which should provide a nice balance against your regular news outlets.

Gerard Serafin's Catholic Page for Lovers
http://www.praiseofglory.alabanza.com
This Web page can best be described as a spiritual oasis in cyberspace. The theme of the page, captured in its potentially provocative title, is the celebration of God's super-abundant love for you and me in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This is truly a message our dying world needs to hear. There are many serious, troubling and even evil sites on the Web. By contrast, the Catholic Page for Lovers is a joyful and uplifting place to visit. The graphics are beautiful, even elegant. The site is brimming with powerful reflections on faith by Gerard Serafin himself, along with many other authors. I was very impressed by an original essay on Christian friendship, an important topic receiving little attention these days. The entire site has a distinctively Eastern Catholic flavor, although Serafin has also clearly drunk deeply from the well of Western Catholic thought and spirituality. I am simply awed by his exposure to the Fathers, saints and doctors of the Church.

The moving, emotional, even tearful testimonials displayed in one corner of a Catholic Page for Lovers speak poignantly of the impact that the True, the Beautiful and the Good still have on our lives. There is nothing quite like this site anywhere else.

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library
http://ccel.wheaton.edu
Although the Christian Classics Ethereal Library is hosted by Wheaton College, a prominent Evangelical Protestant liberal arts school, the Catholic apologist will find quite a bit of excellent source material on this site.

In addition to a complete set of the early Church Fathers, one can also find writings of St. Alphonsus Liguori, St. Benedict, St. John of the Cross and a host of other Catholic saints. Note, however, that these writings are mixed in with Protestant works, so the reader should be alert to doctrinally unsound material. By and large, if the author's name is prefaced by "Saint," you'll be on solid ground. And when read with appropriate discernment, the historically significant Protestant works can also be very useful in apologetics.

One interesting feature of this site is the ability to search the text of the Fathers for any word or phrase. It is of somewhat limited usefulness, however, since the search tells you only the documents in which the words appear, but does not show you where in the documents your selection appears. Still, one might well use this search feature to find that quotation from the Fathers that you just can't seem to locate anywhere else.