My church, St. Anne, in Rock Hill, SC, purchased access to Formed - an app that provides mobile access to a variety of Catholic learning resources. As the digital platform is more popular with younger parishioners, this could be a way of helping them to form their thinking on Catholic topics.
I've already read the biography of Mother Dolores Hart, the nun that turned away from a successful movie career to enter the cloistered life. It wasn't what I expected, but was an amazing journey of a woman in Catholic vows during the transitional years after Vatican II.
If you've ever wondered how the relatively tame women's movement transformed into the radical feminism and abortion-promoting industry that exists today, Subverted, How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women's Movement, by Sue Browder, a former writer for Cosmopolitan, has the inside scoop. She was there at the start of it all, and has the perspective of how it has become so entrenched in American politics.
I started reading it yesterday, and had difficulty putting it down to go to sleep.
I'm also looking forward to the many other books in the FORMED program. One of the many problems with Catholic media is the price - as the market is limited, the price for individual books, movies, and CDs is often out of the budget of individuals. Libraries seldom have good, up-to-date Catholic resources. This program could be a great way to get more books and other media into the hands of the Catholics that want to read it - in the digital format that is beginning to be the standard form desired.
[UPDATE]
Since I first wrote this, there has been an unexpected development - Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine, has died.
Few people under the age of forty can imagine the world that Hefner inhabited before his launch of the nudie mag. It was a world of stable marriages, almost-always married parents, and a sedate media.
Rock & Roll was viewed by many as unacceptably crude and vulgar, so much so, that the TV show Ozzie & Harriet dedicated some screen time to trying to make Rock look so gosh-darn American and wholesome. I doubt they could have predicted Woodstock, the perverse and drug-fueled orgies that too many in the field indulged in on the road, the abuse of women, and media's attempt to normalize that behavior.
Hefner celebrated public nudity in his magazine, and licentious behavior in his Playboy mansion. Like most people, I had little knowledge of the behaviors indulged in by Hefner and his guests. So - hearing about Cosby's use of drugs to facilitate his sexual abuse was, for me, a shocking revelation.
The centerfolds led to expectations of nudity in film, to the extent that an actress who won't strip for the entertainment of her audience is likely to not be hired. If she is hired, she is expected to use a 'body double' - a woman who bares all, so that she can avoid having to. There is no longer a pretense that this is artistically necessary. It's frankly a commercial act.
There was a time, before Playboy, when that commercial act would have been looked down upon. As would the men and women involved.
This headline about STD's is misleading - it makes it sound as though over half the American population is infested with sexually-connected infections.
No, this shows the total number of infections, which a single person might have simultaneously. As the figures for individuals infected over the course of a year aren't given, expect them to be less sensationalistic.
A significant number of those infected are gay men. Back in the 1960's and 1970's, it was known that gay men were far more likely to have repeated, multiple exposure to STDs. That constant battle in their immune system made the early signs of AIDS easy to miss. The extent to which it contributed to the rise of AIDS is not, as far a I've read, known.
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