Rebecca and I had the opportunity to participate in this year’s march. The picture attached to this post is one we took in front of the supreme court. Even though it was taken at the end of the march, you can still see a large number of people behind us, peacefully praying for the court to understand the gravity of its decision.

During the time of Lent it’s especially important to remember our responsibility to pray about the decisions that have been made in our country with respect to the value of human life. One special project that is currently underway is the 40 Days for Life campaign. I am confident that this campaign is also helping to change perspectives on the abortion issue.

If you are unfamiliar with 40 Days for Life, it is a group of volunteers who are posting themselves outside of  abortion clinics, praying for an end to abortion and offering alternatives, support and encouragement to women who are currently undergoing a pregnancy crisis. As of the time I am posting this, the website mentions that there have been 247 babies saved as part of the campaign.

Being in Chicago, we have been praying at a Planned Parenthood location in the downtown loop. This location is conveniently located between two areas:

• Cabrini Green, a former Chicago public housing project that is known for the extreme conditions the residents faced over the years. Please read the wiki article to get a feel for this area.
• Gold Coast, an extremely affluent, expensive area — hence the name “gold.” As a point of reference, the Magnificent Mile is contained within this area.

The location is both significant and ironic – this Planned Parenthood location has made its money by serving the “modern woman” of the Gold Coast, who is often characterized as being too busy to be bothered with taking care of children and as a consequence comes to the clinic to obtain birth control and “boutique” abortions, if necessary. The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, summed up this mindset perfectly when she stated “[Our objective is] unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children…” (Margaret Sanger (editor). The Woman Rebel, Volume I, Number 1. Reprinted in Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentanos Publishers, 1922.)

That same location has also made its money by serving the poor and impoverished predominantly African American population of Cabrini Green. In talking about this group of people, Sanger had even stronger language when she said, “The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.” (Margaret Sanger. “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda.” Birth Control Review, October 1921, page 5.) and “Give dysgenic groups [people with 'bad genes'] in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization.” (Margaret Sanger, April 1932 Birth Control Review.)

The term eugenics refers to the use of controlled breeding to only bring about desirable characteristics in a race of people. From the quotes above, it is clear that Planned Parenthood’s interest do not lie in planning nor do they lie in parenthood. They prey on both the affulent and impoverished to make money to perpetuate their ideals.

This is not a health-minded organization. It has some groups, such as the Susan G. Komen Foundation, duped into donating over $700,000 a year in order to fund early breast cancer detection. However, Planned Parenthood does not provide mammograms at any of their clinic sites. The most they are able to provide is a manual breast exam by a non-physician. If PP is truly non-profit, why would they not provide this expected service as part of a standard women’s wellness exam, as any other clinician would?

I encourage you to join us this Lent. Look at the 40 Days for Life website and find a location near you. It takes courage to make a public stand and even more courage to take time to pray in front of these locations. Perhaps you could help save a life.

Previously, I used this site as a place to journal my thoughts. I am going to start using some of my posts to share my thoughts on married life as well. I still consider myself a newlywed but I have always thought that there are lots of untapped resources to guide people to have a healthy, happy marriage. As part of a special project, I will be presenting my research on specific marriage-related topics. My hope is that these topics can benefit all vocations including those who are married.

I am looking forward to spending time writing again!

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I also find it useful to learn the name of different saints and a little about their lives. There are a number of resources for doing that, including the ones mentioned in the video below. I have two particular websites that I use to learn about the lives of the saints:

First, LOL Saints, which has a weekly podcast featuring a two minute highlight about the life of a saint. Additionally, the website provides some pretty good pictures that make me laugh when I read it. We recently interviewed Jeff, the site’s owner for the In Between Sundays podcast. Check him out on Episode #9, I Can Has Podcast.

Second, there is a fantastic podcast put together by Paul Camarata, called the SaintCast. Paul produces a weekly show that is about 30 minutes long and does some amazing in-depth research to describe the lives of the saints. As of this writing, he has 126 shows up, each about a different saint! Listening to his podcast really has helped me develop a great knowledge of the saints and has helped me to find some devotions to new saints.

Recently, Paul put together a video about the different faith-based applications available for your iPhone and put it up on YouTube. If you’re looking for a way to grow your devotion to the saints, I highly recommend checking out LOL Saints and the SaintCast as well as the other applications mentioned in Paul’s video.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5KftViTzRM

I tend to work from a number of locations and, most of the time, there is wireless available at all the locations. However, I recently ran into a situation last week where the wireless access at my favorite coffee shop was down. This caused a bit of a problem since we had decided to record a podcast episode there and were planning on streaming the show. Luckily, I had remembered an aircard that I had access to and we were able to do the show without too much technical trouble.

