Announcing Fr. Joel's new Podcast Album for 2014

I absolutely love podcasting because it combines two things I love to do: preach the Gospel, and fiddle with computers. Lots of behind-the-scenes tweaking goes on to make your podcast experience enjoyable. One of those tweaks is the Album Title for each year (I follow the Church year or "year of Grace" which begins a new year on the first Sunday of Advent). Last year I anticipated rebuilding and building community with an album called Living Stones. It pioneered album artwork. If you subscribe to this podcast on a smartphone or iTunes, this image will be familiar to you as the Brother Priests podcast logo. Now, building on last year's success, it is time to present the new album artwork.

Everyone knows that the Catholic Church isn't thriving. Numbers are down all over the US, and it is causing concern. But there are answers, and our parish leadership is applying insights from two books, Rebuilt by Michael White and Tom Corcoran, and Forming Intentional Disciples by Sherry Weddell. These books emphasize that we must accept Christ as his Disciples and then try to introduce Him to those who do not know Jesus. Church is not about "church"; Church is about Christ. Our mission to seek and save what was lost is eloquently expressed by our Founder:

“What man among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it? And when he does find it, he sets it on his shoulders with great joy and, upon his arrival home, he calls together his friends and neighbors and says to them, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.’ I tell you, in just the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance." ~ Luke 15:4-7

You will notice that some of these themes have already found their way into some of my homilies this fall. In a beautiful moment of Providence, Pope Francis is echoing these same themes for the universal Church. He is trying to shake up a Catholic Church that too often does not welcome the lost with joy. We need to change that. Our mission as Church is to become a search party that not only welcomes the lost, but even goes looking for them. We have discovered the Good News and are eager to share it. Hence the new album will be called Search Party and features some amazing artwork:

This is without a doubt the most amazing album cover that I have ever designed. This artwork has temporarily become the new podcast logo until Fr. Benjamin and I will roll out a new Brother Priests logo. After that point the artwork will continue as the logo for the feed dedicated to just my homilies: /404

For those of you who get the podcast on the website, you have long enjoyed little thumbnails for each episode. New this year, I have created a set of four thumbnails on the Search Party theme. Each podcast episode will have a sheep on a background that matches the liturgical color for that day (red, green, white or purple). This will provide some continuity between posts and some overall theming consistency. I will also be playing with logos in the episodes themselves to see if they have an effect on how smartphones play the episodes. As you can tell, I love playing with this stuff. Thanks for listening!