Although Laurie Brock took St. Francis all the way to the Golden Halo last year, the SEC stubbornly refuses to sell St. Laurie garden statues in the Lentorium. It should also be noted that despite the fact that Laurie is a huge fan of Alabama football, the acronym SEC stands FIRST AND FOREMOST for Supreme Executive Committee NOT Southeastern Conference. Just to clarify.

The Rev. Laurie Brock, Distinguished Celebrity Blogger, is a returning Celebrity Blogger because she loves getting free coffee mugs and receiving celebrity red carpet treatment at Episcopal gatherings. One of those things may not be entirely accurate. She serves as the rector of St. Michael the Archangel Episcopal Church in Lexington, Kentucky. She blogs at Dirty Sexy Ministry, is the co-author of Where God Hides Holiness: Thoughts on Grief, Joy and the Search for Fabulous Heels (Church Publishing), and is also a contributor to a forthcoming book about the real lives of women clergy. A reality series on E! is surely coming soon. She is also the creative force behind Fifty Days of Fabulous from Forward Movement. She frequently shares her quirky, snarky views on faith, Alabama football,and popular culture on Twitter at @drtysxyministry, but don’t follow unless you can laugh at yourself and your religion. Otherwise, you’ll just be offended. When she’s not doing priest things, she is riding her horse Nina, the Official Horse of Lent Madness.

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Love Lent Madness? Looking for a devotional book to guide you through Lent, Holy Week, and Easter? You've come to the right place!

Lent Madness creator Tim Schenck has written a book titled Dust Bunnies in the Basket: Finding God in Lent and Easter (Forward Movement 2015). If you're looking for the perfect Lenten gift (and who isn't?) or just want to read something other than the 2016 Saintly Scorecard this Lent, we hope you'll check it out (and by "check it out" we mean buy it for a mere $10).

Illustrated by popular priest and cartoonist Jay Sidebotham, Dust Bunnies in the Basket challenges us to go deeper this Lent, to "kick up some dust every now and then, to roll up our sleeves and get involved with the world and the people around us." The book is ideal for personal reflection or seasonal study groups and includes thoughtful questions at the end of each section.

To give you a little foretaste, here's a snippet. Actually, it's the book's Introduction...

Lent is a very personal time of reflection and introspection as we examine our lives and our relationship with God, coming face-to-face with our own sinfulness and mortality. Lent is most fully experienced within the context of a worshiping community—we don’t enter into the season in isolation.

Still, this doesn’t answer our question of what to say to people at coffee hour. Fortunately, the Ash Wednesday liturgy gives us a clue. We are invited on behalf of the Church to the observance of a holy Lent. Not a successful or productive or guilt-ridden or dour or twig-eating Lent, but a holy Lent.

No matter what else David Sibley accomplishes in his life, he will always be best known for shepherding Charles Wesley to the 2014 Golden Halo. In fact, we've already taken the liberty of writing the first line of his obituary: "The Rev. David Sibley, longtime Lent Madness Celebrity Blogger..." Okay, that's all we have so far and as the youngest CB (again), we hope we don't need to finish this anytime soon. Welcome back, David!

The Rev. David Sibley, Distinguished Celebrity Blogger, is in the middle of his seventh year as a southern transplant into the northeast, where he now lives on Long Island and serves as Rector of Christ Church in Manhasset, New York. Raised right in the middle of South Carolina, David studied and did research as a chemist before being whisked away to seminary in New York City. When he’s not in church, David enjoys travel, hiking and camping, all things food and music related, and is a sports fanatic – with his teams of choice in baseball (Chicago Cubs), college football (South Carolina Gamecocks), and soccer (Liverpool FC) being minor obsessions. When the ideas are forthcoming, he’s been known to blog at Feeding on Manna, and holds forth much more often with his partners in crime on Twitter at @davidsibley.

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We're excited that Amber Belldene will soon begin her third year as a Celebrity Blogger because, well, name another online Lenten devotion that can claim to have an Episcopal priest/romance writer on their team. Yeah, you can't. Because we're unique! Or at least Amber is. Read on!

