Well, Hello.

Forgive the relatively lengthy absence, but I assume (and hope) you’ve not been hanging around here too much yourself.

Hope you had a pleasant Christmas. We did – made our way down to Knoxville, to spend a few days with my dad and Hilary, my son Christopher who lives in K-Town, and my son David who came down from Virginia. It was, as they say, a full house, and a very nice time.

On the way down, I read Deal Hudson’s An American Conversion which is a short, but very nice little account of (obviously) his conversion to Catholicism (in case you didn’t know, he was a heavy-duty Southern Baptist B.C.). The emphasis is on beauty – the desire and yearning for beauty as an aspect of our thirst for God. Therefore, the book almost functions as a guidebook to the best of what we might call Catholic culture, especially of the twentieth century. It’s also a kind, but honest appraisal of the crucial differences between evangelical Protestantism and Catholicism.