By Martin Rogers

 (This is from Feb. 2010)

Twelve years ago at the Winter Olympics in Nagano, a 17-year-old speedskating prodigy named Kirstin Holum was tapped for future greatness.

When Holum placed sixth in the 3,000 meters – one of the most grueling disciplines in the women’s program, a lung-scraping four-minute bust of lactic acid torture – speedskating insiders predicted a golden future and speculated she may not even reach her peak for another decade.

Read the full article.

What Would it Take for Christianity to Dominate the Arts?

By Jennifer Fulwiler

Where is the great Christian art? I’ve been wondering that ever since my conversion, and lately it seems that that question has been on other people’s minds as well. Marc Barnes recently took a look at what’s wrong with Christian rock, then found the answer: Christian radio. Kevin O’Brien made the point that “the True, the Beautiful and the Good echo the glory of the Holy Trinity, and we dare not as artist or audience settle for the Trite, the Banal and the Mediocre.”

Read the full article.

 The Disease of Irreverence

By Alice von Hildebrand

"Many sicknesses are contagious; health is not. It is regrettable but it is a fact. Since original sin, intellectual viruses have penetrated the human mind and have affected its reasoning power. This might explain why slogans have a powerful appeal to most men..."

Read the full article.

"Mary lost her home in our chapel"

"After 40-year absence, two statues of Blessed Virgin return to Catholic prep school in Ojai"

Read the full article.

Our latest "short", one-minute, video briefly describes Omaha's annual Corpus Christi Procession, as organized by Fr. Damian Cook and many others in the St. Peter and Our Lady of Lourdes parishes of Omaha. This is excerpted from our documentary "St. Peter: Restoring the Sacred in Omaha" but will later be expanded into it's own full documentary about the Real Presence.

Our first "short" is a one minute mini-documentary about confession. Excerpted from our "St. John Cantius: Restoring The Sacred" documentary, this short video shows Fr. Frank Phillips' approach to confession. "As long as the door was open and the sign was out, he had business. So, same thing for us."

We're pleased to announce, StoryTel Shorts. Storytel's mission is to distribute to as wide an audience as possible stories of ordinary people doing God's work. StoryTel Shorts are one-to-five minute videos that can be easily shared across the Internet and the social networks. They are often segments from within our longer documentaries, but also are sometimes stand-alone original videos.

These videos can be seen on StoryTel's youtube channel or on our screening room page. 

Check out our first short on Confession.

And check out our second short on the Corpus Christi Procession in Omaha.

We made it safely to Argentina late last night after a bumpy ride with some passengers getting ill because of it. There were complications with Customs entering the country. Seems there was some sort of "formal presentation" that should have been prepared ahead of time by us or Miles Christi about the whole project simply because we are bringing in $40,000 worth of equipment. We did not know we needed to do this. Miles Christi did not know either.

The Customs agents were nice to us but they were going to hold our equipment for 24 hours or more until we or Miles Christi accomplished this step properly. The priests who came to meet us were talking to the man for us and it was friendly but serious and not looking good. In the midst of their trying to explain their religious order to the man who had not heard of them, one of the priests mentioned their founder Father Yanuzzi.

The customs agent said, "Father Yanuzzi?"

The priests said, "Yes."

The man said, "Father Roberto Yannuzi?"

The priests said, "Yes."

The man said, "Father Roberto Yanuzzi was my confessor when I was 18 years old! So he has started an order of priests?" Well Good for him! I love Father Roberto! How is he doing?"

He pulled out his cell phone and called his boss who was in the parking lot just getting into his car to go home for the night. Five minutes later the boss came back in to the airport and talked with the agent and the priests for a couple of minutes and then said, "fine, whatever the agent here says is fine with me."

And so the customs waters parted for us and we were waved through without even having them look at any of our stuff or filling out any paper work at all. The priests only had to give him Father Yanuzzi's mailing address and promise to say hello for him and give him his best wishes. And so it seems God wants us here for sure.

Shooting is going very well thus far. We still have not had enough sleep and it's 11 pm now. We just finished dinner about 45 minutes ago. They eat dinner very late here.

We're excited to announce that in January we're planning to do some more major filming for our long term documentary about Miles Christi. We will be traveling to Argentina to capture footage about the formation of the priests that work in America, which takes place in Argentina. We have also been given the oppurtunity for a rare interview with the founder of the order, Fr. Roberto Yannuzzi. 

This marks the first time StoryTel has done any International filming. However, our Dirctor of Photography from our first two On assigment Episodes, Bob Barwegen, has international expereince and he has been wonderful in helping us with all the prerparations. 

So, we're busy with production planning and equipment and travel arrangements. It should make for some amazing footage.

Our latest video premiered this weekend. On Friday it played at a fund raising dinner, and Saturday it played as part of an event with Fr. John Corapi at the Qwest Center.

After Father John Corapi's 3rd talk of the day on the topic of "Spiritual Warfare," 9,000 people watched "ON ASSIGNMENT: St. Peter Catholic Church, Restoring the Sacred in Omaha" (A 15 minute program that is now a fundraising film soon to be expanded into a documentary for EWTN) on 2 big screens down front and 3 jumbotron screens dead center arena today!

The crowd was tired after three one hour talks by this great preacher but they watched and listened closely, became emotionally involved when we hoped they would, and at the very end they laughed when we wanted them to laugh, and they followed up that laugh with a big round of enthusiastic applause! A collection was taken up, from this crowd (who had already paid $30 a ticket to get in) during our the showing of our new film and the ushers who did the collecting credit our film with keeping people in their seats long enough to donate and inspiring them to give big time to give more. 

No final report on the collection but one supervisor is estimating in the neighborhood of $20,000 right now.

On Friday night we showed the new film at a $500 a plate VIP Fundraising Dinner attended by 160 VIPs, including Father Corapi in the audience. It was a huge hit at this event as well.

All proceeds from ticket sales for the entire event go to help Saint Peter Parish with the interior renewal of this great old church. There is so much more to report on this but there simply hasn't been time to get to you with information because we've been too busy editing to meet this deadline. Here's the video and we'll post pictures from the event soon.

THANK YOU to our all of our StoryTel Foundation donors for helping to make this happen!