Third post, 2nd try

So my first attempt at a blog was marred too many perfectionistic expectations of myself.

It was my third post that killed me.

What third post, you ask? The one I never posted because it got so convoluted and arcane that I could never finish it. I think it was about an article in First Things I had read. It was how the Fathers of the Church are making a comeback. I guess I should just have said something simple like, "I like reading the Fathers of the Church, too, especially St. John Chrysostom" and leave it at that. Instead I tried to be too scholarly and too high-falootin'. Anyway the article is here.

The thing I liked best was his point identifying the Fathers as men steeped in Scripture, and how we needed to be steeped in Scripture too in order to renew our culture and save it from the modern Barbarians (or even from the post-Modern Barbarians).

I was also trying to use that post as a way to introduce myself a bit more to my readers. I was born into a Lutheran family in the early 1960's. After my parents divorced during the cultural hurricanes of the 70's (we were the first family of all 4 on my block to implode that decade) I lost the faith, only to regain it through reading Scripture with Evangelicals at my public high school. They loved Scripture and they helped me steep myself in it. (Later I converted to the Church with the help of a beautiful Catholic girl I met my junior year in high school. That's another story.)

If you ask me, good, solid, directed Scripture study is what Catholics need more that anything right now, from praying the Psalms to memorizing chapters of Paul's epistles (like I used to do in high school, influenced by the Bill Gothard seminars.) Putting that Scripture into practice creating new traditions or restoring ancient ones, more than anything will help us to renew our little parts of the world which we inhabit.