Getting Started

A Prufrockian moment if there ever was one:

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

Having been a regular browser of blogs for a couple years now (those I visit with regularity are listed at right), I have finally succumbed to the temptation -- several times earlier resisted -- to start one myself. Some of my prior hesitancy stemmed from my lack of confidence that I possess the creativity and persistence required to write and publish, even in this form, on a regular basis. I once, during a half year of unemployment, wrote a weekly column for a local newspaper that lasted as long as I had nothing else on my mind. Then I went back to teaching, and when the first batch of sixty term papers arrived to be corrected, the column died. I will try to write at least one blog entry a week. But then ...

In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

(There is, after all, a DELETE button on the "Settings" page!)

It seems clear to me that the culture of the West has entered one of those periods of crisis from which it will emerge, although perhaps only after a century or two, much altered. It seems to pass through such a period every five hundred or so years: the crisis of the Roman state around the start of the Christian Era, the disintegration of the Western Empire about five centuries later, the transition from the earlier to the later phase of the "middle ages" around the first millennium, the Renaissance and Reformation in the centuries either side of 1500, and now ... whatever you want to call it.

Within these grand and seismic movements we find our small but never-entirely-insignificant selves caught up (our individual significance being more a matter of faith than of reason, as we are likely to have pointed out to us more and more often, I fear, in the months and years to come). It is only in the context of this great and regularly recurring kind of cultural crisis that we can, I have concluded, begin to understand what is happening to us, to our institutions, to our most cherished beliefs and sense of ourselves, to our entire civilization. But that realization does not make the experience of living through such times any the less distressing.

This blog will be an attempt to reflect upon, to explore, and in some tiny way to respond to the questions and challenges, personal and societal, which the present crisis throws up to us. In a period and in a setting (the so-called "blogosphere") characterized mainly by passionately held but mutually conflicting "certainties," the tone here will perhaps often seem excessively tentative, cautious, and uncommitted. That will be no accident, but rather a part of the intention of the experiment which this blog represents. In the face of so many contradictory and often fanatically promoted beliefs, both in the world at large and among those who lay claim to the name of "Catholic," it seems to me that only the foolhardy or the flippant could choose unhesitatingly to embrace some one of all these mutually incompatible positions, all of which seem to stake an absolute claim to one's assent.

So let us reflect and try our way forward, maintaining an unswerving commitment to the pursuit of truth in the fundamental confidence that this is what our minds are made for and that this very pursuit, in an age of confusion and uncertainty, is what the grace of faith, hope, and charity prompts us to do. Let us (presuming there is at least one single reader of these words) pray for one another and go on.

More, I suppose, presently.