Last Monday at 3:00 pm EDT, an airplane fell out of the sky. Channel 13, a local news network brought on Michael Howard, an Acme engineer, and Sandra Till, a former gate agent from the Pittsburgh International Airport, to comment. The transcript is as follows: Anchor: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in to this special news bulletin. Of course, you know the tragic crash that occurred last Monday…
We think of social media as a level playing field. A place where everyone’s voice matters. But when you look below the surface, social media has become a false democracy. You may remember this news story from 2015: “Red Starbucks Cup Brews Controversy on Social Media.” If you don’t remember this news story, congratulations. You must’ve had a very peaceful November. You couldn’t go on Twitter that month without seeing…
A friend sent me an article recently that highlights two common lies about gender. Patrick Coffin is a radio show host, apologist, and one of the many reminders that staying off of Twitter is a good thing. A while back, he tweeted something along the lines of “women aren’t funny.” The tweet was obnoxious, and he’s since deleted it. But as evidenced by this article, he hasn’t exactly walked back…
I’m going to have to do my best to not rant during this post. There’s been a running joke on The Crunch that I mention Cal Newport too much. It’s a fair assessment. I like him because he writes books with concrete and actionable steps to take against problems facing the information age. There’s no need to list all the problems and it’s impossible to list all their sources. But…
I received an interesting reply from a reader yesterday about my post on phone addiction. She mentioned she was worried adopting the tool mindset would make her hard to reach. “One thing I really struggle with is how as a college student we are expected to text back really quickly and use our phones to make plans with people…I would love to be able to keep my phone in a…
A few months ago, I wrote an article for the Life Teen blog called “Curbing a Social Media Addiction.” Where I listed seven steps for teenagers to handle social media addiction or just a phone addiction in general. I didn’t mention this in the article, but I based it off the 12 Steps in Alcoholics Anonymous. The first step in AA is to admit that you have a problem. More…
A while back, I hadn’t been to confession in a month and a half. That might not seem like a long time, but I’m used to going twice a month, sometimes once a week. But for that month and a half, I neglected confession because of my experience with the priest. My Worst Confession That Saturday, I ended up at a parish far from where I lived. I knew all…
The Theology of the Body is one of the most important theological developments of the past few centuries. It’s also incredibly hip. When I was in high school, it was everywhere. Every tight t-shirt chastity speaker was talking about it. At Franciscan, TOB was one of the hard classes to get into. Whenever people talked about sex or marriage (Which is a lot in your teens and twenties) people were…
This year, I decided to read 100 books in one year. I didn’t announce it because I was worried I’d get halfway through January and forget about it, but here we are: done with the first quarter of the year and I’ve read over 25 books. I’m rereading a few things I want to dive deeper into, but most of these books are new to me and I’d like to…
Today is Easter Sunday. When I was a kid, we would go to Mass on the beach at 5:00 in the morning and dawn would break over the horizon just as the Gospel was being read. When Christ came to Earth, He was a light shining in the darkness that the darkness had not overcome (John 1:5). When Christ rose from the dead, He became the light that shone through…
