- Oct 25, 2024
- 56
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- Country
- United States
- Gender
- Male
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Single
- Politics
- US-Others
To give some background, I was raised in a loving household; Irish father and Italian-Polish mother. I wasn’t raised a strict Catholic. My dad went to mass on Sunday's while my mother stayed home. We’d go on the major days of the year: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter. I went through a Catholic middle school and by the age of 14 I had really begun to question the Catholic Church and Christianity in general. While never an atheist, I became an agnostic, claiming we cannot know what is not knowable. On top of this, I had begun a hobby of reading philosophy. My cousin lent me a copy of Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and I was hooked. Stoicism, while I didn’t accurately know anything about it, was my guiding life philosophy until I entered college. Whenever the Stoics discussed God or “Providence” I ignored it. But this ultimately led me to believe in God when I entered college, getting a degree in history and minoring in philosophy. I ended up accepting a natural theology; We know God through reason alone. It wasn’t until I took a philosophy 101 class that I was exposed to Soren Kierkegaard. After I read his journals and the deeper philosophical works, I started to become convinced that Christianity was true. Not until October 30th of 2019 did I really get it, though. I had a conversion experience; I just felt at peace (it’s hard to explain and it’s what got me sober). I became very interested in Eastern Christianity, exploring the Eastern Orthodox Church, even attending an Agape Vespers (the vespers on the eve of Easter) which was very transformative. After college, specifically wanting to be a teacher, I entered a graduate program for philosophy and theology where I studied Thomism, paying special attention to Lublin Thomism. This however, didn’t work out and it just wasn’t for me. Currently I have found a home in the field of education and I love it. Some of my biggest influences other than the Stoics, Kierkegaard, and the Lublin Thomist’s are Thomas Merton, Fulton Sheen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Seraphim Rose, John C.H. Wu, John Wesley, C.S. Lewis, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Berdyaev, G.K. Chesterton, Vladimir Lossky, John Paul II, Carmelite spirituality (St. John of the Cross, St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Theresa of Avila, Br. Lawrence of the Resurrection), Ignatian spirituality as found in The Spiritual Exercises, and hesychasm (the practice of the Jesus Prayer in the Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Churches).
