Today I begin this blog of what I see and what I think, even if I have no clue what it all means. Mostly, I plan to stick to the concrete stuff and let the meaning leak out on its own. Because of who I am and what I do, I tend to think a lot about religion, especially the meeting points between Protestantism and Catholicism. Some of those thoughts will undoubtedly find a place here, along with musings about literature, history, and art, my main teaching subjects.
Because I am a Protestant teaching at a Catholic seminary college within a Benedictine monastery, helping to form young men for the Catholic priesthood, my day-to-day teaching experience is a little unusual compared to my friends from graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. I am both "inside" the institutional structure of the Catholic Church, but also "outside" of it because of my particular expression of faith. But not too far outside. Over the twenty-one years of teaching at Conception, my faith has been formed by constant daily contact with the monks of Conception Abbey. I have become more "monk-like" over these two decades simply from being around the men in black. My faith has also been shaped by the young men I face every day in the classroom. In a very real sense, they are my teachers. I am grateful for their abiding witness to a transforming faith.
Now, in the latter days of summer, three weeks before the start of another semester, I find myself between two worlds, Protestant and Catholic, imagining what lies ahead, ready once again for the bends and bumps of the Pilgrim Road.
Walk along with me.
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