Brandon Vogt’s bestselling and aware winning Why I Am Catholic (And You Should Be Too) is a remarkable and persuasive argument for truth and beauty in the Catholic Church and for reasons why young people should throw off the common urge to leave the Church for the more radical decision to “join the rebellion” and go against the tide and remain or become Catholic.
Coming soon are teacher resources (lesson plans, assignments, quizzes, and more) to support this 180 pages engaging and clear read. There is also a companion study guide already available for the trade edition.
Brandon Vogt is an award-winning author, blogger, and speaker who serves as content director for Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire Catholic website.
In this recent podcast, Non –Catholic Q&A w/Bishop Barron (June 2019), Brandon and Bishop Barron field questions on the faith from non-Catholic listeners, including atheists and agnostics.
Have you received a review copy of the third edition of the all-time best-selling Your Life in Christ: Foundations in Catholic Morality? If you are a high school theology teacher connect with Bob Wieneke to have a complimentary copy sent to your high school.
What is your opinion on offering extra credit to students especially during exam time? A college professor, Deborah J. Cohan, explains why she changed her mind on offering extra credit and some of its benefits in the article “A professor explains why she offers extra credit in her classroom.”
In our research with high school theology teachers, we have likewise found a majority do offer extra credit opportunities to their students. Hence we have included some questions and assignments in the Chapter Review portions of our text to help facilitate those opportunities. Some of the questions and assignments are based on the overall Focus Question of the chapter. Others are directly related to the particular section content. Even teachers who do not offer extra credit have shared that they use these questions and assignment as study guides to help their students prepare for quizzes and exams.
Helping students engage and remember Church history can be very overwhelming and is often abstract.
The following cards offer a quick template that can assist students to quickly label, compare, and contrast specific factors of heresies, schisms, and various creeds that differ from the tenets of Roman Catholicism. This type of assignment can also be beneficial for developing research skills, through digital literacy, and negotiating web resources to find the correct information. For easy and creative access: use a hole punch and keep the grid cards on a ring for quick comparison.
Some of the groupings that I have used for this activity have included: Gnosticism, Arianism, Apollinarism, Nestorianism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Mormonism, Anabaptist, Mennonite, Seventh Day Adventist, Islam, Iconoclasm, Methodist, Anglicanism, the Hussites, Presbyterianism, Baptist, and Scientology. Scour a Church history text for items that can serve to head up other groupings.
Group: ________________
Time period: __________________
Name of the founder of the movement:
______________________________
Country of origin:
______________________________
Main Tenets
1 –
2 –
3 -
Grouping: _______________
Time period: __________________
Name of the founder of the movement:
______________________________
Country of origin:
______________________________
Main Tenets
1 –
2 –
3 -
Written by:
Thomas Malewitz, M.T.S., Ph.D.
St. Xavier High School (Louisville, KY)
In 2006 I had my first experience teaching in a 1:1 environment using technology. At the time, students had laptops and the classroom had a SMART board. Today, technology in the classroom includes e-textbooks and learning management systems (LMS). Since then I have worked with the iPad, Chromebook, and Surface Pro to integrate technology-based pedagogical methods into Christian religious education. From this experience, I would like to share five tools for implementing digital technology in a theology classroom.
Nearpod
Nearpod is a web-based application that engages students in the teacher’s presentation of the class content and offers immediate assessment of student learning. With Nearpod, a teacher can create slides or upload an already prepared PowerPoint, Google Slide, or PDF. Additionally, a teacher can insert interactive slides to poll students’ views on a topic or ethical question, evaluate the student’ prior knowledge on a topic, or create a real-time formative assessment after a concept has been presented.
For example, a teacher could create a multiple-choice, true-false, matching pairs, or fill in the blanks questions quiz. The open-ended question slide permits students to express their thoughts on the topic, as well as respond to application or evaluation questions. The teacher can then show student responses on the main classroom display. Lastly, the teacher may opt to have students view the presentation on their 1:1 device. This allows students to follow the teacher presentation on their device or work at their own pace. Some limitations with Nearpod are its inability to allow users to rearrange the textboxes on a slide to make room for other textboxes or images, write on a slide while presenting, and to animate the content on a slide so the content does not appear all at once.
Wooclap
Wooclap is a web-based application like Nearpod. However, Wooclap offers several interactive features not available in Nearpod, e.g. brainstorming, a rating-scale, finding a correct area on an image, prioritization, and sorting. Wooclap too allows for live messaging, gamification, and is compatible with PowerPoint. Compatibility with PowerPoint allows the user to insert Wooclap interactive slides into one’s PowerPoint presentation. Wooclap shares the same limitations noted for Nearpod. Unlike Nearpod (that is designed for educators), Wooclap is tailored for a broader population. Consequently, while Wooclap offers more features, Nearpod attends more to specific needs of educators.
Kami
Kami is also a web-based application that allows the user to annotate e-books and PDFs. In Kami, the user can highlight text, use textbooks to make annotations, add notes on the side, draw and handwrite, and insert audio annotations. This means students can interact with their class textbook on PDF as they would with a hardcopy textbook. Moreover, students can add typed, hand-written, or audio annotations. Teachers can also go paperless as students can download handouts, complete them on Kami, and then submit the annotated assignment to the class’ LMS. As Kami is designed for educators, Kami offers blogs for educators to share best practices.
Storyboard
This web-based application is a great tool for digital story telling as users can create a storyboard with scenes, characters, props, dialogue, and explanations. This is a helpful tool for presenting content and evaluating student learning, particularly when teaching a Scripture or Church history course.