This all got me thinking about wireless access through cell phone signals. Right now, I’m led to believe that at some point before the apocalypse AT&T will be enabling tethering on my iPhone. At that point, I will be able to connect my iPhone to my laptop and use it for my connection. While this will all be nice and fun, I’ve been wondering why we need to have the extra hardware just to get an Internet connection. Currently, laptops come with built in wireless and bluetooth, both of which used to be add-on products to computers.

So, why not build in some hardware that allows me to access the Internet using a cell signal straight from my computer? I think that this would be a great selling point for the machine.

Of course, I think that it goes deeper than just hardware: we need to have cell providers who offer more reasonable prices for Internet connections. Currently, the price per megabyte of sending data over a cell signal is exorbitantly expensive. What I would like to see would be cell providers who allow for this connection feature to be tacked on to an existing phone line that will allow a user to only pay $20 or $30 max for an unlimited connection. At the very least, the price should not be any higher than the price of a Cable or DSL connection to the house.

So, what do you think will be the future of wireless Internet access in the US? Would you find this a useful feature on your laptop? Let me know in the comments!

This got me thinking about junk mail and marketing and how you can potentially turn anonymous people into customers. I don’t think that AT&T really went about things the right way.

If the company who is sending me the materials pays money to buy a list with my address on it, I think that they should spend the time or pay the money to at least find out who I am. They are printing all these form letters telling me that I am a “valued customer” and all, but haven’t even spent the time to learn my name. How is that showing me that I am valued? If they had put my name in the address line, I probably would have opened the letter before deciding it was junk mail. Perhaps I may have even taken action on it, since it would have appeared more personalized. Instead, it just went into the trash with everything else.

Take some time to think about how your interactions with customers make them feel valued and whether you have spent the time to learn more about those you serve. Have some suggestions on how to do just that? Leave them in the comments.

Just to clarify, I’m talking about the Facebook Inbox messaging, not their chat application or status messages. Those have all gotten some pretty big upgrades in order to make them more integrated into their service.

What I’m really surprised at is how much I actually send direct messages to friends on Facebook as well as how often we use it to contact one another. In a sense, it’s almost like another inbox that I have to monitor—which gets to the crux of my problem, that I have to monitor yet another inbox.

Messaging has almost no organizational features aside from the delete button. I’m pretty shocked by this, because I would rather be able to file messages away and archive them for later rather than delete them to keep my in box clean. In fact, it’s very hard to delete all the message in your inbox, due to the fact that you can select only 10 messages at a time. Thus, if you have been talking with a lot of people over time, you have 10 pages, or even more, of direct messages you have to wade through. All of this is very surprising, given all of the other very cool social networking features and web 2.0 features throughout the rest of the site.

My biggest suggestion to Facebook would be to start adding some of the features mentioned above, but I have one that would top the my request list: the ability to reply to facebook messages by email. This is a huge thing. I’ve used a number of other sites that allow for this. One of my favorites is Basecamp by 37 Signals. When I receive a message from someone else, I get an email notification and then see something that says “Reply above this line to send a message back.”

What a revelation to see how 37 Signals had implemented messaging. It’s simple, it’s elegant and it works beautifully! If only Facebook had that, rather than sending me some bacn telling me that my friend had sent me a message, in which case I have to open a new tab, navigate to facebook, log in and check my inbox. Rather, I would be able to just reply above said line and have my reply sent back to my friend.

Please join me in my crusade to make Facebook messaging better. Of course, I’m not exactly sure where to start—I tried to search for a Facebook feature suggestion page but it is nowhere to be found. It must be out there somewhere! In the meantime, I guess I just have to settle for trying to send a message.

Recently, I wrote a few blog posts about my intention to limit my exposure to social media. I wondered, out loud and on Facebook, what would happen if I cut my friends list to 100 and really spent the time socializing with those 100 people online.

I haven’t taken any action to limit my friends on Facebook. In fact, what I thought would be a fairly outspoken response was, in fact, more of a murmur among about five friends online. I have, however, realized that at the time, I was pretty much on overload with my use of Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, Ping.fm and a whole host of other services.

In fact, I think that the proliferation of services is making social websites into a commodity. It’s almost a daunting task to try to find a Twitter client these days or a decent facebook application. What was once really fun and exclusive has turned into a commodity. Unfortunately, when things like this happen, people start getting lost in the noise, much like I did. There is so much information rushing at us that it’s really hard for us to process one site, let alone a number of them.

So, what’s to make of all this? How does this relate to young adults? That’s a great question, and I think that there is an essential truth in looking at these social websites and comparing them with our faith.