The Rev. Amber Belldene is a romance writer and the alter ego of a vampire-loving Episcopal priest. She grew up on the Florida panhandle swimming with alligators, climbing oak trees, and diving for scallops…when she could pull herself away from a book. As a child, she hid her Nancy Drew novels inside the church bulletin and read mysteries during sermons — an irony that is not lost on her when she preaches these days. Amber believes stories are the best way to examine life’s truths, and she is passionate about the relationship between sexuality and spirituality — namely, that God made people with a desire for love, and that desire is the heart of every romance novel. Her paranormal romance series Blood Vine is now available from Omnific Publishing and her sexy contemporary novella One Sinful Night in São Paulo, about an Episcopal seminarian looking for love, is scheduled to release later this year. She loves wine, history, heirloom tomatoes and she lives with her husband and children in San Francisco. For more information about her books or to check out her blog go to www.amberbelldene.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmberBelldene or Facebook.

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Scandal has rocked Lent Madness! People have accused the Supreme Executive Committee of being nothing more than hucksters. To prove them wrong, Scott and Tim remind everyone that you can download a FREE full-color bracket any time. You can also add fancy Lent Madness widgets to your website for NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE. With NO PERFORMANCE LICENSING FEES you can gather the whole family around the computer and binge-watch Monday Madness. And of course, more important, participating and voting in Lent Madness can be done by anyone for FREE.*

Isn't the SEC remarkably generous? We thought you'd agree. But generosity is not limited to free stuff. Those of you who procrastinated buying your giant poster-sized Lent Madness brackets are in luck! Forward Movement is running a Procrastinator's Special. By using code PS16 during checkout, you can get as many bracket posters as you want (while supplies last) for just seven bucks.

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"Is there a doctor in the house?" One of the reasons we invited Derek Olsen to join us on this Lenten journey as a Celebrity Blogger, was to be able to answer this question in the affirmative. If the excitement of the saintly smackdown causes you shortness of breath, be sure to call on Dr. Olsen. He'll leap in to save the day by blogging about obscure liturgical minutia with reckless abandon. We're glad to have this new life-saver on the Lent Madness team!

Dr. Derek Olsen is a layman within the Episcopal Church with a Ph.D. in New Testament and an interest in most things medieval, monastic, and liturgical. He is the liturgical editor of the St. Augustine’s Prayer Book, and the author of Reading Matthew with Monks, an investigation of early medieval reading and preaching. Forward Movement will be publishing his book on the spirituality of the Book of Common Prayer near the end of 2015. Derek currently serves on the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission for Liturgy & Music. An IT professional by day, Derek is also the mastermind behind St Bede Productions which is responsible for the St Bede’s Breviary, Forward Movement’s Daily Prayer site, and the St Bede Blog (formerly haligweorc). He lives in Baltimore with his wife, an Episcopal priest, and their two daughters. He spends most of his spare time driving his daughters to and from ballet.

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You think the Lent Madness publicity machine is impressive? I mean, what other online Lenten devotion has been on national TV, NPR, Sports Illustrated, and USAToday? Neva Rae Fox isn't just a Celebrity Blogger but a public relations professional who has assisted the SEC in getting the penitential word out over the years.

We're grateful for her expertise but we're most impressed that she serves on the Altar Guild at her own parish. All clergy know the cardinal rule of parish ministry: Never. Cross. The. Altar. Guild.

Neva Rae Fox is honored, thrilled, and downright delighted to return for a second year as a Celebrity Blogger. Neva Rae is the Public Affairs Officer for The Episcopal Church and many many people at General Convention 2015 identified her as nrfox@episcopalchurch.org. However, to her surprise and delight, she has also been recognized as a Lent Madness Celebrity Blogger on assorted occasions. Still the Jersey Girl of the bunch (you got a problem with that?), Neva Rae remains active in her own Episcopal Church in the Diocese of New Jersey, serving on the communications committee, Altar Guild, ECW and as a reader, preacher, and lay Eucharistic minister. She is a frequent presenter in dioceses and organizations throughout the Church and is dedicated to other volunteer and philanthropic causes. She remains a diehard Philadelphia Phillies and Eagles fan – thereby proving she knows how to suffer. During the 2015 baseball season, she and her husband Bob were able to check off Fenway Park from their “bucket list.” And the great things continue — while her cat Duke adorned the back cover of the 2015 EpiscoCats calendar, Neva Rae has been informed that her other cat Bugsy will grace the February pages of the 2016 EpiscoCats calendar.