PowerPoint
PowerPoint’s strength lies on the user’s capability to customize the slides by mixing images, fonts, textboxes; along with the animation and transition of slides features. Additionally, when presenting, the teacher can highlight and write explanations on the slide with content or use the white screen function to have a clean whiteboard for which to offer further explanations. This is a valuable tool for classroom management as, when used with a tablet, a teacher can offer explanations from anywhere in the classroom. Lastly, the narration feature records the slide transitions and animations along with the teacher’s verbal and written explanations.
This narration can be exported into video to create Vodcasts. This is a valuable tool as students can access the lecture on their own device in class or at home. Also, students can work at their own pace. One limitation of PowerPoint is that the teacher is the active participant and students are passive recipients. However, the integration of Wooclap into PowerPoint overcomes this limitation. The integration of Wooclap also does away with the teacher having to choose between PowerPoint and another application that engages students and with switching between applications when presenting class content
Written by:
Israel Diaz, M.T.S., M.A. Theo
Department of Theology
St. Thomas Aquinas High School
Lou Holtz, the Hall of Fame former Notre Dame coach, has written a new book Three Rules for Living a Good Life: A Game Plan for Graduation. The book provides a simple formula for success for young adults entering the workforce and moving toward committed relationships.
Just for fun, take a look at ten famous Lou Holtz quotations. Ask your students to pick out a favorite and tell why they chose the one they did.
1. “Motivation is simple. Eliminate those who are not motivated.”
2. “If you’re bored with life—you don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things—you don’t have enough goals.”
3. “You were not born a winner, and you were not born a loser. You are what you make yourself to be.”
4. “Everyone needs something to do, someone to love, something to hope for, and something to believe in.”
5. “One thing is certain: there will be one thing that will dominate your life. I strongly suggest it be something you can be proud of.”
6. “Ability is what you are capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.”
7. “Without self-discipline, success is impossible. Period.”
8. “Virtually nothing is impossible in this world if you just put your mind to it and maintain a positive attitude.”
9. “Making a big life change is pretty scary. But you know what’s even scarier? Regret.”
10. “I can’t believe God put us on this earth to be ordinary.”
During his 2015 address to Congress, Pope Francis spoke of four great Americans that stood as witnesses of the dignity of the human person and advocated for social justice for all: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton (Address of the Holy Father, 2015). In this spirt, encourage your students to follow the insights of Pope Francis and research lives of individuals from Catholic tradition that advocated for social justice and non-violence alternatives through their life and witness. Assign a presentation or short essay along with the research.
Rubric expectations might include: personal quotations, pictures, biographical information, and/or a summary of their advocacy work. (This might be a good activity to guide students in learning about digital literacy and the need of reference citations and clear supporting evidence to accurately illustrate the advocacy of the individual.) For more creative settings invite the students to create a poster, PechaKucha, or find a series of song lyrics that connect with the mission and ministry of one of the following Catholic advocates to present for the class.
The following are some examples of Catholic individuals who advocated for human dignity and labored for a non-violent alternative throughout the American twentieth century (supply background information on each as needed):
Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950)
Sr. Thea Bowman (1937-1990)
Fr. Solanus Casey (1870-1957)
Cesar Chavez (1927-1993)
St. Marianne Cope (1838-1918)
Dorothy Day, OblSB (1897-1980)
Ms. Eileen Egan (1912-2000)
Ms. Dolores Huerta (1930-)
Fr. Emil Kapaun (1916-1951)
Sr. Teresa Kearney (1875-1957)
The Martyrs of La Paz, El Salvador (1980)
Sr. Mary Angeline Teresa McCrory (1893-1984)
Thomas “Fr. Louis” Merton, OCSO (1915-1968)
Fr. Stanley Rother (1935-1981)
Mother Soledad Sanjurjo Santos (1892-1973)
Fr. Aloysius Schwartz (1930-1992)
Ms. Eunice Kennedy Shriver (1921-2009)
Ms. Mary Ann Wright (1921-2009)
Ms. Rhoda Greer Wise (1888-1948)
Fr. George B. Zabelka (1915-1992
Submitted by Thomas Malewitz, Ph.D.
St. Xavier High School Louisville, KY
An essential component for authentic catechesis is to include real-life, pertinent, and culturally relevant examples within the theology course activities (Catechesi Tradendae, 1979; Instrumentum Laboris, 2012; Evangelii Gaudium, 2013). Jesus exemplified this by teaching through parables to relate to his audience. Jesus’ parables challenged the audience to think critically about a moral lesson, and jar complacent/stereotypical attitudes of the time (see Luke 10:25-37). Although we don’t use the same cultural images in our stories today we can still use similar techniques, like music videos and short films, to teach moral lessons and challenge our students to think beyond stereotypes and labels. Music videos, like ancient parables, can be a helpful modern-day storytelling technique as well as a beneficial option for a quick theological conversation starter.
Directions
To start a conversation for adolescents on parables choose a couple of the music videos (a few are listed below), watch the video and develop a dialogue from the following suggested questions to discuss the meaning and morals of the videos you chose. Finally, bring the conversation back to Scripture by connecting the video to any theme of Jesus’ parables.
Suggested Questions
1) What message do you think the director wanted to express through this music video?
2) How could the video be compared to a parable?
3) What were your first impressions of the video?
4) Who could be considered the anawim (outcast) in the video?
5) Briefly discuss, explain, or compare/contrast the videos you chose and relate them to a parable from the Gospel.
Suggested Videos (remember adolescents may relate to other genres or artists more than the options offered below)
- Avicii's "Hey Brother" (2013)
- Collective Soul's "The World I Know" (1995)
- Dave Matthew's Band "Everyday" (2001)
- Emerson Drive's "Moments" (2006)
- Five for Fighting’s “What If” (2013)
- Taylor Swift’s “Mean” (2010)
- T.I.'s "Live Your Life" (2008)
Submitted by Thomas Malewitz, Ph.D.
St. Xavier High School Louisville, KY
