Link of the Day: Diary of a Wimpy Catholic

Here's a very good find: a really fine writer, a prolific writer, whose subject is the faith that brings us all together here. 

Max Lindenman's blog, Diary of a Wimpy Catholic: A Hedonist Contemplates Heaven, comes to us through the Catholic Portal at Patheos.  Max is a fairly new arrival there and a look at his posts titles will show you that his blog is kept very fresh with a wide variety of topics. For starters look here and here.

For the record: there is, in fact, nothing wimpy about this blog!

Here are some excerpts from Lindenman's first post at Wimpy Catholic:

After burning through my convert’s zeal in the space of a year, I looked around me and realized that life in the Mystical Body of Christ is okay — a few things are very good, and a few very bad. But on the average, a post-conversion day rates a solid B-minus, which is pretty much what the pre-conversion days rated.

That may sound like a big, fat “duh,” but for me it came as a surprise — a rather liberating one. People who write about the Catholic Church tend either to love or hate it (or, more likely, they love their peculiar vision for it — traditionalist or progressive – and hate whatever stands in the way of realizing it). They write with such intensity, positing such extremes of good and bad, that I find myself wondering what planet they live on. I couldn’t hack it as a polemicist or an apologist; if I had to go around all day feeling enraged or exalted, I’d drop dead from nerves.
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I want to... write about the life of faith from a distinctly (and distinctively) personal perspective. Don’t worry — dispatches from my navel won’t account for all my posts, or even for the majority. Its contents just aren’t that fascinating, even to me, and in any case I look forward to trying my hand at punditry and cultural criticism. But even on subjects of general interest, I’ll be writing from a personal slant — that of a Catholic convert who gets touched by grace, but very rarely; who believes that God is, but finds Him very far away; who detests his sin because he fears the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, etc., but still can’t help recalling some with a smile.

My writing won’t be to everyone’s taste. No one will mistake it for the broadcasts of Mother Angelica. If you’re one of those people who gravitates toward red-hot culture warriors, I doubt I‘ll make your list of favorites. I make no bones about my ambivalence toward much of what I’ve seen and learned in the Church. Getting to work through that ambivalence is one of the perks of writing, and to my own ear, my voice is at its most authentic and convincing when I address it head-on.
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(Read the whole post here)

Read Max! ( He has something to say and he says it well.  His page offers a refreshing break from much of what's in the Catholic blogosphere: you won't be disappointed.  (His page is now on my blog roll.) 

 
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