In my hometown, I have a lot of selection with regard to churches. There are 10 within a short driving distance and a great number more if I’m willing to go a bit further. Some say mass in the pre-conciliar rite, some don’t. Some have praise and worship music, some have more traditional music. At some, I know that I’ll get a long, theological homily, while at others, I know that the priest will be brief, but thoughtful.

While I have the benefit of living in the town that I grew up, I realize that others are not that fortunate. As young adults, trying to find a church that will help us grow spiritually can be hard. We may even go to church on Sunday and, despite the best efforts of the church, feel like we get lost in the noise. After attending, we may feel like there wasn’t enough done to engage us or to keep us interested. What happens is that we eventually feel like I did with the social websites—that going to church is a commodity!

While it is important to find a place where we feel like we belong, I think that we should look at ourselves to make the difference in our own churches. If I could steal a line from John F. Kennedy, I think we should be saying, “Ask not what your Church can do for you, but what you can do for your Church.”

We may feel like we get lost in the noise, but perhaps we are not working to turn down its volume by offering to get involved in various ministries. In my own church, only recently have I started seeing younger faces helping out. While that is a good step, I know that there are a number of people like myself who have a lot to offer, and need to take some time to volunteer. It is in volunteering that I really do find my faith engaged and it stops feeling like a commodity.

However easy it is to “church hop” every Sunday, I know that I need to always work to see my faith as so much more than a simple metaphor—I have to see it as a gift. That is what will keep it unique and constantly fresh. That is what will help me to continue coming back every Sunday for mass and even consider going more than once a week.

Our faith is far from a commodity. Rather, it’s unique to each person because, unlike shouting information about ourselves out into the void of Facebook, Twitter and the like, God knows everything about us, is infatuated with us and cares about us like we are the only person in the world.

I encourage you to spend some time in prayer this week. While you are there, pick up a bulliten and consider a few areas where you might be able to volunteer and turn down the noise. Then, spend some time in the presence of God, who knows you and cares for you so intimately that we dare to call Him, Father.

This is on top of another post that I found at YPulse, on how college students are finding out that there’s a lot more stress and anxiety that comes with being always “plugged in.” This post makes mention of the fact that there’s little to no work-life balance for college students who have smartphones:

Today’s teens and college students have no concept of a work-life balance, and while young people have never been known to keep regular schedules, in a generation that is more sleep-deprived, stressed-out, and distracted than ever, it would be much healthier if young people were able to completely chill out during their leisure time, and save their e-mails for the school week or the daytime.

This is very interesting, as I think that myself and a few other friends that I have been corresponding with are feeling the same way. As part of my thought process to get myself down to 100 friends on Facebook, I am planning on participating in Digital Detox Week to see how it goes. It’s been a while since I’ve spent some time without my phone and really done something “analog.”

For example, one of the things that I absolutely love to do is read. Most of it is done online now, because I use Google Reader to page through a good number of online articles every day. On top of that, I usually peruse the articles over at Google news and then spend some time listening to audiobooks or reading them on my iPhone.

One of the things that I started this past week was actually sitting down and spending an hour or so reading a book. It was very relaxing, and I really felt like my mind was at rest the few nights that I read before going to bed, rather than checking emails and reading some articles online. It seems to me that Digital Detox Week is a very needed thing.

Are you planning on participating? Leave your comments below.

The whole thing with Facebook is that it’s gotten too busy. I don’t have time to keep statuses on what everyone is doing and it doesn’t feel like I’m being authentic with most of the people anyway. Take some time to read the following blog post, Faceless Book. Here are his two basic points:

First, people don’t edit themselves. People uploaded every picture they took, even the duplicate out of focus ones. Why? I don’t know. They don’t have to. But, there they are!

Second, the reality is that I don’t have the time to check out everyone’s picture of every event in their lives. I don’t have time to update and comment and send pokes and flair and surveys and notes and God knows whatever else I could virtually send to my fellow Facebookians.

In continuing my thoughts from yesterday, my friend Sabrina had some good suggestions. She suggested that I actually keep my friends, but add everyone else over 100 friends to another group and only give them limited access to my profile. That way, I retain everyone on the list, but only stay updated on a few people.

What I really want to do is create a list of genuine, authentic friends on facebook who I would interact with often enough for it to be worth the time for all of us. Instead of just shouting it all out, I would edit things and only put up relevant content rather than everything. I actually think that the sheer amount of stuff on Facebook has made information a surplus commodity, making it impossible for any one person to keep updated on what their friends are doing.

So, as I continue thinking about this, please keep sending me your comments. If I decide to go through with this, I’ll have to make some tough decisions on who to keep. And, as they say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease…