I was looking for some pictures of the Jewish temples in the Old Testament, when I though about checking Google’s Sketchup program to see if anyone had made 3D modles of them. I found a couple great ones:

Temples

• Solomon’s Temple - This model is set on top of a map so you can see where the temple was in relation to the Dome of the Rock. If you zoom in you can see some tags that tell you a little bit about the surrounding area, but the black lettering on top of a black and white picture is difficult to see, so you have to look closely.
• Herod’s Temple- This model is amazing.

I did some more searching and found these two models of Noah’s ark

• Complete - This one is a complete model of the ark sitting in the water . . . but
• Incomplete - This model has a lot more detail to it. It isn’t complete yet but it’s pretty cool. There are a couple of figures inside the ark to help give you a sense of proportion. The figures look a little big, so I’m not sure if the proportions are correct, but the modes is still being built so he might adjust that later . . . or I could just be wrong.

David Allen said one of the “advanced secrets” to Getting Things Done is to over-commit yourself. I think what he meant was that we all tend to slack-off, and when we’re committed to several projects, we can fulfill our desire to avoid certain work by doing other work that is important but not necessarily a priority. For example, I should be editing the programs for our Confirmation mass, but instead I’m working on my Jr. High Bible study.

I added a few more questions from Esther and Ruth, but I got stuck half way through Ruth. How do you explain what she did with Boaz to Jr. High students?

Click here for more Catholic Bible Trivia Questions.
By the way, I found out that there wasn’t anything wrong with the original PDF file of the board game. Apparently Adobe has a default setting that turns all large images into a big grey box. So I’ll post that file again soon and explain how to turn off the grey-box setting.

I updated the bibleTriviaQuestions.xls file. I realized I didn’t have any questions from the uniquely Catholic parts of the Bible, so these questions are all from 1 Maccabees and Tobit.

I use YouTube videos almost every week in our youth ministry. I’ve tried several different sites and add-ons for downloading the videos and here are the two that I recommend:

Online Converter: www.tubefish.net

This is the easiest way to get a video in mpeg format. YouTube videos are in .flv (flash video) format, and this site converts it for you then lets you download it. All you have to do is cut and paste the web address of the video you want. There are several other sites that work the same way, but I have two problems with online converters:

1) They don’t work consistently (tubefish has worked the most consistently for me, plus you can browse videos that other people have downloaded). Here are a couple other online converters. Neither of them work consistently for me but maybe you’ll have more luck with them than I did.

www.viddownloader.com

vixy.net (they have a beta version of a desktop app, but I haven’t tried it out.)

2) The second problem I have with online video converters is video quality. Sometimes you lose video quality when you convert it from one format to another, and that’s bad because YouTube videos are often low-quality to start with.

Add-ons

The way I recommend you download YouTube videos is with the Firefox add-on called DownloadHelper.

This technique is more complicated but it works 100% of the time and the video quality is better when you leave it in flash video format.

You’ll also need a Flash video player, or software to convert the the .flv to another format such as mpeg.

I use Flash Video Player because it’s simple.

And I recommend SUPER to convert. . .everything. It isn’t the easiest converter to use, but if you can figure it out you can convert almost any format to any other format.

The Bible study our High School youth ministry is using this year is okay, but it isn’t good enough that we want to keep using it next year.

For the last couple months I’ve been searching for next year’s curriculum, and I think I found it. James Hornecker wrote a Bible study on the Gospel of Mark called, The Lion’s Roar. James has a Masters in Theology from Franciscan University and has worked with the NET team—so he’s a Catholic theologian who knows good youth ministry. I just finished going through the study on my own and I loved it, but don’t take my word, here is what Scott Hahn has to say about it:

“I highly recommend The Lion’s Roar to all who wish to understand God’s Word more fully.”

If my other small group leaders like the Bible study, we will definitely use it next year. There are twelve Bible study units, so we’ll also put together a couple meetings on morality, friends, self-image, etc. and that should get us through the first semester. The book is just a simple Bible study, so we’ll also have to find our own games for each meeting . . . but I’ve never found a curriculum that I didn’t have to do that for anyway.

There is an excellent review about James’s study at Amazon.com (Don’t buy the book from Amazon.com, the seller is charging $8 more than the listed price). The review describes the study in more detail, so you’ll have a better idea of what you’re getting into.

If you want to know more about how we would use this, see my post titled “How we organize our youth ministry meetings.”

Just so you know, when I say “Bible Study” I’m referring to the Bible study technique of reading a text then discussing questions. We don’t stick strictly to the Bible, we also cover the Catechism and Encyclicals, and occasionally other spiritually edifying texts. But that’s too complicated a sentence to say every time I talk about what our youth group is doing, so I just call it a Bible study because people usually have a rough idea of what I mean.