God, Jesus, and Coffee, not necessarily in that order

Really not sure what to make of this one, but I was trying out Blogpulse.com, which lets you search blogs. They have this nifty "trend search" which will place the frequency of posts about any given subject on a graph for you.

Being a theology blog, I tried out "God" and "Jesus" because, hey, you can't get any more basic than that, right? Also I tried something a bit more neutral (at least to most people), "coffee". And thus we find the following:




Frankly, I was surprised at the 6-month popularity of blogging about God. It consistently beat out such things as "coffee" "George Bush" and even "sex". However, Jesus scored fairly low except, of course, for Christmas and Easter.

Now, of course this little study of mine is unscientific in the extreme, and perhaps the only thing people were blogging about were swear phrases involving the use of the word "God", but at the very least it's nice to know people think more about Jesus than they do about coffee at least twice a year...

Basil Pennington Dies

June 3, 2005. With heavy heart and confidence in the Resurrection, I announce that Father Basil Pennington, one of the principal original teachers of centering prayer, died June 3, 2005 at 5.40 PM Eastern time. He was being weaned from his respirator and was recovering fairly well from the many surgeries he experienced after his very serious car accident on March 29. He took, however, a sudden and unexpected turn for the worse yesterday morning. He died with his abbot, Father Damian, and Father Matthew, his close friend, with him. He clearly communicated his wish that as he took a turn for the worse, he be allowed to die with no further surgical intervention, peacefully surrounded with his brother monks praying for him. And he did.

This is from thecentering.org website. It's very sad, especially considering I could barely find any news articles about it at all. But then I suppose since it didn't have anything to do with a suicide bomber, Bush, or homosexuality no one cares. I'm kind of assuming that if you read a blog like this you probably already know this, but Pennington was a Trappist monk (i.e. a member of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance) and a prolific writer. His best known work was Centering Prayer which helped to popularize this form of prayer again in the west. Some felt that his thought at times strayed too far afield from traditional Christianity, but regardless he helped to bring the concept of Christian contemplation back to the Western masses.

Br. Basil pray for us.