Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Help Me Out, Buddies

So you remember that I recently posted about a new website I'm thinking of putting together, a kind of portal for the Catholic laity? (For non-Catholic Christians as well, and for priests and those in consecrated life as well, but primarily for the Catholic laity.) And remember my appeal for help with the technical side? Well, a reader has very kindly contacted me and is giving me invaluable advice on how to navigate this aspect of it.

So I am appealing now for content. I really hope that this portal will take off and that readers will contribute to it. But I can't start off with blank pages, and I don't want to start off with everything being written by me. (Nobody wants that!)

Therefore, dear reader, I am asking you to think about contributing some writings of your own.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am hoping to have a section where Irish Catholics recount their own experience of being Catholic in Ireland, whether that comprises seventy years since they came into the world as cradle Catholics, or seven months since they came to embrace the Faith. I'm hoping that these accounts will be personal, reflective, digressive, and idiosyncratic-- although they can be just the opposite, too. They can be a grand overview of a life's experience as a Catholic in Ireland. They can be nostalgic pen-pictures of long-ago First Communions or religion classes in school. They can be gritty accounts of crises of faith or of bereavement. They can be essays about the author's difficulties with Church teaching. (Although I intend this portal to be faithful to Catholic orthodoxy, I have no problem carrying material from a different perspective.) In other words, they can be as broad or as specific as you like.

Related to this, I hope to have a 'conversion stories' section, containing testimony of those (like myself) who have not practiced (or held) the Catholic faith all their lives but who have come to believe in it. Everything I said above applies here.

I also hope to have a Sacred Art section-- a section for original poems, hyms, drawings, paintings, photographs and any other works of art which explore our Catholic (and Christian) faith in some way. Again, there are no rules oor requirements. (Apart from obvious ones, like nothing downright obscene or blasphemous.)

Finally, you can put your name to anything you contribute, or you can go with an alias, if you prefer.

So how about it?

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