A new year always brings changes. New prospects, new challenges. This year, I’ve decided to take the plunge and start a blog. I had held off for several reasons. First, I’m still an undergraduate. I felt for a very long time that any kind of blog would be inevitably uninteresting, given my relative lack of life experience and knowledge of the world. Secondly, I was apprehensive about committing myself to any particular opinions in print. I know what it is to change one’s mind, and for that change to be nothing short of radical. I felt that if I put my thoughts down for all to see, I might be pigeon-holed later on. It seemed like a limit for my future freedom. Then, I knew what petty squabbling the blogosphere (particularly the religious corner of it) can produce, and I didn’t want to get bogged down in that sort of thing. Finally, there was the simple question of what I would blog about. A personal blog seemed too narcissistic, an art blog seemed too narrow, and a religious blog seemed to run the risk of devolving into the kind of preachy mess that characterizes so much of what’s produced online.

But, urged by some close companions over the last few months, I came to realize that many of my fears were disproportionate to the potential benefits a blog might offer. After all, I’ve had plenty of friends about my age who write blogs that are worth reading. I decided to mix all of the above topics into a distilled personal view of life, art, pop culture, religion, and more. I hope that I can entertain and, perhaps, enlighten. But mostly I just want to have a little fun.

A word about the blog title: I’m descended from Pennsylvania’s Amish community, including the first Amish bishop in America. But I converted to Catholicism a few years ago, and intend to make the study of Catholic theology my life’s work. I came up with the phrase “Amish Catholic” a few years ago in jest, and thought it might work for precisely this kind of publication. We’ll see.