Isaiah 55:11
So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void, But it shall accomplish what I please, And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it
Gen 1:3
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light
Matthew 26:26
And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, “Take, eat; this is My body."
Malachi 1:11
My name will be great among the nations, from the rising to the setting of the sun. In every place incense and pure offerings will be brought to my name, because my name will be great among the nations," says the LORD Almighty.
John 20:23
If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.
James 5:16
Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.
James 2:14
What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?
Luke 20:38
For He is not the God of the dead but of the living, for all live to Him.
Rev 21:27
Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb's book of life.
1 Cor 3:15
If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.
Psalm 51:5
Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.
John 3:5
Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.
Titus 3:5
Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost;
1 Timothy 3:15
but if I am delayed, I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.
Acts 22:16
And now why tarriest thou? arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord.
It seems that readership of our beloved Christian Apologetics Society has increased by a further 20-30 visitors daily. When we first noticed the increase, we attributed it to a temporary increase due to either a recent post or a comment on third-party blog. Looking at the monthly analytics report, its neither. The increase has been sustained, shows no sign of dropping, and seems related to Google. No single keyword or phrase stands out and the increase is from just a few extra visits for the many keywords visitors have used for months on end. We suspect a
Google dance may have occured.
The increase has had the effect of boosting the Christian Apologetics Society from the top 300-400 Christian sites to the top 200-300 Christian sites at
ChristianTop1000.com. With over 12,000 sites listed, Christian Apologetics Society is doing okay. There's a lot of big churches ahead of us. We are just an extra 10-20 visitors a day from breaking into the top 200, so please tell a friend or blogroll CAS.
Finally, goal conversions are consistently in the 10-12% range, some days far fewer and some days twice as many, but seldom zero. While Christian Apologetics Society blog sells nothing, not even advertising (we see CAS as a pure ministry driven by Christian charity), we do have specific goals that we would like visitors to take action on. We measure three actions and monitor their trend lines. We'll leave it to your imaginations as to what the three visitor actions are. (They're not using the church locator nor visiting the Bible Bee.) If you care to think out loud, the comments are right below. (Um, no, one is not commenting, but that a good guess.)
Labels: Miscellaneous
While reviewing our web analytics, which steers much of our content, we were intrigued by the U.S. map showing where you our readers were located. Usually we view a shaded map which tells us that most of CAS visitors hail from California, Texas, and New York. We were much more suprised when we opted for a map showing by cities where you our beloved visitors were from:
We may have to conduct some research to discover what topics would interest visitors from the Dakotas and the upper Mountain region of the U.S.
Related Posts:2008 Evangelical Electoral MapEvangelism Explosion Among CatholicsPew and the U.S. Religious LandscapeSource:
Google AnalyticsLabels: Demographics, Maps, Miscellaneous
It seems we have been banned again. The first was satire, this time it's not.
We were visiting Baptist Board, a Baptist bulletin board, which we do monthly. They generally have a few interesting things to read, particularly in regards "Baptist History" and "Other Christian Denominations". They had a particularly good discussion regarding some Catholic voters being excluded from communion for their support of Obama. Rather than the usual shrill anti-Catholic diatribes that populate many Baptist sites, the discussion was charitable and stayed on message. Several even agreed with the "appropriateness of this priest's comments and actions."
It was after attempting to create an account to respond and give kudos that we discovered that we, in fact, had an existing account. It was after recovering our password and logging in that we encountered the following screen:
You have been banned for the following reason:
None
Date the ban will be lifted: Never
Well, that certainly seems charitable and Christian, doesn't it?
To the best of our knowledge we have never posted on Baptist Board and do recall being turned down for an account many years ago on account of not being a Baptist. Strange that we were not banned for our behavior and that there is no chance of redemption. We find that particularly interesting as Christ taught that one may always repent of their sins. There is no "never" with Christ. Not so with our Baptist brothers at Baptist Board. We'll keep them in our prayers as I hope you will too!
Related Posts:Banned!Source:
Obama's effect on Catolic CommunionLabels: Baptist, Miscellaneous
CAS reached two blogging milestones ths past week. Almost two years of faithful blogging for the world at large, we are pleased to announce:
CAS receives over 1,000 visitors a month. More importantly, over 12% of those visitors accomplish our goal of reading specific content during their visit to CAS.
We recently posted our 100th post, a significant achievement, as we don't copy and paste other people's articles, but write original content for you our faithful readers.
Please join us in thanking God for the success of this ministry.
Freely you have received, freely give.
