De La Mennais Brothers: Making Jesus Christ better known and loved by young people

Here's a very cute Easter edition of "Simon's Cat" :-)

Thoughtful, important words on the Last Supper from increasingly successful Catholic recording artist and worship leader (for the LifeTeen youth movement) Matt Maher (whom I met once at a LifeTeen Music Ministers conference in Phoenix, Arizona). A very nice guy and great songwriter/musician.

As we are approaching the Easter Triduum, here once again is a link to the story about Simon Of Cyrene that I wrote on retreat many years ago. I still find it speaks to me, so I share it here in case it may speak to others too. http://brojames.blogspot.com/2009/04/simon-of-cyrene-short-story-for-easter.html

This is an ad for a Taiwanese bank, but if they made it into a feature film, I'd go and see it!! I consider myself to be incredibly lucky to call "friend" a number of older people (within my congregation and beyond) who have the same spirit, lust for life and sense of wonder as these guys and they are an inspiration to me. I've got another long-distance sponsored cycle coming up for Haiti at the end of May and for the first time on such a ride I won't be alone. (Southampton to Assisi, 10 days, 1,130 miles, including the famed Mont Ventoux, south of the Alps, 13 miles of solid climbing at an average of 8% gradient, with our bags on our bikes!!). A 65 year-old cycling sparring partner and friend with whom I rode on and off for 15 years around North Wales and Cheshire (when I lived in Liverpool), Pete Smith (retired teacher from London, known to all as "Cockney Pete" in the Birkenhead North End C.C.), has decided to ride with me. He is someone who gets out ...

This breathtaking image is not from here on Earth. It's a composite image of part of the Martian landscape put together from photos taken by the Mars Odyssey probe which was sent to orbit Mars back in 2001 and is still going strong today. Here's the beginning of the Universe Today article from which I pinched the image 10 Years of the Mars Odyssey by NANCY ATKINSON on APRIL 7, 2011 This view across western Candor Chasma on Mars was created with data from the 2001 Mars Odyssey. Credit: NASA/JPL/Arizona State University, R. Luk A 2001 space odyssey indeed! On this day in 2001, the Mars Odyssey spacecraft launched, and now, 3,333 days later, the robotic spacecraft is still going strong. In orbit around the Red Planet, Mars Odyssey has collected more than 130,000 images and continues to send information to Earth about Martian geology, climate, and mineralogy. Last December, Mars Odyssey broke the record for the longest-serving spacecraft at Mars, besting the Mars Global Surveyor, ...

The below extended passage from an article in The Independent newspaper back in 2004 by David Thomson contains some very interesting points that echo those from my own article. In a third article on this theme, I will look at the idea I referred to in "pt. 1" about the burden of responsibility to "save the world" borne by characters in disaster movies and relate it to the Easter story. Click here for the full article from The Independent. Yes, we fear all the great natural disasters: such as global warming raising the level of the seas; the ozone hole making a desert of the Home Counties; the woeful kind of accident (the Intelligence fuck-up) that could let off a nuclear holocaust. But, just like cocksure kid gangsters, we sneer at all those risks, too, and ask the film business to bring 'em on. We don't really know yet what the use of slaughter as a regular part of "entertainment" is doing to us. We don't know whether we are smart or ironic ...