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 catechist. I also worship regularly 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 reason for pursuing the degree is personal growth, 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, 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.

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. Though more bookish than activist, I’m tempted to become a TEA Party member – not so much because of my views on taxation, but because I’d like to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those decent people as they are vilified by some of the most vicious demagogues in American society, being smeared as racist by people who obviously have no intelligent (or honest) response to their opposition to morally bankrupt public spending policies that are constructing a suffocating mountain of debt being piled on the backs of others, like my young children. 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.