Matthew 10:8
Labels: Miscellaneous
This past week we discovered a new tool for Christian bloggers and apologists that relieves the tedium of building links to online Bibles by hand.
RefTagger is a short fragment of javascript that easily enables most major blog and portal systems to support the automatic linking of Bible references to your favorite version of the Bible, provided its one of the eight available. You set your preferred version in the script fragment. RefTagger provides an online tool for creating a unique custom fragment for just your blog.
For fellow Blogger users, the installation was quick and painless. We simply selected our template tab, scrolled to the bottom of the textarea box, and pasted the script
just above the closing body tag. Save the template and RefTagger works. RefTagger converted every Bible reference in every post since our start two years ago to a rollover showing the referenced verse.
Now if Logos would only add the public domain Douay-Rheims version of the Bible for outreach to Catholics, we'd be cooking with gas. A Greek New Testament would also be handy for those few times we need to examine the underlying Greek.
In closing, remember the words of Isaiah 55:11.
Related Posts:Scripture Memorization in Early Church HistoryApologetics - eSword for CatholicsNWT for eSwordSource:
RefTaggerLabels: Miscellaneous, Software
Steven Ertelt of LifeNews.com is reporting that an Obama faith event in Lynchburg, Virginia failed.
"The Obama campaign has signed up evangelical author Donald Miller, Pepperdine University professor Doug Kmiec and former Indiana Congressman Tim Roemer, for the "Barack Obama: Faith, Family and Values Tour."
The trio made a stop at Liberty University, which is home to over 10,000 evangelical students from across the county and a conservative bastion..."
15 people showed up for the rally. Not good.
I suspect one of the problems was the campaign's selection of Rev. E. Terri LaVelle, senior adviser on Religious Affairs. I fail to see how a non-Catholic can advise on Catholic outreach. Ditto for how a women minister can design outreach for fundamentalist Christians who oppose ordination of women. Its like the Obama campaign is tone deaf regarding Christian outreach.
No comment on how this failure might impact the Virginia election as Virginia is very close in recent polls.
Related Posts:Obama for Catholic Women Ordination?Source:
Barack Obama Faith Tour Flops With Pro-Life Voters in Jerry Falwell's BackyardLabels: Miscellaneous
My apologies to regular CAS readers for not posting this past two weeks. I left what "Blue Staters" call "Jesusland" for the very urban environs of Chicago. Chicago, I discovered is remarkably Catholic. (Settled by French Catholic fur traders. Makes sense.)
Here in Jesusland, Catholics are a minority. My state is in competition with Mississippi for the fewest Catholics. Baptist and Pentacostal churches predominate. Country crossroads often sport two or more Baptist churches. Catholic churches are about 20-30 miles apart. Some counties lack a single Catholic church entirely.
By comparison, downtown Chicago seems to have Catholic Churches spaced 20-30 blocks apart. Some city crossroads seemed to have several Catholic churches at their intersections, one Roman and another one or two Eastern. The view from an elevated deck showed tall cross adorned spires announcing the presence of Catholic churches in every neighborhood.
I discovered that Old Saint Mary's Catholic Church on Michigan is actually a very modern structure. The Catholic Church in Chinatown offers worship in Chinese and four other languages, including Italian. The Lithuanian parish in Bridgeport offers Mass in Latin. I'm sure local Chicagoans could add to my list of observations.
To be fair, I know that all religions are likely found in Chicago. North of the river, we found a Jewish area. That was before driving along Devon and through its Indian and Pakistani communities. Along the way we passed at least two Episcopal/Anglican churches and a lovely Lutheran church. I did eventually spot a Baptist congregation.
Somewhere south of the corn belt in Illinois, Catholic churches disappeared and Baptist churches dominated. I thought to myself. Jesusland! I'm almost home.
Labels: Catholic, Catholicism, Miscellaneous
CAS recently did an extensive review of our 2008 web analytics, including 1495 search phrases that led visitors to our beloved blog. Thanks to alphabetizing, several areas of interest were clear. We have identified about 30 search phrases that would make for interesting discussion and exploration.
Some of the major topic areas include:
Baptist history
Bible history
Beginning apologetics
Blessings
Byzantine Catholics
Early Church history
E-sword tutorials
Heresies
Lent
King James BiblePapal polemics
Women deaconsZakaria BotrosCAS believes in finding our what people want to read and giving it to them. To the over 500 CAS readers every month, thank you for your time and support. Of course, as we run across news and other items of interest, CAS will continue to keep you updated.
Labels: Miscellaneous
