NewAdvent.com: Biased?

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For a long while, I have visited NewAdvent.com and have considered it a worthwhile collection of Catholic news and blog posts and so on. However, lately, I have noticed a trend with this site’s featured articles and links: They all seem to be slanted to a certain position on a given issue.

Take Fr. James Martin. I do not want to have a debate regarding him here. Go elsewhere if you wish to. However, it is increasingly obvious and annoying that NewAdvent consistently links to articles that are essentially anti-James Martin. I think the whole controversy regarding him is ridiculous to say the least, so maybe I am biased — I personally favor him. I mean, if you take a look at the latest link, you will notice there is hardly any substance to the CatholicCulture article: There’s nothing refreshing or enlightening about it. It’s just dragging on a controversy that’s really not a controversy at all – except for perhaps the ultra-conservative Catholic blogosphere that NewAdvent seems to favor.

Still, the point is that NewAdvent is a claimed Catholic site seems very slanted it its cultural and political viewpoints.

This is just a fair warning. NewAdvent does not represent all orthodox Catholic positions. You do not have to agree with NewAdvent to be an orthodox Catholic.

Any other experiences with this?
 
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Personally I have never seen anything on NewAdvent that gave me the slightest doubt of its orthodoxy.
 
catholic1seeks said:
Still, the point is that NewAdvent is a claimed Catholic site seems very slanted it its cultural and political viewpoints.
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So, is it your feeling that a Catholic site should be “unslanted” and basically in favour of – or at least uncritical of – all other cultural and political viewpoints in order to be a “Catholic site?”
 
My opinion is that newadvent.org links to sites that have a certain point of view, not liberal, but also not entirely faithful to Church teaching. It seems to me that the site promotes certain errors, conservative errors I suppose.
 
We have a tendency in America (assuming your American, which you may not be) to view things in a lenses of conservative vs. liberal. There is not in a real sense anything such as the Conservative Catholic Church, or Liberal Catholic Church. There is orthodox Catholic and heterodox Catholic. There are, however, conservative and liberal Catholics both of which can possibly be quite orthodox. Some websites may lean right or left which is fine, people have different points of view. What matters is whether it is orthodox.
 
I love New Advent. It has tremendous Catholic resources like writings of the Church Fathers and the Bible in Latin and Greek. The news and article links on the front page are great too. I don’t tend to read the articles about disputes because I’m less interested in them. If a seemingly promoted position really bothered me I’d ignore that in favor of all that is good on the website.
 
Any bog has a bias…but New Advent has much to offer besides links to blogs.
 
New Advent is primarily the project of one Catholic layman. So I certainly don’t expect the aggregate of blog posts and news articles on their front page to be as though chosen by the Magisterium.

I go to their main page a lot, too, just for Catholic news. I generally like most of what they post, but it’s certainly coming from a particular perspective.

Honestly, I think it’s far more balanced than most places. He’s just as likely to link to John Allen as he is Fr. Z. And he avoids linking to most of the really polemical stuff.
 
A Catholic site, professing to be Catholic, should be Catholic.

NewAdvent seems to be hosted by one individual. Ah, makes sense why it has a certain political/cultural flavor.
 
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As long as no one assumes NewAdvent is an objective expression of All Things Catholic…

It seems to be run by one individual. So the idea that it runs more to the right makes sense.
 
redbaron162 said:
We have a tendency in America (assuming your American, which you may not be) to view things in a lenses of conservative vs. liberal. There is not in a real sense anything such as the Conservative Catholic Church, or Liberal Catholic Church. There is orthodox Catholic and heterodox Catholic. There are, however, conservative and liberal Catholics both of which can possibly be quite orthodox. Some websites may lean right or left which is fine, people have different points of view. What matters is whether it is orthodox.
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True.
It is hard not to adopt the common dimension of liberal vs conservative. But as we promote orthodoxy we can’t be fearful of being labelled by others. If this were the 1950s, an orthodox position, such as racial equality, would cause a Catholic writer to get labelled liberal. In the generations since 1960, with the culture saturated by liberal media and education systems, asserting orthodoxy will usually get you labelled conservative, or worse. Well, do it anyway.

All Catholic media should affirm the truth, at all times…but they should concentrate on whatever truths are forgotten or unpopular, in this time.
New Advent seems to be doing that. They not only try to refute errors, but specifically the errors that are currently popular…the erroneous assumptions.

The scary thing is the tendency my diocesan newspaper has. It prides itself on being “balanced”. That means repeating the truths that are already being presented in the secular media, and omitting the ones that are already being omitted. Thus, no one would label them “biased”.

Let’s hope New Advent, and other Catholic media, never try to win applause for being balanced. A good prophet will always be labelled as biased. But so what…as long as he or she is orthodox.
 
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catholic1seeks said:
As long as no one assumes NewAdvent is an objective expression of All Things Catholic…

It seems to be run by one individual. So the idea that it runs more to the right makes sense.
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Why would anyone assume a website run by an individual represents all things Catholic? I can go do a web search and pull up all sorts of wonky ‘Catholic’ websites. Luckily New Advent isn’t wonky at all. It is a great resource for orthodoxy.
 
catholic1seeks said:
A Catholic site, professing to be Catholic, should be Catholic.

NewAdvent seems to be hosted by one individual. Ah, makes sense why it has a certain political/cultural flavor.
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What is your preferred “flavor?”

Let me guess…

Your definition of ‘Catholic’ includes ‘universal’ and your definition of ‘universal’ means accepting all ideas as having equal validity. Provided someone somewhere believes them, those ideas are as valid as any other, yes? What else could ‘universal’ mean with reference to beliefs?

We all have our own truths, so anyone who claims to have any inkling whatsoever into the truth must, by that fact, have a “certain political/cultural flavor:” that of being intolerant, bigoted, conservative and extremely right wing.

Feel free to correct my impression.

What do you suppose it means to “be Catholic?”

I noticed you didn’t even attempt to answer my initial phrasing of that question.
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NewAdvent.com: Biased? Catholic News
So, is it your feeling that a Catholic site should be “unslanted” and basically in favour of – or at least uncritical of – all other cultural and political viewpoints in order to be a “Catholic site?”
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We are at the point now where any publication that tries to be orthodox Catholic, or Protestant, will get trashed as fanatic. People will throw the word “dogmatic” at you and assume that is an insult. I would tend not to trust any publication that does not have some people denouncing it as fanatic or biased. (That does not mean every publication labelled “fanatic” or biased is trustworthy).
 
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Honestly, the main page of New Advent is but a tiny portion of the site, and is basically just a general interest RSS feed of sorts. The rest of the site includes the Old Catholic Encyclopedia, the 37 volume writings of the Early Church Fathers, Aquinas’ Summa and more. It’s a super valuable site for Catholics. If you don’t like the main page current news links, you can just ignore it.
 
My biggest problem with NewAdvent is that the Catholic Encyclopedia is from 1917.

As a result the language is cumbersome to read at times. Also, it doesn’t included Vatican II teachings.

I have an Encyclopedia of the 1985 edition and it’s like night and day to read.

Jim
 
Certainly, it would be nice to have more modern language and more recent events, but then it wouldn’t be in the public domain and freely available online. So there is a trade off.
 
Actually nothing is stopping anyone from modernizing the words. People could collectively update it and place those updates in the public domain. You could even print a copyrighted version based on your particular modernizing updates.

I was curious to know more. Apparently New Advent’s version did update some things like the names of the books of the Bible.

 
Cost money to produce.

You can get on-line versions for a price.

Jim
 
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