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F r o n t i s p i e c e
Real-Time Apologetics
By Karl Keating
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This Rock
Volume 15, Number 6
 July-August 2004 
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I am writing this three days after announcing publicly, through my weekly E-Letter, that discussion forums had opened at Catholic Answers’ web site. Already I am wondering whether things are getting out of hand.
On the day after the announcement, users posted 998 messages to the forums. The next day they posted 1,094. At these rates there will be 30,000 new messages each month—and that assumes no growth in membership. I expect thousands of additional people to register at the forums between when I write (in May) and when you read (in June or July). That means the daily count of messages likely will be higher than it is at the moment.
I call this a boon for apologists and apologetics, even though not all of the messages are on apologetics. At the forums we permit carte blanche so far as choice of topics is concerned, but most people, most of the time, write about things that fall under the rubrics of explaining and defending the faith. Of course, I have not been able to read most of the messages (who has time to read a thousand missives daily?), but many of the ones I have read impress me. They are cogent, timely (even instantaneously so), and full of facts and arguments I was not aware of. I find myself cribbing from them already.
Messages at the forums commonly refer to real-life incidents. Someone asks, "Here is a problem. How should I handle it?" A dozen or a hundred people reply: "Do it this way." "No, this way." "The Church says this, I think." "More precisely, the Church says this." "Here is how I handled a similar problem, and it worked." These are real issues being handled by real people in real time. It is not the apologetics of the old manuals, not even the apologetics of recent books, including my own. Granted, there may be a roughness to the presentation, an awkwardness of expression, sometimes even inadvertent misdirection (which usually is caught in minutes by other users). Despite such limitations, one ends up with a resource like no other.
If you were asked to list by name all the Catholic apologists you could think of, you might come up with five or ten names. Twenty years ago you might have come up with only one or two, if that. I work professionally in apologetics, so I have a certain advantage. I can come up with a hundred names. Few of these folks are known outside their immediate areas. Many have been working only in their own parishes or dioceses.
If we aggregate all these names, we end up with a list barely into three digits. If that were the extent of Catholic apologetics in America, there would be cause for dismay. But I am not dismayed. Many people are "doing" apologetics who do not think of themselves as apologists. Just look at our forums. These are Catholics giving a reason for the hope that is in them (cf. 1 Pet. 3:15). To join them or just to learn from them, visit our forums: http://forums.catholic.com.
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