THE SOCIETY OF CATHOLIC SOCIAL SCIENTISTS

The 15TH ANNUAL MEETING at St. John's University Law School

Post IV

Professor Joseph Varacalli, the founder of the Center for Catholic Studies at Nassau Community College, asked me if I could put together a panel on Catholic blogging and I was intimidated but very honored. I knew there were a some local bloggers around and asked Leticia Velasquez of Causa Nostrae Laetitiae and Dawn Eden of The Dawn Patrol first. I knew there were others in the NY area I could ask but both of these women said yes so there was our panel. We would each speak for 15 minutes and then there would be a question and answer period. Later, Elizabeth Andrew, a local blogger I was not familiar with, was added to the panel so we had a 4 person panel. I was exciting to talk about Catholic blogging since I have been very interested in them since I started reading some of the blogs on Gerard Serafin's "List of Some Catholic Blogs". When Gerard died I created the Catholic Blog Directory to continue this valuable resource of having a list of blogs of interest to Catholics. I wanted in my talk to give a background/history of Catholic blogging and to point out the importance of blogs to Catholics, and hope I did some justice to this. In hindsight, I wish I had gone over some ideas on blogging that I would have liked to stress, but because of time constraints and nervousness I left them out or mentioned them briefly. I also would have liked to gone into some criticisms of blogs but we did not as a panel do this. Overall though, the panel went fine. Next, I will post my basic talk for the panel and fill in some of the stuff I left out in the talk.