I’m a 63-year-old married Christian, father of four and grandfather of five. Over the past several decades, I’ve been an active member of my local Roman Catholic parish, where at various times I have served as: lector, extraordinary minister of holy communion, catechist, adult Bible study leader, parish council member, and member of several other of the committees and ministries that tend to dot the parochial landscape. I earned a Master of Arts in Theology & Christian Ministry from Franciscan University of Steubenville a few years ago.
I’m currently employed as an IT professional by a large pharmaceutical company, at which I’ve worked (under some corporate incarnation or another) for about twenty-five years. I’ve earned a B.S. (Information Technology w/ Business minor) from UMass (Lowell). I’ve also earned the PMP certification from the Project Management Institute, and a Project Management certification from Boston University. I also have a pile of dated technical certifications from various networking technology and information security vendors.
My intellectual interests begin with the Word of God in Sacred Scripture, extending through other areas of theology, including its personal and cultural lived expression in religion. I’m deeply interested in the relation between revealed religion and the various substitute or competing frameworks for confronting life, which are sometimes religions themselves, but more often in the modern West are schemes more purely subjective than religion is, rising only to the levels of ideology, worldview, orientation, values, etc. I’m also interested in many areas of philosophy and cultural criticism, in history and political thought, in law, language, music, and economics. I have little interest in most of the social sciences – especially psychology, which I see as largely a fool’s errand – and I am frankly contemptuous of the reductionist materialism that unfortunately permeates the sciences in general.
I am deeply and explicitly Catholic in my worldview, and most people would thus consider me a staunch social conservative. I’m OK with that designation, even if I recognize Catholicism as an ultimately radical commitment to completely transform and renew the world’s status quo. My social and political concerns are rooted in a revulsion at the relentless encroachment of the progressive nation-state into all areas of personal and community life – especially its alarming interference in the realm of the family, most notoriously its advocacy for the debasement of marriage and for the murder of pre-born children, as well as with modernity’s overall denigration of the role of father, both within the family and within society.
My personal interests, in a sense, are defined by a radical idea revealed in the doctrine of the Incarnation: that everything which is not false is at least potentially as weighty as eternity. God’s breaking-in to human history has sanctified creation, and thus makes it possible for us to know history itself as the theater of our encounter with Him. As dull as my own mind is, I’m also somehow aware that every experience is pregnant with grace and with the redemptive power of holy joy; that every moment of my life is ripe for Christological encounter, if only I can manage to heed the urgent plea of the Apostle Paul, as he wrote to the Colossians: “whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” (Col 3:17, RSV)
I remember traveling to the University of Steuebonville in high school and praying at the Tomb of the Unborn Child there. It is indeed a very special place.
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