To those of you who have been following “The Deacon’s Bench” at my previous address, welcome back! Good to have you here. Please excuse the boxes and bubble wrap. I hope to have the place tidied up soon. I’m still learning my way around the Beliefnet neighborhood, so posting may be a little slow at first.

And to those newcomers: howdy. Welcome to The Bench. When I first built this piece of cyber-furniture two years ago, I offered this introduction:

Feel free to make yourself at home. This little enterprise will be a place for news about deacons, the Catholic Church, and various thoughts on the art of preaching. I hope it will give off more light than heat, and provoke both thought and prayer. I’ll also post some of my homilies, delivered from the pulpit of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Catholic Church in Forest Hills, New York. I welcome your feedback, comments, constructive criticisms — and prayer

Thomas Merton wrote: “To write is to pray,” and it’s my wish to make of these writings a kind of prayer, too — a hymn of praise and thanksgiving, a quiet canticle to The Word.If you choose to leave a comment, the ground rules are simple: no slander, profanity, racism, sexism or name-calling. Violators will be deleted. I reserve the right to moderate comments, if necessary, or even shut them down. E-mails are also fair game for publication, unless you specifically ask otherwise. The guiding principle should be: WWJB? “What Would Jesus Blog?”
I hope you like reading these pages as much as I do writing them.

And I hope that this effort will reap the fruits of the beautiful prayer said over me at my ordination:

“Receive the gospel of Christ, whose herald you have become. Believe what you read, teach what you believe, and practice what you teach.”

I still hope those words will hold true in the days and months to come. And I hope to make this a dialogue, not a monologue. Drop a line, leave a comment, whatever. I like to hear what people are thinking.

Meantime, if you want to know more about me and what I’m up to, you can check out my biography, on the sidebar, or read some of my ideas about blogging that were published a few months ago in America magazine. You might also like to look at a few of my thoughts on my own vocation, which were adapted from my first homily in May of 2007.

And the picture below? That’s from the recessional at my Mass of Thanksgiving, on May 20, 2007, at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, my parish in Forest Hills, New York. The woman beside me? The lector. Who also happens to be my wife. (You’ll be hearing more about her, trust me…) Meantime, thanks for reading.