MaybeToday.org

I’m a 50 year old married Christian, father of four girls (two of whom have moved out; two of whom are pre-teens). I’ve been married since February 29th, 1980 to my high school sweetheart, Joyce. We live in Natick, Massachusetts, the town we were both raised in.

For about the past twenty years, I’ve been a member of Saint Patrick Roman Catholic Church, here in Natick, where I currently serve as a Reader (lector) and an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion, as well as serving as a high school catechist. I also worship frequently at Saint Augustine Church in Andover, MA, which is very close to my place of work. My Catholicism is very much at the core of who I am – and increasingly so. I am currently engaged in prerequisite coursework for the Master of Arts in Theology program at Franciscan University of Steubenville, an effort that will take me the better part of a decade to complete, given the time I find I am able to commit to the workload. Although my primary reasons for pursuing the degree are increased knowledge and intellectual discipline, I also hope to utilize the credentials to obtain meaningful work after I retire from my profession.

I’m currently employed as an IT Project Manager by a large pharmaceutical company with a couple sites in Massachusetts, for which I’ve worked (in some incarnation) for the past thirteen years. I’ve earned a B.S. (Information Technology w/ Business minor) from UMass (Lowell), and I hold the PMP certification from the Project Management Institute, as well as a pile of dated technical certifications from various networking technology vendors.

My intellectual interests begin with the Word of God in Sacred Scripture, extending through other areas of theology, and its cultural expression: religion. I’m also interested in many areas of philosophy and cultural criticism, history and political thought, law, language, music, and economics. Not that I know much of anything about any of it, mind you, but I’m working on it – with what time I have. 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.

Even excluding the ancient and medieval writers, it is hard to narrow down the writers and thinkers who have influenced or otherwise profoundly engaged me thus far to a reasonably concise list. Somewhat surprisingly, I can come up with only a few names of Biblical commentators who have excited me – feeling, I guess, that I owe a greater debt to those scholars who have labored to assemble the standard lexicons and such – but I have been enthralled at times by the work of Gunther Bornkamm, Marcus Barth, and W. F. Albright – all men considerably more liberal than me in their interpretation, interestingly. Of course, Scripture is its own magnificent source of intellectual delight, so it shouldn’t be surprising that the commentators have paled next to their subject.

Among modern theologians, I have been most fruitfully engaged with the work of Karl Rahner, Jurgen Moltmann, Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, David B. Hart, Raniero Cantalamessa, and Frank J. Sheed – whom I liken to a Catholic C.S. Lewis in terms of the accessibility of his theology, though Sheed is sounder. Also among the most influential would be the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, whose extensive writings approach the high-water mark of the intellectual output of the contemporary world, as I see it. Other favorite religious writers would include G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Henry Thoreau – whom I have long felt was a kindred spirit, despite the probability that we wouldn’t like each other very much.

Among modern philosophers, I find sanity in the voices of Josef Pieper, Etienne Gilson, Mortimer J. Adler, Diogenes Allen, and Hannah Arendt. I would also add to the list legal philosopher John Finnis and historian John Lukacs, as well as social critics Richard M. Weaver, Neil Postman, and Aldous Huxley – another man I’ve long felt was a kindred spirit, despite the predictable contempt he would have for my blood and guts Catholicism, and the corresponding contempt I would have for his wishy-washy, quasi-religious spiritual noodling. He makes me think, though.

Musically, I grew up listening to radio pop/rock until my brother Tom gave me Yes’ “Close to the Edge” for my 14th birthday. From that point on, I’d listen to radio only sporadically, focusing instead on Yes music – and on similar music from the “progressive” wing of rock – for a couple of decades, until the genre and my patience for it were more or less exhausted. By my late thirties,I had pretty much soured on popular music both aesthetically and morally, as I was (finally) finding repugnant the worldview that informed so much of it, including much of what I had wallowed in for years. At the end of the decade, I discovered the Irish band Iona, which rekindled my appreciation for modern music, with their more finessed yet ambitious aesthetic, and their virtuous, self-respecting, and sometimes explicitly Christian lyrics. All the same, I had begun listening to classical music in the early eighties, and it is increasingly becoming my music of choice today. I generally prefer baroque and classical period music, but have been slowly warming to the newer styles over the years.

Of the rock acts from the 1970s, I still listen occasionally to Yes, and others such as Kansas, Camel, Genesis, Supertramp, Renaissance, and Pink Floyd, as well as a few later acts that had emerged by the 1980s, such as Kate Bush, Joe Jackson, and Dire Straits, and a few acts that emerged in the 1990s, such as Spock’s Beard, Glass Hammer, and the afore-mentioned Iona. I’ve never liked the Blues, and I dislike most Jazz – finding it lacks a sense of purpose. I’m OK with semi-sappy piano music (e.g. George Winston or Suzanne Ciani), but don’t have any interest in any but the least stereotypical Country music. I’m partial to bands, like Iona, who mix Irish folk motifs with rock or new-agey sounds (e.g Capercaille, Clannad), and I thoroughly enjoy Cape Breton music – especially bagpipes. I generally despise the more popular brands of radio/TV entertainment music – regardless of which generation it was produced during, as well as any music – or other art form – that wallows in human degradation.

Politically, I am officially unenrolled/independent, as I cannot presently bring myself to be formally aligned with any of the parties – though I find the contemporary Republican Party far less odious than the current alternatives. I am a staunch social conservative who is deeply troubled by the relentless encroachment of the liberal nation-state into all areas of personal and community life – especially its alarming interference in the realm of the family, including its advocacy for the debasement of marriage and the murder of pre-born children.