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Another day, another Lutheran?! Yup. Two of our new Celebrity Bloggers this year are Lutherans. David Hansen joins Beth Lewis as part of the Lent Madness Lutheran contingent. Fortunately, they will be using their respective computers to advocate for their respective saints rather than nailing theses to church doors around the country (not that there's anything wrong with that).

David has the distinction of being one of the few pastors around with an actual punctuation mark in his parish's name. We may or may not be changing our official name to "Lent Madness!" Read on...

The Rev. David Hansen, despite growing up as a pastor’s kid, turned out okay. An ELCA pastor, he serves at Spirit of Joy! Lutheran Church in The Woodlands, Texas (outside of Houston), where he lives with his wife Megan, their daughter, and their menagerie of pets. When not preaching and teaching for the Lutheran diaspora in Texas, David is helping to drag the church into the digital age – teaching congregations and leaders to make use of online tools for ministry (You can catch David this year leading an Intensive as a part of the ELCA Youth Ministry Network Extravaganza. He is a regular contributor and moderator in the Church Social Media (#chsocm) community, and wrote the forward to Celebrity Blogger alum Meredith Gould’s The Social Media Gospel. He is an occasional contributor to The Lutheran magazine and Living Lutheran, and blogs at Pastor David L. Hansen. Connect with him on Twitter @rev_david and Facebook.

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One of three Celebrity Bloggers named David (shockingly we have none named Goliath), David Creech is entering his third year as a Lent Madness contributor. As a professor with a fancy PhD, he makes us all appear to be smarter than we actually are. We are grateful for that, even if we've never been able to figure out why his blog is named Dying Sparrows.

Dr. David Creech is Assistant Professor of Religion at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. A student of early Christianities, David knows a lot about saints—they anathematized many of his research subjects. He is a product of an Evangelical seminary and a Catholic PhD program and now teaches at a Lutheran college and worships with Episcopalians. For those looking for the ecumenical voice (read: objective and unbiased/quite confused) in this year’s competition, he’s your man. Although he does dress in robes from time to time, David brings the unique perspective of a layperson. His book title is long and boring (The Use of Scripture in the Apocryphon of John: A Diachronic Analysis of the Variant Versions) but nearly sold out of its initial print run of 200 copies. You can follow David on Twitter @dyingsparrows and read his oftentimes provocative posts at his blog by the same name. When not teaching and writing, David enjoys owning his three kids Ian, Ela, and Dylan at Sorry.

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Don't let looks deceive you. Megan Castellan is a battle-hardened veteran of Celebrity Bloggerdom. Last year she shepherded Brigid of Kildare to the first ever Silver Halo, thus inspiring the popular Lent Madness Brigid pint glass.

Along with her fellow long serving (suffering?) Celebrity Bloggers, David Sibley and Laurie Brock, Megan was recently awarded the title Distinguished Celebrity Blogger. This title, graciously bestowed by the Supreme Executive Committee after they drank way too much coffee, will allow these three dedicated Lenten heroes to write their own ecclesiastical tickets.

The Rev. Megan Castellan, Distinguished Celebrity Blogger, is Assistant Rector at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Kansas City, Missouri, and diocesan youth coordinator for the Metro Kansas City area. Previously, she has lived and worked in Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Arizona, and that period of time in the West Bank that the government can’t know about. Her ongoing adventures and strong opinions are chronicled in her blog Red Shoes, Funny Shirt and on Twitter @revlucymeg. (From time to time, you can also catch her writing in various other places, like House of Deputies News, Episcopal Café, or Fidelia’s Sisters, though the snark factor is significantly lower there). In her spare time, she enjoys singing, playing with yarn, throwing jellybeans at politicians she disagrees with on TV, and cheering on KC-based sports ball teams.

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