Site Seeing - David Palm

Pixel This: Online Wisdom
Your road map for exploring Catholic Web sites on the information superhighway.

Catholic Online
www.catholic.org

You've got to feel pretty good to get a Web address like www.catholic.org. Such an easy-to-remember Internet moniker should be backed up by some pretty good content. Catholic Online doesn't disappoint.

You can get free e-mail service from Catholic Online through this site, allowing you to send and retrieve e-mail from any Web browser. Although most Internet service providers already provide you with e-mail, this service can be very useful if you travel and can bum access to the Web wherever you're staying. Catholic Online also hosts Web sites, so if you yearn to start a personal or organizational site, check out what they have to offer.

The opening screen features late-breaking news items of interest to Catholics. There's also a search engine for both the site itself and the Internet at large. Note that you'll get a mix of Catholic and non-Catholic "hits" when searching the entire Internet for your topic. A really outstanding feature of this site is the Catholic Online WWW Directory, an indexed and categorized list of over 10,000 links to Catholic sites spanning a remarkable spectrum of apostolates. They are clearly positioning themselves to be the Catholic Grand Central Station of the Web. And with a URL like www.catholic.org they are likely to be just that.

Internet Medieval Sourcebook
www.fordham.edu/

"Well, everybody knows that Pope Such-and-Such said the Catholic Church is full of beans. I can't quote him exactly, but he used words to that effect." In discussions with non-Catholics, one encounters many claims, some more outrageous than others. Too often, an allegation that some ancient Catholic leader said something damaging about the Catholic Faith is impossible to document or is based on a quotation taken wildly out of context.

The Internet Medieval Sourcebook is a great place to go to set the record straight. This is the largest collection of English translations of ancient and medieval works relating to early Christianity anywhere. There is nothing like getting back to the primary sources to settle questions of history, but until now most of these sources were available only in rare volumes found only in specialized libraries. The Internet provides unprecedented access to these important documents, allowing the Catholic apologist to settle many a dispute with concrete evidence. Of course, disputes aside, it's also a great place to find numerous gems of godly wisdom from our Christian ancestors.

The documents on this site are well indexed making a specific source easier to find. And a search engine lets you search the entire Sourcebook for an elusive word or phrase. Be sure to check out the related Islamic History and Jewish History Sourcebooks, also available on this Web site.

The Path of Socrates
www.members.aol.com/socratesmg

This is a fine personal site, dedicated to introducing people to Catholic Christian truth using the Socratic method; the anonymous host of the site takes Socrates as his pseudonym.

The only downside I encountered is that on my PC, at least, the various pages took a long time to load. I would love to see this site hosted by a speedier service provider.

When you visit, be sure to take The Believers' Test to see if you're a true follower of Christ. This discussion focuses on our Lord's discourse in John 6. The reader is led through that chapter of Scripture in an intriguing way and the results could be unsettling for those who disdain the Real Presence of our Lord in the Eucharist.

I appreciated a Poetry section containing, "Easy-reading poetry for those who don't usually read poetry" (that's me). These poems by the site's host are accessible and often quite moving.

And Socrates also has a very promising section called Let Scripture Speak, which demonstrates the wonderful ability Catholics have to support Catholic doctrine simply by taking Scripture at face value. This page has only one major essay in it to date, but the scheduled topics hold a lot of promise; I hope Socrates expands this soon.


Check out Dave Palm's Web site at www.ourworld.compuserve.com/homepage/djpalm.