One of the cooler things about the Catholic Blog Awards was discovering new blogs that I am now actually following -- not commenting yet, but following. This is an excerpt from Fr. Dwight Longenecker who would be a priest I would travel to go see. I wish he were closer to my home town...

...This is the theme of my own book, More Christianity. In many different ways I have argued that Catholicism is not essentially something different, but something more. On the other hand, Catholics who leave for Protestantism are most often rejecting Catholicism, and if they don't at first, they are soon taught to by their new found faith.

In saying that, many Catholics leave the faith for Evangelicalism because (for many reasons) they did not receive a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. There are many shallow and ignorant reasons for Catholics to leave, but we have to admit that there are also some good reasons, and we only have ourselves to blame.

Amen and amen.

is there no way to be knit or woven together?

i found the following, via julie d. happy catholic, to be interesting. my question is this: can someone not be both? must you be one or the other when these tenets are applied?

The Protestant imagination focuses on the gulf that separates us from God, while the Catholic view is of the sacramental nature of all that is around us. It is no wonder that while Protestant spirituality focuses on the Word of God (preaching it, hearing it, applying it) in order to repair the separation that divides us from God, Catholic spirituality focuses on finding, lifting, and releasing the Spirit of God that is sometimes hidden or latent in the world around us. This is the world as sacrament, the world incarnated...

Where the Protestant approach to the Spirit is to analyze its meaning, the Catholic approach to the Spirit is to imagine its depths. Where the Protestant mind stops and pulls the strands apart, the Catholic mind makes further connections and intertwines the strands...Jon M. Sweeney, from Lure of the Saints: A Protestant Experience of Catholic Tradition

i declare: i want to be both. i am both. why must it be one or the other? can we not be woven together, using all of our efforts, our selves, to all connect and intertwine?

where does that leave me?
where does that leave you??