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The Federal Trade Commission offers the following safety tips for young people who use social networking sites on the Internet:

The World Wide Web is full of sites that prey on human weakness. Yet there are also plenty of spiritually nourishing sites that help users grow in their faith or spend time in prayer or meditation.

The late, great Pope John Paul II referred to our era as the “Culture of Death.” Increasingly, our society sees death as a solution to our problems. Death is not the solution. Death is the problem.

When I was a teenager, my formative, if largely vicarious, political experience was the civil rights movement. It was a time of great issues bravely contested, a moment replete with heroes and villains. It was George Wallace vowing “Segregation forever!” Bull Connor setting dogs on demonstrators, and Klansmen bombing black churches. It was the March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer, the showdown at the Edmund Pettis bridge, and much more. Anyone who sang “We Shall Overcome” in those electric years will welcome a new fact of our public life: America – a country whose original sin was slavery – has become a place in which an African-American can be a major party’s candidate for president.

The longest of the 150 Psalms in the Bible is Psalm 119. It is in praise of God’s law. Virtually every other verse mentions the law or its equivalent: covenant, precept, statute, decree, ordinance and commandment. The Jewish believer saw the law, known as Mosaic law since Christian and Hebrew tradition ascribe it to Moses, as God’s great gift and blessing to them. In pondering and meditating on the law, one glimpsed the face of God and was transformed into a virtuous heart. He rejoiced in the law of God.

When Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development issued a call to develop new affordable homes for Sandtown, St. Peter Claver was there to answer. St. Peter Claver became an integral part of Project Nehemiah, which was named to give the community revitalization a biblical context, relating it to the rebuilding of Jerusalem and restoration of Israel under the supervision of Nehemiah. The St. Peter Claver Evangelization Team, under the able leadership of longtime parishioner Pat Nolan, has visited each home in the new subdivisions and provided residents with a welcome kit consisting of spiritual material and a St. Peter Claver Mass schedule.

TORONTO – As the Taliban issued an explicit threat against Canadian aid workers and the killings of nongovernmental staff reached record levels in Afghanistan, a Canadian Catholic aid agency said it remains committed to its work there.

LOS ANGELES – Building relationships among parish ethnic groups is critical to meaningful multicultural celebrations, said presenters at the National Association of Pastoral Musicians western regional convention Aug. 5-8 in Los Angeles.