What This Blog is About

This is a new experience for me, one that I enter with some reluctance, the Luddite that I am. I'll try this out and see how it goes.

The name - Catholic in the Third Millennium - may confuse some visitors. I apologize at the outset for that. This is not a Roman Catholic blog. Nor am I about to engage in a debate or discussion over which tribe "owns" the term "Catholic," apart from saying that it is the common inheritance of all explicitly Nicene Christians. If it proves to be too confusing we may have to re-consider revising the name of the blog. For now it stays.

Readers may wonder to what "tribe" I belong. I am an Anglican; an Episcopalian actually. I describe myself as both Anglican and Catholic, or "Anglican Catholic," though have never owned the term "Anglo-Catholic," nor desired to lug around much of the cultural baggage that goes along with it. That being said, my seminal catholic formation has taken place in Anglo-Catholic contexts. My favorite place in the whole world, my sanctuary during my years in research, is Pusey House, Oxford. Matins and Mass in early morning, breakfast with the chapter, all day in the library, ending the day with evensong. You see, I can pine for the past with the best of them!

But this blog is not about the past, it is about what lies ahead for Catholics in the future, by reflecting on the bridges we and others attempt to build between our Catholic past and our Catholic future in the Catholic present.

I can't promise anything more than the occasional musing on this blog. There was a time when I dreamed of being a powerhouse theologian, devoted to a cloistered life of research and writing. I know that I had and have the right gifts for that life, but alas this was not to be my calling. God called me to a different vocation; and, of course, our life circumstances and choices have to be factored into this equation as well. I have no regrets. The one gift I do think I possess is that of seminal thinking. Interaction with students, both past and present, has confirmed this. And, who knows? A forum like this may be a way of disseminating such thinking to a wider audience. A teacher is always looking for disciples. I am a teacher.