"30-Second Homilies"

A couple of posts ago I quoted Drew Westen, a clinical psychologist and a beleaguered U.S. Democrat, who tells us in his book The Political Brain (2007) how, when it comes to politics, stories trump statistics.

In thinking about the kinds of stories politicians tell (George W. Bush was most certainly a storyteller), many of them, at least to my recollection, are homilies.

But as we are living in a moment when politicians have less and less time to make their point (I am old enough to remember when television commercials for even the most banal household products were a minute long), I entered "30 second homilies" into a search engine. What came up was the above video.

In this video we have a young priest announcing to his digital brethren that he is suspending his daily "30-Second Homilies" project. And in telling us why, he provides statistics.