Catholic Thought discussion

Welcome to Catholic Thought! We are a group interested in reading, learning, and sharing our immense and inspiring 2000-year heritage of Catholic writings. We like our discussions to be kind and respectful, the goal being to gain a deeper understanding of our faith, history, and heritage.

This is not an apologetics group. Our focus is strictly learning and reading, not polemical discussions. While we entertain books of Catholic apologetics, we do not entertain discussions that seek to proselytize or cast aspersion on any faith.

To create a more harmonious discussion and experience here, this group excludes the discussion of politics, both that of internal to the Catholic Church and external to the country and world at large.

We kindly ask authors to refrain from advertising their books on this site.

The moderators will exert their best efforts to ensure that the books submitted to voting are in keeping with the stated philosophy of this group.

To encourage greater participation and provide a greater say for participating members in the book selection process, the group will use a weighted voting process based on the number of comments made to Catholic Thought. Those with 50 or more comments will have a 2X value vote while those with less than 50 comments have a 1X value vote.

Procedures and Guidelines are posted in Message #3 below.

I still kept the old Rules thread open for now in case you wanted to see the differences. The differences i think are two fold.

First we want to clarify the apologetics statement that was in the original rules. The intent is the same, just hopefully it's now clearer, if it wasn't for some. It wasn't for me actually. We are not saying that no apologetics can be discussed. Apologetics defending Catholicism to Protestant, atheist, and non-Christian critique is a part of Catholic intellectualism. Of course that is open for discussion. The original and still current intent is to avoid the internal political strife that occurs between various factions of Catholics. We don't want the group to degenerate into bickering between say Liberals and Conservatives or between any other factions. We want to avoid that. And while we were at clarifying that statement, we included a statement about all politics in general.

The rule that is totally new is that last one on a weighted voting. Over the years we've had a number of people who vote, effect the outcome of the book selection, and never participate in the read or ever heard from again. In order to discourage that, we wanted to give participating members more weight in the selection process. So we decided that if you have 50 comments posted in the group, your vote will count as twice that of those less than fifty. This way those committed to the group and the read can have more of a say. This isn't uncommon to a number of groups here on Goodreads. 50 comments is not even that hard to achieve. Loretta I noticed has only been with the group a couple of months, and she is already over 100. If you're not aware, you can check to see how many comments you've made with a group by clicking the "Members" link in the upper right.

I'm also going to post some procedures and guideline as well. They aren't rules but document how we go about our business.

In the meantime, if anyone has any comments or opinions, please post them here. Of course we're willing to discuss and modify if need be.

Procedures

1. The selection process for the subsequent read shall begin one month before the current read will end. This allows for two weeks for nominations and two potential weeks for polling.

2. In order to assist those in the group on a limited budget, the book selection shall alternate between a regularly priced book and a book that has the availability of purchase in some format below five dollars.

3. The moderators will maintain a bookshelf for the group as a well-rounded resource to keep and add books that are solidly Catholic, classics and modern, and have the additional criteria of being suitable as a group read. Members are encouraged to suggest books for the bookshelf. Books that are selected for group read will automatically be placed on the shelf.

4. The moderators would like to intersperse short reads every so often between fuller length reads. These short reads can be Papal documents, essays, short stories, lives of saints, homilies, sacred music, sacred art, history, devotionals, or whatever fits into a two or three week discussion
 
Guidelines

1. We respect the opinions of all members and expect all comments and responses to demonstrate our Catholic sense of community.

2. From time to time news items may appear in a post please be very respectful to the Church and the clergy.

3. This book club is not about disputes. We urge a harmonious relationship between members.

4. Moderators can nix nominated books if it seems inappropriate to the group’s rules and guidelines.

Hi all. No one has commented on the new rules, procedures, and guidelines. Any thoughts, comments, angry tomato pitches? ;)

I wouldn't mind some feedback.

Manny, the rules, in my humble opinion, are fair and provide a sound philosophy for a friendly place to share our thoughts on our reads. I like this group alot.

Jim wrote: "Manny, the rules, in my humble opinion, are fair and provide a sound philosophy for a friendly place to share our thoughts on our reads. I like this group alot."

Thank you Jim! Now get your comments up to 50 so you can have a solid say in what we read! Bless you. :)

Manny,

I was going to post a comment yesterday that the rules looked good to me - clear, reasonable . . . all that good stuff. I was going to leave a comment to that effect, but no one else had, so I thought maybe you wouldn't want the rules thread mucked up with a bunch of comments. My bad. :-)

John wrote: "Manny,

I was going to post a comment yesterday that the rules looked good to me - clear, reasonable . . . all that good stuff. I was going to leave a comment to that effect, but no one else had, s..."

No problem. Thank you. I appreciate you telling us.

I like the new voting change as I bemoaned and was puzzled by votes of members who showed no activity but came around voting time and sometimes forced a vote to go one way that they did not support in any way later.

Galicius wrote: "I like the new voting change as I bemoaned and was puzzled by votes of members who showed no activity but came around voting time and sometimes forced a vote to go one way that they did not support..."

Yes I was thinking of your comments over the last couple of years when we decided to do that.

Manny wrote: "Galicius wrote: "I like the new voting change as I bemoaned and was puzzled by votes of members who showed no activity but came around voting time and sometimes forced a vote to go one way that the..."

You came up with an innovative idea to deal with this issue. Let's hope it will encourage members to more active participation. It probably should not make any difference to those who already are active participants. What I derive from this group is still the exposure to book sources and reading the comments from members.

When you reply to a post how are you getting the quote from another post into your own? Newbie question!

Jim wrote: "When you reply to a post how are you getting the quote from another post into your own? Newbie question!"

Jim, underneath the comment you want to have quoted, there should be "reply" link on the lower right. When you click the "reply" link it automatically puts the first few lines of that comment in quotation marks. Now that's only the first few lines. If there is something specific further down in the comment you want to make sure is copied, you have to physically go back to that comment, highlight what you want, copy, come back down to the comment box, and paste in between the quotes. Give it a practice shot with this.

I don't have a reply link

Loretta wrote: "Jim wrote: "I don't have a reply link"

Jim, do you see the line that says, "message 14: by Jim (new) on the left and then it gives when you posted (2 hours, 15 min ago)? Right on top of that it sa..."
I figured it out. The android phone version does not have the reply/flag option, only the desktop version does.

Glad to hear it Jim.

Jim wrote: "The android phone version does not have ..."

That's a long list.

I really like these rules and guidelines. Simple and to the point.

Doreen wrote: "I really like these rules and guidelines. Simple and to the point."

Great! I thought you would, actually. :)

Just acknowledging that I’ve read the rules.